Jennifer Jordan

Hello again, México.

Recently, I went to the Creative Commons Summit in Mexico City. I had never been to Mexico City, but it was my second international trip in about a month, which was exciting, as my passport needed to be broken in.

View from the 17th floor of Fiesta Americana
AI and Copyright session with the moderator sitting next to Nick Garcia of Public Knowledge and Ryan Nishimoto

The conference’s theme was AI and the Commons. I learned that I have a lot to learn. I went to sessions on AI and Copyright, AI and OER, and AI and Open Knowledge. I met interesting people. Initially, I was surprised at the number of lawyers at the conference, but it makes sense given that creators are working to protect their intellectual property from being harvested by AI. It seems like there are more questions than answers right now about how AI will impact openly licensed materials and other folks’ intellectual property.

The sessions I went to explored the questions and potential impacts of AI. For example, in a session on AI and copyright, Ryan Nishimoto, an Intellectual Copyright lawyer from L.A. talked about some of the questions facing AI companies:

From a US law perspective, the questions come from a broad spectrum: creators, tech folks…and the non-expected folks like people whose works intersects with implications from AI. Facebook had trouble with privacy issues. Any company that gathers data is sitting on a wealth of information. Clients are looking to use this wealth of data from any social media platform. They want to scrape the data. Those questions are yet to be wrestled with. In terms of AI, we have only started to scratch the issues.

What folks seemed to agree on is that the legal boundaries of AI are being tested in a similar way as previous technologies. James Grimmelman, a lawyer, Cornell professor, and author of the Internet Casebook, compared AI and the rise of Google books in terms of unanswered questions:

Google books was sued by authors and publishers. Machine analysis of human creativity. The assumption was that machine use…fell under fair use. The arrival of generative AI has unsettled that. Machines trained on creativity. Some of those are very different in training. Outputs of generative AI are not in a separate tech sphere but coming back into the human sphere. AI has been trained as AI. How do we treat the outputs of creative products?

Laws move much slower than innovation. I am glad that creators are trying to draw boundaries around their intellectual property. That might not be the most popular opinion for an OER Librarian as I also like free and open IP.

When I was in Mexico City, I also did some fun stuff, like going to the Frida Kahlo Museum. And I had warm and toasty mezcal shots that I chased with oranges and Tajin. Down below, you’ll find more colorful pics from my trip.

Frida’s corset that also gave her body suupport
Frida’s beautiful dishes stacked on yellow shelves
Me standing in front of the museum’s flower filled entrance
Moses by Friday Kahlo
Black and white picture of Frida sitting on the ground
Frida’s wheelchair and custom-made adjustable easel
View out of Frida’s paned window onto her back patio filled with green trees
Shot of mezcal next to a dish with *GREEN* oranges sprinkled with Tajin

Jennifer Jordan

2 responses to “Hello again, México.”

  1. Marie A Bailey Avatar
    Marie A Bailey

    Looks and sounds like you had a fun trip! I bet the AI conference was interesting. The little bit I’ve read about publishers and authors being uncomfortable with AI was focused on the proper attribution of material as well as the “scraping” of published works without permission. Sounds like copyright violations. Libraries should get a pass because they provide a public, educational service, and they don’t sell unattributed intellectual property. Many years ago when I was a grad student, I remember a lot of frustration among my professors and fellow students when journal publishers started playing hardball with the reading packets that our professors like to compile. The journals had to grant permission for their articles to be photocopied into the packets, and that, of course, took weeks and weeks.

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    1. Jennifer Jordan Avatar
      Jennifer Jordan

      Yes, it’s wild how for-profit publishers control the flow of information in publicly funded institutions. But that’s capitalism for ya. Thanks for reading =0)

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