AI Report: “Any media company banking on legal intervention to protect copyright might be disappointed”

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AI-Assisted Artistic Works May Be Copyright Eligible in Some Cases, US Copyright Office Says Technology News

This article is for information only, and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. Instructing the Stable Diffusion Playground web tool to create “a portrait of Rick Astley in the style of Vincent Van Gogh”, for example, resulted in the images below – though each run will produce a different set of images, even with the same text prompt. The use of AI in the production of artwork is now an area of intense debate and is central to a number of legal cases, but for various different reasons – we’ll look at some of the issues here.

This is a problem that we’ve only had to deal with in the last year – since Generative AI took the world by storm. Tools like ChatGPT can write stories, songs or plays, while Stable Diffusion or DALL-E 2 can produce images of anything we can describe to them. Publishers are hoping to establish landmark deals to ensure companies such as Google, Open AI and Microsoft pay to use any articles that underpin their chatbots. The News Media Association (NMA), which represents UK publishers including Telegraph Media Group, said Google’s alleged actions represented a breach of copyright and were a “serious threat to journalism”. On a similar issue, you can read the article “What the vote of the EU Parliament on the AI Act means? In case of mistakes due to errors in the AI system, questions arise about who is responsible for that.

UK Music Industry Demands Copyright Protection from AI

This blog has already established that it can be hard to pinpoint ‘ownership’ of AI-generated materials. Adding AI into the mix could make things very tricky because it challenges conventional ideas about copyright law. Only a handful of countries have so far begun to tackle these issues and provide some protection for AI-created work. Music companies can harness AI to streamline production, expanding their creative possibilities for more refined outputs. A nuanced strategy could involve AI-generated music complementing, rather than supplanting, human-crafted works.

Some argue that the creators of the AI system should be held liable, while others suggest that the AI system itself should be held accountable. The outcome from the Getty Images case may not be known for many months, but, it is hoped, the Government’s code of conduct will provide some much-needed guidance and clarity. Everything and anything you get from ChatGPT started out somewhere else on the internet in some form. Perhaps just as ingredients waiting to be pulled together, bricks just waiting to be put into the right arrangement, perhaps as a fully-fledged answer to your question that merely needs to take a spin through the ChatGPT machine to come out looking shiny and new. You don’t just steal them from anyone who didn’t “opt-out” of having their bricks stolen. Every time this happens, it is impacting the ability of a working human creator to sell their content or services.

Generative AI and intellectual property rights—the UK government’s position

Copyright infringement under UK law occurs when there is copying of the ‘whole or substantial part’ of a particular work. Thaler has also applied for DABUS-generated patents in other countries including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and Saudi Arabia with limited success. Artists are suing DeviantArt saying that their art had been used to train its AI model without their consent, and that they could potentially lose commissions and money because of the AI system.

• A core concern is that studios could lean heavily on generative AI, both for scriptwriting and acting, potentially rendering some human roles redundant.
• UK law currently permits “text and data analysis” only for non-commercial research (s. 29A, CDPA).
• James advises on a range of commercial matters including general commercial contracts, technology and innovation, intellectual property and data protection.
• The worry is that those inexperienced in musicality are asking the AI to create a track ‘like’ or ‘close to’ their reference, without the experience to musically question the AI result.

Further impact may be seen in the budgets the brands and agencies put towards their music choices. The cost to licence a pre-existing commercial track or creating a new bespoke soundtrack versus the cost to use AI. Shortly after his appointment as Director, Mr Abbamonte delivered a major Communication setting out the Commission’s strategy on Data called “Towards a thriving data-driven economy” and set up the European Public Private Partnership on Big Data Value. Recently, he delivered the new legislative proposal amending the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, adopted by the European Commission on 25 May 2016.

Founder of the DevEducation project

The attribution or labelling of works can be challenging as AI systems can produce new works from mere fragments of other works, such as words or parts of images, so the labelling of those words or sections will be a challenge. Any licence fees will also have to account for the degree of use, as a blanket fee for any labelled content could result in AI system developers paying costly licence fees for generated works. At the most basic level, copyright law attempts to balance the needs of authors with the interests of society as a whole.

There is uncertainty over how much selection and refinement is needed to produce the best work (see examples of selection, refinement and reworking here and here) and getting the right prompt is challenging enough to have created a market for effective prompts. There will be debates over whether generative AI is, for the purposes of copyright, a tool used by a human author or is genrative ai an autonomous creator of works. The Copyright Office knows it has a lot more work to do to fully clarify when AI-assisted content is eligible to be registered. As such, the Office revealed plans to issue a notice of inquiry later this year, seeking public input on how the law should apply to the use of copyrighted works in AI training and the resulting treatment of outputs.

IBM presents ‘brain-like’ chip for more environmentally-friendly AI tools

The rise of generative AI is being fuelled by billions of dollars of investment and continued technology advances, and its capability is expected to grow exponentially. “The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work,” the office said. The positive impact this could have on society, however, would be offset if it also means creative people have to become accustomed to others taking their work and profiting from it – particularly if it can be used in ways that they may have moral or ethical objections to. Musicians, for example, frequently deny permission for their music to be used at political rallies. As things stand, there would be nothing to stop a politician from using AI to create music “in the style of” any particular band and using it as they see fit. I believe that generative AI has the potential to be truly transformative in many positive ways.

Irrespective of the legal copyright ownership position, it’s
always important to check the T&Cs of the relevant platform to
assess the contractual terms on which the output is being provided
to the user. Either way, many ways in which the US legal system is distinct from that of continental Europe, will make international copyright treaties more relevant, especially given the global reach of the tech industry. The tug-of-war between AI development and copyright protection in the music industry is far from over. The UK government originally planned to exempt AI data mining from copyright protection laws. Creative industries have been outspoken in their concerns about AI models, such as ChatGPT, which are trained on large datasets that often include copyrighted material. The ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought forth by Stephen Thaler, who was looking to copyright ‘A Recent Entrance to Paradise’, an image he created using an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm he built and named the Creativity Machine.

Practical steps to address legal risks in adopting AI

Consequently, the product of a generative AI model cannot be considered copyrightable. As the opening quote by George Bernard Shaw, a famous Irish playwriter illustrates, creation has long been perceived to be a process innate and unique to humanity. This is also the overarching genrative ai understanding around which copyright laws in Hong Kong are organised and what copyright is designed to reward – human effort and originality. In the past few months, however, great strides have been made in the development of generative AI such as ChatGPT1 and Midjourney2.

The Daily Mail website has itself been accused of large-scale copyright breaches in the past. In 2014 it settled a court claim in Australia from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which had alleged plagiarism. Industry bosses have also pointed to mistakes made in the early days of the internet, when many publishers gave away content for free only to see their advertising revenues cannibalised by tech giants such as Facebook and Google. On the topic, you can find interesting the article “The Italian case on ChatGPT benchmarks generative AI’s privacy compliance? If you are concerned about how AI may impact copyright of your original content, please contact Will Charlesworth. In the US, the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America are striking over an absence of assurances from studios as to controls on the use and influence of AI content generation in the entertainment industry.

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