From The World Economic Forum:
As artificial intelligence (AI) moves beyond performing simple tasks to creating original content, it blurs the lines between humans and machines. In doing so, it challenges a core tenet of many traditional intellectual property (IP) frameworks: only works created by humans are protected by copyright laws.
The development and training of AI models also raise another important copyright issue: whether the use of third-party content in that exercise might infringe on the copyright of that content.
Emerging use cases around generative AI are disrupting traditional views of creativity, authorship and ownership and pushing the boundaries of copyright law. As the world catches up with innovation, the resulting legal ambiguity impacts all sides of the AI equation – developers, content creators and copyright owners.
Training and copyright infringement
To create content, generative AI learns from processing vast amounts of information. This training process can involve using copyright-protected content, raising a critical question: does training generative AI models constitute copyright infringement, exposing developers to related claims?
If so, is new legislation needed to address this issue in a manner that does not unreasonably impede innovation but still respects the rights of creators?
These questions have led some jurisdictions to consider amendments to existing text and data mining exemptions and/or fair use/fair dealing exceptions to cover the training of generative AI. Such exemptions permit certain activities that would otherwise constitute copyright infringement.
Other jurisdictions are still awaiting guidance, creating a drastically uneven regulatory landscape that will continue for some time. But, no matter where they stand, legislators need to consider this issue to incentivise innovation while protecting content creators’ rights.
Looking past the legal uncertainty at traditional means of creativity, humans constantly learn as we receive and process information. Typically, things we create are inextricably linked to what we have learned from others and our experiences. One could argue that AI is no different in that it learns from the underlying datasets to produce something new.
Copyright – ownership of content
Copyright law is a key means by which innovation and creation are rewarded – and thus enabled – raising the stakes for courts and intellectual property authorities to define copyright ownership in the context of generative AI.
Depending on where you are in the world, the definition of copyright varies, a significant legal consideration in its own right. But virtually everywhere, copyright requires meaningful human contribution.
Generative AI, which often involves little human input, shatters the mould of this traditional framework. It calls into question whether AI-generated content can be protected by copyright in the first place and, if so, then who owns this copyright?
Is it the developer of the AI model who arguably enabled the ‘creative’ process? Is it the owner of the AI model? Or is the person who considered and input the prompts that allowed the AI tool to generate the content? Of course, this depends on whether there was sufficient human contribution to justify copyright protection in the first place.
Currently, most generative AI tools provide that users own the content they generate in their terms of use. However, if the content is not copyright-protected in the first place, then the terms of use can’t change that position. There is less clarity around who is responsible if AI-generated content infringes someone else’s copyright in a protected work.
To answer these questions requires courts and intellectual property authorities to challenge the scope of traditional copyright law in relation to generative AI, which could lead to changes to existing legislation covering ownership of computer-generated content.
Eventually, it is possible that copyright law will need to be further reimagined and redefined to account for the possibility of recognizing a machine as its own entity with independent authority and the ability to own and protect content, though this does not appear to be on the horizon in the short term. In this more progressive scenario, it is unclear where liability would rest for negative consequences (including copyright infringement) caused by generative AI outputs.
Link to the rest at The World Economic Forum
To the best of PG’s knowledge, The World Economic is a non-profit NGO based in Switzerland that sponsors a variety of conferences and programs to make the world a better place. Its most high-profile program is a conference held annually in Davos, Switzerland.
Roughly 3,000 of the most powerful and wealthy leaders globally use over 1500 private jets plus a great many larger government jets to arrive and depart. Global warming has a regular place on each conference’s agenda.
They are arguing two meaningless things.
The first, *past* LLM training forgets that copyright is about *distributing* copies of content in ways that *substantially* competes with the protected product. Not applicable, as the models are not used to substitute for the “read” material.
The second is more important: future model training will not be done off the masses of content input into the first mainstream models to tease out rules and relationships but rather by feeding the relevant rules and relationships for a specific mission to create a leaner and more efficient model. At which point the aggrieved will have no standing vis a vis the actual money generating tools since they will be created via a “clean room” process.
In addition to the existing case law on internet crawlers (legal) and machine scanning to create a database relating to the content (Google lawsuit, also legal) there is a third legal case that might factor in and that is the LED ZEPPELIN lawsuit over the opening of STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/arts/music/stairway-to-heaven-led-zeppelin-lawsuit.html#:~:text=Led%20Zeppelin%20Wins%20Long%20%E2%80%98Stairway%20to%20Heaven%E2%80%99%20Copyright,copy%20part%20of%20a%201968%20song%20by%20Spirit.
A case can be made that the rules and relationships extracted from content are analogous to notes and chords in music and reproducing segments of copyrighted material from those elements is not a violation per se.
As to the Davos folks it is worth considering that the majority are not only old and rich but also disconnected from the workings of modern tech as all they do is black box it, at best. They might as well be debating angels tapdancing on a pin head for all they mjght understand of machine learning.
Lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Safely ignored.