Artificial Intelligence for Faculty: AI and Copyright

2 Jan. 2024. Reuters. Reviews some of the cases that might go to trial in 2024.

1 Dec. 2023. In the year since the release of ChatGPT, generative AI has been moving fast and breaking things — and copyright law is only beginning to catch up.

21 Aug. 2023. Reuters.

11 July 2023. Copyright only protects original works by human creators," said Nazareth Pantaloni III, copyright program librarian at IU Libraries. "Under U.S. copyright law, copyright protection does not extend to non-human creators, which is an obvious problem for AI-generated works.

Stokel-Walker, C. (2023, May 13). New Scientist, 258(3438), 13.
David Bamman at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues looked at whether the AIs were able to fill in missing details from a selection of almost 600 fiction books, drawn from sources such as nominees for the Pulitzer prize between 1924 and 2020, and The New York Times's bestsellers lists over the same time period. The researchers say this suggests the AIs were trained on significant proportions of both books. "The results of this paper confirm that ChatGPT and GPT-4 are more familiar with books that more frequently appear online and that this may have implications in terms of how literary taste reflects and reinforces social inequalities," says Florence Smith Nicholls at Queen Mary University of London.

Samuelson, P. (2023). Communications of the ACM, 66(7), 20–23.
Samuelson discusses the legal challenges to generative artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI has captured considerable popular attention recently. ChatGPT and DALL-E have given members of the general public opportunities to use AI systems to generate text and image outputs for fun and a wide range of other purposes. Google and Meta have announced their intentions to launch similar AI systems soon. Generative AI has also caught the attention of lawyers who question the legality of ingesting in-copyright works as training data and producing outputs derived from copyrighted training data

Pophal, L. (2023). Information Today, 40(6), 37–38.
"When registering a work that contains AI-generated material, creators must disclose the use of AI in the registration application. Addressing plagiarism and content ownership of AI-generated content, Lommel states, will be extremely difficult given the way these systems work. "Because they are generating-rather than copying-content, the bar will be high to prove that any output infringes on the rights of others."