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Notes -
There's going to be some very interesting questions here in regards to the interactions of CDA230 and these lawsuits. Roommates says that CDA230 doesn't apply where the service provider actively solicits the content or actively creates it, but does where they merely provide a conduit, but it's not clear if that's good law rather than good-for-this-case law, and whether the AIgen is a 'creator' or a 'conduit' under modern analysis gets even uglier.
(There's another exception for NCII specifically under 8 USC 223(h), but that was only recently signed into law, and I don't think it would apply to xAI in these cases even were it in force.)
But I'd expect that this gets shoveled under the rug, one way or the other, instead.
I'd expect, regardless of the ability of AIgen tools to avoid Legally (or Socially) problematic smut, that the Visa and Mastercard situation means that the revenue argument will long favor not doing it, at least for any of the larger providers. Textgen sites have had similar problems. Itch.io has similar problems.
As others have noted, this would drastically reduce a lot of the underlying use cases for a lot of image generation tools. Even prohibiting uploads containing real-life pictures of people - previously a very hard problem, now 'just' a simple inference run - would still have massive impact.
I'm also not convinced that either would avoid the problem. Is it still NCII if you merely describe a person in significantly precise detail and sufficient attempts that a third party could reasonably confuse a purely text-to-image generation for a 'real' photograph? I wouldn't want to bet a company on it!
First time?
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