STANFORD, Calif. — The Justice Department’s chief antitrust enforcer issued a warning Thursday to tech companies working in artificial intelligence, cautioning that they could face action from regulators if they don’t find a way to fairly compensate artists, entertainers and other creators.
“If firms in the AI ecosystem violate the antitrust laws, the antitrust division will have something to say about that,” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said at a Stanford University conference attended by AI researchers, executives and other government officials.
The topic of the conference was the economic impact of generative AI systems like ChatGPT and how antitrust laws may apply to them. Compensation to creators is one area of concern, Kanter said.
“What incentive will tomorrow’s writers, creators, journalists, thinkers and artists have if AI has the ability to extract their ingenuity without appropriate compensation?” Kanter said. “The people who create and produce these inputs must be properly compensated."
The warning comes as tensions are spiking between AI companies and artists. Last week, actor Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of using an “eerily similar” voice to hers for their new GPT-4o chatbot after she declined the company’s request to provide her voice.
The use of AI-generated voices and imagery in films, television and video games has been an ongoing source of conflict in labor negotiations in Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry.
AI companies including OpenAI and Microsoft have also faced a raft of lawsuits, including from authors and media outlets such as The New York Times, over their use of creative works to train their models, while other media outlets have chosen to sign content deals with AI firms instead.
Kanter did not say that Justice Department action was imminent, but he said the department was paying close attention to industry developments.
“At the antitrust division, we are actively examining the AI ecosystem, both through our policy work at events just like this one and through our enforcement,” he said.
“Monopolizing upstream markets or creative works is monopolization, whether or not a large language model is involved,” he said.
Kanter was joined in his concerns about competition by Věra Jourová, a vice president of the European Commission who also spoke at the conference Thursday. She warned about the high barriers to entry in AI such as computing costs that may favor large companies over startups.
Appointed by President Joe Biden, Kanter has pushed an aggressive antitrust agenda including against the tech industry. The Justice Department has sued tech giants including Apple and Google and has teamed up with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan for a task force on alleged price-fixing.
Kanter said that the Justice Department has the potential authority to act under the antitrust principle known as monopsony, which is when a buyer in a supply chain has so much power that they dramatically push down prices and reduce the incentive to produce. Monopsony is the mirror image of monopoly, which is when a seller has so much consolidated power that they raise prices, and it can also sometimes raise legal concerns.
“Absent competition to adequately compensate creators for their works, AI companies could exploit monopsony power on levels that we have never seen before, with devastating consequences,” Kanter said.
He said his concerns are ultimately about the future of free expression, “which is the most impactful and beautiful form of human innovation.” But he also said there are similar questions about medical patients “whose health data is fed into massive AI models” and “journalists and news outlets who are vital to our democracy.”