If you’ve ever watched a “hacking” scene on TV and wanted to scream “THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS!” at the screen, you’ll understand where I’m at when it comes to discussion of the laws around AI. From journalistic coverage to HackerNews threads, people have been boldly tossing in incorrect assertions about copyright, privacy, and other complex areas of law. While AI-specific regulation still seems like it’s a ways out, there’s a lot we can learn from looking at the areas of law that likely do touch AI, especially those that are relevant to video. I’ll step us through how copyright law can protect the content ingested into models, how privacy laws are triggered by the use of people’s names and faces, how the “right of publicity” could be wielded by celebrities and members of the public alike, and how rules around deceptive trade practices could come into play.

This talk was presented at Demuxed ’23, a conference for video nerds in San Francisco featuring amazing talks like this one.