3 Count: Wordle Battle

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1: Nvidia Faces Lawsuit From Authors Over Alleged Copyright Infringement in AI Models

First off today, Eric Revell at Fox Business reports that a group of authors have filed a lawsuit against Nvidia, accusing them of illegally training their AI system on books that they wrote and hold the copyright to.

According to the authors, Nvidia admitted to training its NeMO AI system on a dataset that featured nearly 200,000 pirated books. The collection, known as Books3, has been a popular source for AI systems to train their large language models due to the ease of availability, amount of data and its organization.

The lawsuit mirrors similar ones filed against other AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, all of which also allegedly trained their AI systems on copyright-protected work without permission. Nvidia declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing pending litigation.

2: Artists Fume as New Midjourney V6 Feature Suggests Their Names for Prompts

Next up today, Matthias Bastian at The Decoder reports that Midjourney v6 has a new discription fearture as part of its image generation AI and artists are upset that it names them as an artist similar to the image they are analyzing.

The issue was originally noted by photographer Jingna Zhang, whose name has been used in over 22,000 Midjourney prompts. She, and other artists, worry that the new feature could motivate more people to generate works in their style, further targeting their work for use in the generation of new AI works.

Artists, including Zhang, expressed frustration at the feature, saying that it dehumanizes their work and, in Zhang’s case, takes their lifetime of work and turns it into “meaningless fodder for a commercial image slot machine.”

3: The New York Times is Targeting Wordle Clones with Legal Takedowns

Finally today, Jess Weatherbed at The Verge reports that The New York Times has begun issuing copyright notices against various sites hosting “clones” of its popular Worlde game, including a GitHub-hosted version that had been copied around 1,900 times.

According to the New York Times, the games involved were direct Wordle clones that infringe both their trademarks in the Wordle name but also the copyright-protected gameplay. In addition to the GitHub repository, they also they also have targeted other developers on a variety of other platforms.

The New York Times purchased Wordle in 2022 and, since then, has been aggressive at defending the brand. However, this particular spate of copyright notices only began in December 2023 and appears to be ongoing now. The paper said in a comment that it has no issue with similar games, just those that violate their specifict trademarks and copyrights.

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