GenAI Studio: News, Tools, and Teaching & Learning FAQs
These sixty minute, weekly sessions – facilitated by Technologists and Pedagogy Experts from the CTLT – are designed for faculty and staff at UBC who are using, or thinking a=bout using, Generative AI tools as part of their teaching, researching, or daily work. Each week we discuss the news of the week, highlight a specific tool for use within teaching and learning, and then hold a question and answer session for attendees.
They run on Zoom every Wednesday from 1pm – 2pm and you can register for upcoming events on the CTLT Events Website.
News of the Week
Each week we discuss several new items that happened in the Generative AI space over the past 7 days. There’s usually a flood of new AI-adjacent news every week – as this industry is moving so fast – so we highlight news articles which are relevant to the UBC community.
This week in AI a deep dive around Anthropic’s court case concerning its usage of the online book databases, like Book3 among others, in its training of it’s artificial intelligence models. To provide additional insight on the implications, adjunct professor Jon Festinger was invited to provide his insight and to conduct a discussion on the impacts this case could have on future rulings.
In Brief:
A U.S. federal court has ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its AI models qualifies as fair use, calling the process “highly transformative.” Judge William Alsup determined that the AI’s method of learning parallels human cognition, undermining claims that it simply copied and replaced original works. However, while the training itself was protected, the court found that Anthropic’s mass download of over seven million pirated books was not. These materials were sourced from illegal repositories like Books3 and LibGen, even after Anthropic began purchasing licensed copies. The court will allow a trial to proceed on the piracy-related charges, which could expose Anthropic to damages. The ruling marks the first significant fair use decision in a generative AI copyright case and may influence similar lawsuits across the tech industry. Legal experts see the decision as both a precedent and a cautionary tale, underscoring the need for lawful dataset sourcing. Although celebrated by some as a victory for innovation, the case leaves open major questions about ethical boundaries in AI training practices.
Read the full ruling and implications for AI and copyright law.
Questions and Answers
Each studio ends with a question and answer session whereby attendees can ask questions of the pedagogy experts and technologists who facilitate the sessions. We have published a full FAQ section on this site. If you have other questions about GenAI usage, please get in touch.
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