The Copyright Alliance reported early in 2024 on some copyright-related AI activities in the American courts. Matters such as copyrightability of AI-generated content and copyright infringement where visual artists book authors, songwriters and other creators and copyright owners are alleging infringement of their copyrights resulting from the ingestion of protected works to train AI models.
"AI companies have failed to meaningfully address or remedy the harms to creators and copyright owners related to the mass scraping and unauthorised use of expressive works to train commercial AI models."
A New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI is full of examples where ChatGPT replicates their articles nearly verbatim, and offers the responses to its paying customers, free of attribution. This leaves the user of these AI tools vulnerable.
"There's nothing in the [AI] output that say what the sources are. So the users are on the hook and have no clue as to whether it's infringement or not."
According to the Los Angeles Times Technology and Internet column, tech companies say these legal complaints present an existential threat to generative AI. But they argue that what they're doing with copyrighted materials fall under fair use because it's transformative. Or that cases like the New York Times material are rare and bugs that are going to be patched. And that they cannot afford to pay for the use of copyrighted works.
As academics learning about and experimenting with generative AI we need to develop our situational awareness around AI so that we can influence policy and governance. To learn more about AI in general and within the UFS context, consider joining an AI Sandbox. Hosted by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures (ICDF) and the Digital Scholarship Centre (DSC), these sandboxes will provide you with an opportunity to experiment with generative AI tools relevant to your context. Introductory and advanced sandboxes are available. A guide on AI in higher education will provide you with context-specific AI tools to try, and content from a variety of events at the UFS around AI, such as the AI Wayfinder Seminar Series.
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