ChatGPT has had anything but a triumphant welcome tour of Europe. As a sequel to grumbling regulators in Italy And the European Parliamentit is the turn of the German trade unions to express their concern about possible copyright infringement.

No fewer than 42 industry associations representing more than 140,000 of the country’s authors and artists have signed a letter urging the EU to impose strict rules on AI’s use of copyrighted material.

As first reported by Reutersthe letter, which underscored growing concerns about copyright and privacy issues arising from the materials used to train the large language model (LLM), stated:

“The unauthorized use of proprietary training materials, their non-transparent processing, and the foreseeable substitution of resources by generative AI outputs raise fundamental questions of accountability, accountability, and reward, which must be addressed before irreversible damage occurs.”

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Signatories include the major German trade unions Verdi and DGB, as well as other associations for photographers, designers, journalists and illustrators. The authors of the letter further added that,

“Generative AI should be at the center of any meaningful AI market regulation.”

ChatGPT is not the only target of copyright conflicts. In January, visual media company Getty Images filed a copyright claim against Stability AI. According to the lawsuit, the developer of the image creation tool allegedly copied more than 12 million photos, captions and metadata without permission.

LLM training offers diminishing returns

The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has led to many concerns. So far, these have covered everything from aggressive development due to a commercially motivated AI “arms race”, to issues such as privacy, data protection and copyright. The latest model, GPT-4, is trained with over a trillion words.

Meanwhile, one of the originators of the controversy, the company’s CEO Sam Altman, stated last week that the reinforced machine learning strategy behind ChatGPT has run its course. Indeed, OpenAI predicts diminishing returns as model size scales. The company trained its latest model, GPT-4, with more than a trillion words at a cost of about $100 million.

At the same time, the EU law on artificial intelligence is approaching its home track. While it may well be a global regulatory standard, the question is how well it will adapt as developers find other new and innovative ways to make algorithms more efficient.