Colleagues and friends: On September 17, 2024, California Governor, Gavin Newsom, signed two bills into law that aim to help actors and performers protect their digital replicas in audio and visual productions from artificial intelligence, the governor’s office said. As robots and AI are taking over, we must have regulations to monitor and protect intellectual property integrity in the Arts as well as all dimensions.

Imagine if you are a screenwriter or author, and spent years perfecting a script or book.  Now imagine AI engines that are fed random and unrestricted IP from thousands of writers and other sources, and generate a script or book just like yours? Did the company with the infringing AI spend years writing the book? How do you protect your music for example, vs AI-generated music based on other music training data sets? Protecting human IP against machine-generated (copy and illegal) IP is critical and this is a very important first step.

There is a very loud and concerning movement in Silicon Valley to do away with all Copyright and Patent Protection for all forms of content. This same movement is attempting to open up all doors with no restrictions for Gen AI to begin to generate millions and billions of outputs of all forms without any restrictions.   We are diligently watching… why?

1. Copyrights and patents not only protect IP of all kinds, they are the nexus of innovation and creativity.
2. When content is created by humans, time, money, effort, and individual genius are utilized.  When such content is generated with Gen AI, it is done by using everyone else’s genius, using someone else’s IP, and pocketing all the benefits by the company using Gen AI for this purpose.

You all know me and know my role as a disruptor and innovator. I also believe Gen AI has enormous potential in augmenting human capabilities. However, it is totally unacceptable to think we can illegally use someone else’s creativity, build AI-generated content, take the economic gains, and not worry about copyright, patents, and IP.

To Governor Newsom: Thank you for taking swift action to turn this bill into Law.

Let’s disrupt and innovate relentlessly, BUT, let us do it legally and respectfully!

Next I will be writing about SB 1074,  one of the most consequential California bills, which just passed CA Senate approval, waiting to be signed by CA’s Governor to become law.  This is massive folks!  Longer debate coming to you soon!

Imagine | Disrupt | Innovate | Lead