If so, I think that sets an interesting precedent that could be referenced in copyright claims over AI generated art… For instance, if a Midjourney user generating an image of Mickey Mouse meant Disney could sue Midjourney directly…
I’m not sure if it’s just copyright to be honest. Hosting companies are free of blame from their users as long as they respond to reports, but if they preemptively moderate content their legal position becomes more precarious because it implies there is actually some kind of explicit vetting going on. OpenAI clearly does vetting of their own (if you can trick the bot into cursing you out it’ll remove the message and pretend there was an error) so it’s possible that the failed preemptive moderation can be relevant here.
From what I’ve read, the judgment could go either way. No matter what the legal conclusion will be, the impact will be huge.
In terms of defamation I think OpenAI will be in the clear. There’s a full screen popup that tells you their program lies all the time and statements it makes cannot be taken as facts. There’s also no (other) human involved with content generation. You won’t be winning a defamation suit against the company behind your phone’s autocomplete, and super fancy autocomplete is really all ChatGPT really is.
If there is a legal risk for OpenAI, I bet it’s copyright. All of the data the model is trained on, websites, blog posts, news articles, video transcriptions, you name it, is protected by copyright (assuming they pass the originality threshold). AI companies have used the fact there are copyright exemptions for research purposes to build their models, but now that they’re turning into businesses their models repeating someone else’s copyrighted work may suddenly complicate things, legally.
Japan was (to my knowledge) the first country to officially rule on AI generated images with regards to copyright… They deemed it fair game to use copyrighted material in training, but subject to copyright infringement if the AI generates something too close to copyrighted material. It’ll be interesting to see where other countries weigh in on this issue.
Theoretically, someone has to be considered responsible for what an AI does. Especially now that we’re seeing businesses start using AI for things like talking to customers… If they had full immunity against lawsuits for things their AI says, that’d set a really bad precedent; we’ll just have to see where the line gets drawn.
Japan’s case is very interesting already, but if a large economy comes out with a more restrictive ruling then that’s the law most international companies will end up sticking by. Disney isn’t going to risk losing copyright in the rest of the world just because Japanese law would permit them to use AI, for example.
I agree that this would be a bad precedent. Personally, I think the way AI companies have gotten away with things that would obviously be crimes if they couldn’t hide behind their magical neural networks has become too much of a problem to ignore.
If so, I think that sets an interesting precedent that could be referenced in copyright claims over AI generated art… For instance, if a Midjourney user generating an image of Mickey Mouse meant Disney could sue Midjourney directly…
I’m not sure if it’s just copyright to be honest. Hosting companies are free of blame from their users as long as they respond to reports, but if they preemptively moderate content their legal position becomes more precarious because it implies there is actually some kind of explicit vetting going on. OpenAI clearly does vetting of their own (if you can trick the bot into cursing you out it’ll remove the message and pretend there was an error) so it’s possible that the failed preemptive moderation can be relevant here.
It’s likely were going to find out in a while.
From what I’ve read, the judgment could go either way. No matter what the legal conclusion will be, the impact will be huge.
In terms of defamation I think OpenAI will be in the clear. There’s a full screen popup that tells you their program lies all the time and statements it makes cannot be taken as facts. There’s also no (other) human involved with content generation. You won’t be winning a defamation suit against the company behind your phone’s autocomplete, and super fancy autocomplete is really all ChatGPT really is.
If there is a legal risk for OpenAI, I bet it’s copyright. All of the data the model is trained on, websites, blog posts, news articles, video transcriptions, you name it, is protected by copyright (assuming they pass the originality threshold). AI companies have used the fact there are copyright exemptions for research purposes to build their models, but now that they’re turning into businesses their models repeating someone else’s copyrighted work may suddenly complicate things, legally.
Japan was (to my knowledge) the first country to officially rule on AI generated images with regards to copyright… They deemed it fair game to use copyrighted material in training, but subject to copyright infringement if the AI generates something too close to copyrighted material. It’ll be interesting to see where other countries weigh in on this issue.
Theoretically, someone has to be considered responsible for what an AI does. Especially now that we’re seeing businesses start using AI for things like talking to customers… If they had full immunity against lawsuits for things their AI says, that’d set a really bad precedent; we’ll just have to see where the line gets drawn.
Japan’s case is very interesting already, but if a large economy comes out with a more restrictive ruling then that’s the law most international companies will end up sticking by. Disney isn’t going to risk losing copyright in the rest of the world just because Japanese law would permit them to use AI, for example.
I agree that this would be a bad precedent. Personally, I think the way AI companies have gotten away with things that would obviously be crimes if they couldn’t hide behind their magical neural networks has become too much of a problem to ignore.