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Artificial Intelligence | ChatGPT for Instructors

Information on Generative AI for Instructors

Copyright Issues

Output of Generative AI

Can you copyright something you made with AI?

  • Open AI says:"... you own the output you create with ChatGPT, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise – regardless of whether output was generated through a free or paid plan."

  • The U.S. Copyright Office says:  The term “author" ... excludes non-humans. But if you select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work. For an example, see this story of a comic book. The U.S. Copyright Office determined that the selection and arrangement of the images IS copyrightable, but not the images themselves (made with generative AI).

Generative AI Training Data: Fair Use?

To train Generative AI, vast amounts of information are needed.  This information is called training data.  ChatGPT's training data consists of information from books, journal articles, newspapers, websites, code respositories, Wikipedia, and conversational data.  OpenAI claims that the use of this copyrighted information falls under the Fair Use doctrine.  Authors of the works that have been used claim this is a violation of copyright.
 

Other Countries:

Corporations Have Offered to Pay Legal Bills of AI Tool Users:

Legal Opinions

It will be difficult to prove, according to IP lawyers like Katherine Gardner.  “When you put content on a social media site or any site, you’re generally granting a very broad license to the site to be able to use your content in any way,” Gardner said. “It’s going to be very difficult for the ordinary end user to claim that they are entitled to any sort of payment or compensation for use of their data as part of the training.”

Rebecca Tushnet studies and teaches copyright and trademark law as the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School. In this interview in the Harvard Gazette, she talks about some of the broader legal issues around emerging tech. 

Prof. Matthew Sag Testimony on Copyright and AI (PDF). Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, July 12, 2023.

Letter to the U.S. Copyright Office from the Library Copyright Alliance. The American Library Association and The Association of Research Libraries. Oct, 31, 2023. Download the PDF. Supports the idea that training data for generative AI should be considered fair use.

It's Difficult to Remove Data from an AI Once It's Been Trained

According to Google, "Fully erasing the influence of the data requested to be deleted is challenging since, aside from simply deleting it from databases where it’s stored, it also requires erasing the influence of that data on other artifacts such as trained machine learning models."

To address this, Google has announced a Machine Unlearning Challenge, a competition for researchers to foster novel solutions to this problem.

Copyright is Only One Lens Through Which to Consider

Generative AI