A lot of the future of AI will be settled in court. From publishers to authors to artists to Hollywood conglomerates, the creative industry is picking a big copyright fight over the vast quantities of data used to train AI models — and the ultimate output of those models. (Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.) This week, we got rulings in two early cases, involving groups of authors suing Anthropic and Meta. In both cases, the tech companies won. Sort of.
On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay, David, and Jake talk a lot about the twin rulings this week, and whether the AI companies may have won the battle without winning the war. But before we get to all that, there’s some other tech news to talk about! We run through the first few days of the Tesla robotaxi rollout and the latest on the Trump Phone, both of which are going about as you’d expect. We talk about the new Fairphone 6 and Titan 2, two fascinating but maybe slightly niche ideas about smartphones. And we talk about Meta’s new face computers, one made with Xbox and one made with Oakley.
After that, The Verge’s Adi Robertson joins the show to dig into the AI cases. We talk through the ways the plaintiffs failed to make the right arguments, and why the judges in both cases appear desperate for someone to come in and do better. We talk about the difference between buying books and pirating them, between inputs and outputs, and the actual creative risks that come from flooding the internet with AI slop.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with the gadgets of the week:
And in the lightning round:
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