Last Wednesday, Elon Musk threatened a lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing the company of illegally using Twitter’s data to train its artificial intelligence program, CNBC reported.
The Twitter CEO leveled the threat after it was reported that Microsoft planned to drop Twitter from its advertising platform which enables advertisers to manage all of their social media accounts from one place.
In a tweet in response to the news, Musk blasted Microsoft for “illegally using Twiter data” to train its artificial intelligence, adding “Lawsuit time.”
Musk’s tweet is the latest example of the growing fight over data ownership in the push for artificial intelligence. Data owners are seeking to charge or stop tech companies developing AI models like OpenAI’s GPT from using their content.
Microsoft, which invested $10 billion in OpenAI last year, develops its own large language models (LLMs) and sells access to OpenAI’s.
Large language models like GPT need terabytes of data to train, most of it taken from social networks like Twitter, Reddit, and StackOverflow, which enable it to learn more informal, back-and-forth conversational language.
But as the new artificial intelligence models move from research labs into a more corporate setting, the data owners are beginning to make demands.
Last week, Reddit said it would charge companies looking to access its programming interface to feed Reddit conversations into AI training software. Additionally, Universal Music Group said last week that AI training of artists’ music violates copyright law and breaches its agreements after a video of an AI-generated song by rapper Drake went viral on social media.
Getty Images, the stock photo database, is suing the company Stable Diffusion claiming that it copied Getty content to train its artificial intelligence image-generator.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI before leaving in 2018, recently criticized the company for moving from a non-profit model to a profitable business influenced largely by Microsoft.
In December, Musk announced a pause to Open AI’s access to Twitter’s database.
