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James O'Brien
UC Berkeley
James O'Brien is a highly educated professional with degrees from reputable institutions, including a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from The Honors College at Florida International University and the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
James has a rich professional background, having served as a Full Professor at UC Berkeley and in various consulting and leadership roles at organizations like DreamWorks Animation, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, Avametric, and Pixelux. He has also contributed to the academic community as the Director At Large at ACM Siggraph during his tenure as a grad student at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Highlights
As someone who has been developing algorithms and software for the movie industry for over 30+ years (and has an Academy Award for the effort) and who has worked as an expert in IP litigation for 20+ years, I can say with certainty that the recent lawsuit by the The New York Times regarding generative AI and copyright is misguided.
The problem with NYT's examples is their "experts" who specifically prompted for copyrighted images, not the AI tool that just did what it was instructed to do.
This reproduction of a frame from The Joker (2019) was generated in response to asking for "Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie, 2019, screenshot from a movie, movie scene". What did they expect to get?? A highly skilled artist would have been able to fulfill the request and also produce a similar copyright violation. Should we gather up all the artists and wipe their minds just so that they are incapable of producing copyright violations?
A tool like Midjourney is a threat to artist jobs in the same way that Microsoft's CoPilot is a threat to programmers: It's not because generative AI violates copyright, but because generative AI allows regular people to do what they would have previously had to pay a highly skilled person to do. Yes, we do need to think about how to regulate the use of AI so that it is put to positive uses, not uses that harm society, but this copyright nonsense is counter productive.
#newyorktimes #openai #midjourney #microsoftcopilot
Our latest paper on motion privacy in VR/XR with Vivek N., Louis Rosenberg, and Dawn Song was just published in IEEE Security & Privacy.
