Some background: under US lawâââand under a mountain of international treaties, from the Berne Convention to the TRIPS âcopyright is automatically granted to creative works of human authorship âat the moment of fixation in some tangible medium.â
That is: as soon as a human being makes something creative, and records it in some medium (a hard-drive, magnetic tape, paper, film, canvas, etc), that creative thing is immediately copyrighted (the duration of that copyright varies, both by territory and by whether the creator was working on their own or for a corporation).
The story you heard, about a US Air Force AI drone warfare simulation in which the drone resolved the conflict between its two priorities (âkill the enemyâ and âobey its orders, including orders not to kill the enemyâ) by killing its operator?
It didnât happen.
The story was widely reported on Friday and Saturday, after Col. Tucker âCincoâ Hamilton, USAF Chief of AI Test and Operations, included the anaecdote in a speech to the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) Summit.
The thing is, there really is an important area of AI research for Google, namely, âHow do we keep AI nonsense out of search results?â
Googleâs search quality has been in steady decline for years. I blame the companyâs own success. When youâve got more than 90 percent of the market, youâre not gonna grow by attracting more customersâââyour growth can only come from getting a larger slice of the pie, at the expense of your customers, business users and advertisers.