A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.
The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.
Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.
This regulation (and similar being proposed in California) would not be applied retroactively.
Never mentioned any sort of retroactive measures.
Since no retroactive measures are mentioned, the companies that already scraped the web won’t be stopped from continuing to use the AI models already trained on that data, but anyone else would be stopped by the law.
It is like making it illegal to rob banks after someone already robbed all the banks and letting them keep all the money.
The law could have made it illegal for use of models trained on the copyrighted materials without permission instead of targeting the process for collecting it.