An Indigenous Perspective on Generative AI

<p>Earlier this month, Getty&nbsp;Images, one of the world’s most prominent suppliers of editorial photography, stock images, and other forms of media, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">announced</a> that it had <a href="https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/getty-images-statement" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">commenced legal proceedings</a> in the High Court of Justice in London against Stability AI, a British startup firm that says it builds AI solutions using "collective intelligence," claiming Stability AI infringed on Getty’s intellectual property rights by including content owned or represented by Getty&nbsp;Images in its training data. Getty says Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty&nbsp;Images without a license, which the company says is to the detriment of the content’s creators. The notion at the heart of Getty’s assertion- that generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALLE-2 are in fact exploiting the creators of the images their models are trained on- could have significant implications for the field.&nbsp;</p><p>Earlier this month I attended a <a href="https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/xr-2023/home" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">symposium</a> on Existing Law and Extended Reality, hosted at Stanford Law School. There, I met today’s guest, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/runningwolf/?originalSubdomain=ca" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Michael Running Wolf,</a> who brings a unique perspective to questions related to AI and ownership, as a former Amazon software engineer, a PhD student in computer science at McGill University, and as a Northern Cheyenne man intent on preserving the language and culture of native people. </p>