Generative AI and copyright Machine learning AI-powered knowledge management

Programs like ChatGPT and Bard are leading this so-called “AI Awakening,” rising from tech buzzwords to real game changers and solidifying their role as essential tools across numerous industries. Human creativity for such campaigns remains critical to protecting marketers from running into legal issues. Simply put, a generative AI tool must go through “intensive training” – ironically, in a similar way a copywriter or an art designer does by reading extensively and analysing different art designs in depth – in order to produce content.

There have already been lawsuits concerning incorrect content, but it is only a matter of time before a large organization is sued for content produced (using GAI) without sufficient supervision. Addressing plagiarism and ownership of AI-generated content will be extremely difficult, given the way these systems work. Prioritizing the protection of creative rights can lead to an AI landscape that upholds ethical values and celebrates human ingenuity.

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Interested parties may advocate for either a quite limited or an expansive view of fair use, but the regulatory approach that ultimately prevails will shape the generative AI industry and the IP law that surrounds it. Yakov Livshits To be clear, art created by a human using a tool like a paintbrush or a chisel can be copyrighted by that human. Thaler effectively wanted to use the work-for-hire convention to assign authorship to his AI paintbrush.

The ignorance of IP law while using copyrighted material will not excuse anyone’s liability or organize any kind of legal defense against claims made by copyright owners. These tools’ generative ability is the result of training them with scores of prior artworks, from which the AI learns how to create artistic outputs. As generative AI art tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have been thrust into the limelight, so too have questions about ownership and authorship.

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Moreover, Plaintiff argued this statutory interpretation comports with the purpose of the Act, especially in view of current technological advancements in generative AI. To carry out the Act’s purpose, Thaler further asserted the scope of copyright protections necessarily expanded as technology has progressed. By way of example, Thaler discussed the expansion of copyright protections to photography because the Act at the time preceded the invention of cameras,9 a machine (like Thaler’s “Creativity Machine”) capable of rendering images. A recent decision by the USCO shows the challenges that may be faced by those seeking copyright protection for works that include components or features that were created by a generative AI tool.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Counting words never shielded you from infringement claims–and in any case, it applies poorly to software as well as works that aren’t written text. Elsewhere the US copyright office states that fair use includes ”transformative” use, though “transformative” has never been defined precisely. It also states that copyright does not extend to ideas or facts, only to particular expressions of those facts–but we have to ask where the “idea” ends and where the “expression” begins. Interpretation of these principles will have to come from the courts, and the body of US case law on software copyright is surprisingly small–only 13 cases, according to the copyright office’s search engine.

Generative AI and copyright law: What’s the future for IP?

While building your business’ generative AI stack, pay attention to the data used in training and fine-tuning generative AI models from a copyright perspective. “We could extend copyright law and we could consider things like joint ownership,” Mahari said. Several pending lawsuits have also been filed over the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI without permission. FOSSA’s Editorial Team creates content on the wonderful world of open source software.

Overnight, a software program could generate thousands of unique works in the style of a particular artist, causing the supply of a particular artwork style to increase substantially. Unlike the Google Books case, this type of use of copyrighted works may produce an output that is intended to be a commercial replacement for the copyrighted work used as input for a generative AI system. As the courts gain more experience handling cases involving generative AI, such as those previously summarized, they can contribute to guiding this domain.

Does generative AI violate copyright laws?

To help, Zhao and his team designed a new tool called Glaze, which aims to prevent AI models from being able to learn a particular artist’s style. If an artist wants to put a creation online without the threat of an image generator copying their style, they can simply upload it to Glaze first and choose an art style different from their own. The software then makes mathematical changes to the artist’s work on a pixel level so that it looks different to a computer. To the human eye, Yakov Livshits the Glaze-d image looks no different from the original, but an AI model will read it as something completely different, rendering it useless as an effective piece of training data. Competition is also at the heart of internal debates at The New York Times over a potential lawsuit against OpenAI, according to reporting by NPR. NPR’s sources said the Times is concerned that generative AI tools will repurpose its reporting and display it to readers who would otherwise visit its site.

AI researchers have also created new methods and techniques for more rapidly building AI systems, often using AI to train AI. Technical innovations that have been used to help generative AI reach its current levels include generative adversarial networks, where two neural networks, one generating content and one trying to determine if content is real or fake, are pitted against each other. Another technique is reinforcement learning from human feedback, where an already-trained AI model generates several outputs, humans rank those outputs, a reward model is trained on these rank outputs to estimate how much a human would like an output, and the reward model is used to refine the already-trained AI model. With the advent of readily accessible artificial intelligence (AI) and the breakthrough of generative AI (GAI) programs such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, GAI is now a staple in all facets of business. GAI programs can generate new texts, images, and content (outputs) based on textual prompts by a user (inputs).