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We’re witnessing a massive revolution in artificial
intelligence. Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion,
Dall-E and Copilot allow users to generate text, imagery, computer
code and other content based solely on natural language prompts.
The creativity, detail and human-like quality of the AI outputs are
astonishing, leading to widespread excitement, fear, and ire, as
thinking machines force us to question long-held assumptions about
the supposed uniqueness of human ingenuity and ponder whether AI is
bringing us closer to utopia, human obsolescence, or something in
between. Thankfully, this is just a law blog, so we can leave these
existential questions about the coming singularity for an episode
of Black Mirror.
The legal implications of AI are varied, evolving, and complex,
but the focus of this post is AI’s intersection with
intellectual property—in particular, the IP and IP-adjacent
issues raised by AI’s
input—i.e., the content used to
train AI. (A different set of issues relate to the IP protection,
or lack thereof, afforded to the output
of AI. We’ve previously blogged about the output issue,
which is not the focus of this post.).
The fundamental question is this: do content creators have the
right to authorize or block AI systems from collecting and using
their content as training data? This question implicates not only
complex issues of law but important matters of public policy. What
rules around AI will optimally “promote the Progress of
Science and useful Arts,” the prime directive of the U.S.
Constitution’s copyright mandate?
These questions are at the center of two class action lawsuits
brought against generative AI providers accused of ingesting
content without permission. Both cases were filed in the United
States District Court for the Northern District of California by
the same lawyers (the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and Matthew
Butterick). A third lawsuit brought by Getty Images in the United
Kingdom…
..
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