'Please regulate AI:' Artists push for U.S. copyright reforms but tech industry says not so fast

abcnews.go.com:

Country singers, romance novelists, video game artists and voice actors are appealing to the U.S. government for immediate relief from the threat that artificial intelligence poses to their livelihoods

Country singers, romance novelists, video game artists and voice actors are appealing to the U.S. government for relief — as soon as possible — from the threat that artificial intelligence poses to their livelihoods.

«Please regulate AI. I’m scared,” wrote a podcaster concerned about his voice being replicated by AI in one of thousands of letters recently submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Technology companies, by contrast, are largely happy with the status quo that has enabled them to gobble up published works to make their AI systems better at mimicking what humans do.

The nation's top copyright official hasn't yet taken sides. She told The Associated Press she's listening to everyone as her office weighs whether copyright reforms are needed for a new era of generative AI tools that can spit out compelling imagery, music, video and passages of text.

“We’ve received close to 10,000 comments,» said Shira Perlmutter, the U.S. register of copyrights, in an interview. «Every one of them is being read by a human being, not a computer. And I myself am reading a large part of them.”

WHAT'S AT STAKE?

Perlmutter directs the U.S. Copyright Office, which registered more than 480,000 copyrights last year covering millions of individual works but is increasingly being asked to register works that are AI-generated. So far, copyright claims for fully machine-generated content have been soundly rejected because copyright laws are designed to protect works of human authorship.

But, Perlmutter asks, as humans feed content into AI