The Trump administration has fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, two sources familiar with the situation confirmed to CBS News Saturday.

The firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter came after Perlmutter and her office earlier this week issued part three of a lengthy report about artificial intelligence and expressed some concerns and questions about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology.

Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, said in a statement that Perlmutter’s firing was “a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis.”

Morelle speculated that there was “surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models,” in reference to the report released by the Copyright Office this week.

  • doug
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    1 day ago

    Even if I went offline, so far I have seen ai slop seeping into:

    • video games (even by big studios like Outlast Trials or COD)
    • smaller merchants at local events or malls
    • commercials (even big companies like Coke, Mazda, and smaller ads)

    I can’t imagine how much worse it’ll get with the flood gates opened.

    I would not want to be a stock photographer or model right now.

    • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      I’m conflicted. The stock photo industry has been broken for a long time, with Getty actively maintaining and orchestrating an illegal monopolistic trust. I feel inclined to champion almost anything that threatens their illegal, predatory business model.

    • xyzzy@lemm.ee
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      23 hours ago

      I see it everywhere, constantly:

      • At work in stupid images for meetings and unhelpful and inaccurate AI summaries designed to make us more productive. I love Ghibli, but with all the Ghibli profile images I see there it’s making me hate seeing the art style.

      • On meetup event descriptions, where the photos are either cartoons or deceptive, photorealistic representations of a meetup in action instead of a less glamorous real photo.

      • Reviews, product descriptions, news articles, SEO farms in search results, paid bot comments on practically every single video in order to manipulate engagement stats…

      I’m just so tired of the slop, the lack of care, everywhere I look. It’s exhausting.

    • mhague@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      On playstation there’s several games that were just released by the same scammer. One game, Gun shop simulator, looks to have ai generated textures, page description, and even the screenshots of gameplay. The main logo of the shop changes in every screenshot.

      The screenshots of the game. Generated. What is Sony thinking? It’s like nobody is at the helm anymore.

      • BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca
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        22 hours ago

        I guess we’re all too busy watching number go up to actually manage anything. For them it’s their stock prices, for me it’s my seed ratio!