Diller confirms plans for legal action over AI publishing  

Media titan Barry Diller confirmed Sunday he and a group of “leading publishers” plan to take legal action regarding the use of published works in training artificial intelligence (AI) systems.  

Diller, the chairman and senior executive of internet and media conglomerate IAC, said he thinks generative AI is “overhyped, as all revolutions that are in the very beginning,” in an interview Sunday morning with CBS’s Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation.”  

AI systems are trained and improved using large language models, which ingest compilations of written works like books, news stories and social media posts.  

Diller said he and others in the publishing industry don’t agree with how AI systems take in publishers’ content.  

“It’s not that either Google or Microsoft, who are the two real leaders of this in terms of, certainly Google with having a monopoly on advertising. They, too, want to find a solution for publishers,” Diller told Brennan. “The problem is they also say that the fair use doctrine of copyright law allows them to suck up all this stuff.” 

“It is, it will be, long-term catastrophic if there is not a business model that allows people professionally to produce content,” Diller continued. “That would be, I think everybody agrees is catastrophic.”  

Diller claimed legislation or litigation is needed to protect the copyright of publishers.  

“Of course, say we’re open to commercial agreements. But on the side of those people who are depending upon advertising, Google, for instance, they say, ‘Yes, we’ll give you a revenue share,’” Diller said. “Right now, the revenue share is zero. So, what percent of zero would you like today? I mean that’s rational, but it’s not the point. The only way you get to the point is protect fair use. In other words, protect the copyright.”  

Diller would not disclose or confirm who is he planning to launch litigation with, only calling them “leading publishers.”  

“It took 15 years to get back paywalls that protected publishers, I don’t think that same thing is going to happen,” Diller said.  

When asked if generative AI poses a threat to Hollywood studio workers’ jobs, Diller said, “In this case, I think the one-to-three-year period, not much is going to happen. But post that, there are, of course, all these issues.” 

Diller is not the first to consider legal action over AI publishing. Comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors are currently suing Meta and OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, claiming the platforms’ AI systems were “knowingly and secretly trained” with unauthorized copies of their books. 

The Associated Press announced last week it would license its archive of news stories to ChatGPT maker OpenAI to help train the AI company’s system.