AI News Roundup – AI Action Summit in Paris, Reuters wins first major AI copyright lawsuit, Microsoft studies AI’s effects on human cognition, and more

To help you stay on top of the latest news, our AI practice group has compiled a roundup of the developments we are following.

 

• Representatives from over 60 countries around the world gathered in Paris this past week for the AI Action Summit, according to Politico Europe. Leaders including U.S. Vice President JD Vance, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi were in attendance at the event, which focused primarily on new investment and the promises of AI technologies. Previous summits in the United Kingdom and South Korea focused on AI safety measures, though the Paris summit was less focused on such. Vice President Vance railed against the European Union’s AI regulations (covered in this roundup last week) as hindering the growth of the technology, while several EU officials including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged to limit regulations and “red tape” surrounding AI in the bloc. President Macron announced over €100 billion in investments into AI in France, including the French startup Mistral. The summit concluded with the signing of a declaration calling for “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all,” though the U.S. and U.K. refused to sign.
• Thomson Reuters, parent of the news agency Reuters, has won the first major AI-related copyright infringement case in the United States, according to Wired. The suit against Ross Intelligence, an AI legal startup, claimed that Ross’ AI tools reproduced material from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw legal research database. The decision, handed down by U.S. Circuit Court Judge Stephanos Bibas sitting by designation in the U.S. District Court of Delaware, granted summary judgment for Thomson Reuters, finding that Ross directly infringed on headnotes included in some of Westlaw’s materials. Ross had claimed their use of the material was covered under fair use, mirroring the claims of several other AI companies (including OpenAI) currently defending against lawsuits from newspapers, publishers, and other entities. In the decision, Judge Bibas used a four-factor test for considering fair use claims: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The decision indicated that Thomson Reuters prevailed on the first and fourth factors, which were given higher weight in the decision. Ross Intelligence shut down in 2021 due to costs of litigation, but the decision is likely to influence future legal proceedings on the matter.
• A new study from Microsoft has found that the use of generative AI systems was associated with a decline in critical-thinking skills in its users. The study, conducted by Microsoft Research in partnership with a team at Carnegie Mellon University, surveyed 319 “knowledge” workers (e.g., teachers, traders, and other “office” jobs) about their use of AI and how they assessed their tasks. It found that the higher trust a user had in an AI system for certain tasks, the less they performed those tasks themselves and reported declines in their own skill for those tasks. Some respondents reported beginning to doubt their own abilities and becoming more likely to simply accept whatever the AI system gave them. The authors of the paper posited that generative AI has led workers of the type studied to “shift from task execution to oversight, requiring them to guide and monitor AI to produce high-quality outputs,” but noted that future work should focus more on task confidence and critical thinking effects. The authors also recommended that AI training programs should include “a focus on maintaining foundational skills in information gathering and problem-solving would help workers avoid becoming over reliant on AI.”
• The New York Times has approved the use of AI tools by some of its journalism staff, according to Semafor. In an internal guidance document, the company said that “[g]enerative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world. Machine learning already helps us report stories we couldn’t otherwise, and generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more.” The company specifically approved the use of Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot AI assistant for coding tasks, Google’s NotebookLM, as well as OpenAI’s non-ChatGPT API. The NYT also announced Echo, an internal AI-powered summarization tool, and noted that AI would allow the paper to “become more accessible to more people through features like digitally voice[d] articles, translations into other languages, and uses of generative AI we have yet to discover.” However, the company warned against the use of AI for more substantive tasks, such as drafting or revising articles, as well as against inputting copyrighted materials into AI systems. AI technologies have been a tricky topic for the company, as it remains involved in an ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI alleging copyright infringement for OpenAI training its models on the paper’s work.
• Apple will be partnering with China’s Alibaba to introduce AI features on Apple devices sold in the country, according to the Financial Times. At a conference in Dubai, Joe Tsai, chairman of the conglomerate, said that Apple “want[s] to use our AI to power their phones.” Tsai also said that Apple was “very selective,” as the company discussed partnering with many of China’s leading companies, including Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent before deciding on Alibaba. Chinese regulations require any large language model (LLM) offered to the public to undergo a government testing and approval process, leading market observers to predict that Apple would need to partner with a Chinese company to use AI technologies on their devices in China, the world’s largest smartphone market and Apple’s second largest after the United States.