In the 2020s, the rapid advancement of deep learning-based generative artificial intelligence models raised questions about whether copyright infringement occurs when such are trained or used. This includes text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion and large language models such as ChatGPT. As of 2023, there were several pending U.S. lawsuits challenging the use of copyrighted data to train AI models, with defendants arguing that this falls under fair use. [1]
Popular deep learning models are trained on mass amounts of media scraped from the Internet, often utilizing copyrighted material. [2] When assembling training data, the sourcing of copyrighted works may infringe on the copyright holder's exclusive right to control reproduction, unless covered by exceptions in relevant copyright laws. Additionally, using a model's outputs might violate copyright, and the model creator could be accused of vicarious liability and held responsible for that copyright infringement.
Since most legal jurisdictions only grant copyright to original works of authorship by human authors, the definition of "originality" is central to the copyright status of AI-generated works. [3]
In the U.S., the Copyright Act protects "original works of authorship". [4] The U.S. Copyright Office has interpreted this as being limited to works "created by a human being", [4] declining to grant copyright to works generated without human intervention. [5] Some have suggested that certain AI generations might be copyrightable in the U.S. and similar jurisdictions if it can be shown that the human who ran the AI program exercised sufficient originality in selecting the inputs to the AI or editing the AI's output. [5] [4]
Proponents of this view suggest that an AI model may be viewed as merely a tool (akin to a pen or a camera) used by its human operator to express their creative vision. [4] [6] For example, proponents argue that if the standard of originality can be satisfied by an artist clicking the shutter button on a camera, then perhaps artists using generative AI should get similar deference, especially if they go through multiple rounds of revision to refine their prompts to the AI. [7] Other proponents argue that the Copyright Office is not taking a technology neutral approach to the use of AI or algorithmic tools. For other creative expressions (music, photography, writing) the test is effectively whether there is de minimis, or limited human creativity. For works using AI tools, the Copyright Office has made the test a different one i.e. whether there is no more than de minimis technological involvement. [8]
This difference in approach can be seen in the recent decision in respect of a registration claim by Jason Matthew Allen for his work Théâtre D'opéra Spatial created using Midjourney and an upscaling tool. The Copyright Office stated:
The Board finds that the Work contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence ("AI"), and this content must therefore be disclaimed in an application for registration. Because Mr. Allen is unwilling to disclaim the AI-generated material, the Work cannot be registered as submitted. [9]
As AI is increasingly used to generate literature, music, and other forms of art, the U.S. Copyright Office has released new guidance emphasizing whether works, including materials generated by artificial intelligence, exhibit a 'mechanical reproduction' nature or are the 'manifestation of the author's own creative conception'. [10] The U.S. Copyright Office published a Rule in March 2023 on a range of issues related to the use of AI, where they stated:
...because the Office receives roughly half a million applications for registration each year, it sees new trends in registration activity that may require modifying or expanding the information required to be disclosed on an application.
One such recent development is the use of sophisticated artificial intelligence ("AI") technologies capable of producing expressive material. These technologies "train" on vast quantities of preexisting human-authored works and use inferences from that training to generate new content. Some systems operate in response to a user's textual instruction, called a "prompt."
The resulting output may be textual, visual, or audio, and is determined by the AI based on its design and the material it has been trained on. These technologies, often described as "generative AI," raise questions about whether the material they produce is protected by copyright, whether works consisting of both human-authored and AI-generated material may be registered, and what information should be provided to the Office by applicants seeking to register them. [11]
The Copyright Office further clarified in a January 2025 that AI-assisted works which the creative expression of the human remains evident in the work can be copyrighted, which can include creative adaption of prompts for AI generators. Works "where the expressive elements are determine by a machine" still remain uncopyrightable. [12]
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) similarly codified restrictions on the patentability of patents credits solely to AI authors in February 2024, following an August 2023 ruling in the case Thaler v. Perlmutter. In this case, the Patent Office denied grant to patents created by Stephen Thaler's AI program, DABUS due to the lack of a "natural person" on the patents' authorship. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld this decision. [13] [14] In the subsequent rule-making, the USPTO allows for human inventors to incorporate the output of artificial intelligence, as long as this method is appropriately documented in the patent application. [15] However, it may become virtually impossible as when the inner workings and the use of AI in inventive transactions are not adequately understood or are largely unknown. [14]
Representative Adam Schiff proposed the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act in April 2024. If passed, the bill would require AI companies to submit copyrighted works to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems. These companies would have to file these documents 30 days before publicly showing their AI tools. [16]
Other jurisdictions include explicit statutory language related to computer-generated works, including the United Kingdom's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which states:
In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken. [6]
However, the computer generated work law under UK law relates to autonomous creations by computer programs. Individuals using AI tools will usually be the authors of the works assuming they meet the minimum requirements for copyright work. The language used for computer generated work relates, in respect of AI, to the ability of the human programmers to have copyright in the autonomous productions of the AI tools (i.e. where there is no direct human input):
In so far as each composite frame is a computer generated work then the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work were undertaken by Mr Jones because he devised the appearance of the various elements of the game and the rules and logic by which each frame is generated and he wrote the relevant computer program. In these circumstances I am satisfied that Mr Jones is the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the works were undertaken and therefore is deemed to be the author by virtue of s.9(3) [17]
The UK government has consulted on the use of generative tools and AI in respect of intellectual property leading to a proposed specialist Code of Practice: [18] "to provide guidance to support AI firms to access copyrighted work as an input to their models, whilst ensuring there are protections on generated output to support right holders of copyrighted work". [19] The U.S. Copyright Office recently[ when? ] published a notice of inquiry and request for comments following its 2023 Registration Guidance. [20]
On November 27, 2023, the Beijing Internet Court issued a decision recognizing copyright in AI-generated images in a litigation. [21]
As noted by a lawyer and AI art creator, the challenge for intellectual property regulators, legislators and the courts is how to protect human creativity in a technologically neutral fashion whilst considering the risks of automated AI factories. AI tools have the ability to autonomously create a range of material that is potentially subject to copyright (music, blogs, poetry, images, and technical papers) or other intellectual property rights (patents and design rights). [8]
Deep learning models source large data sets from the Internet such as publicly available images and the text of web pages. The text and images are then converted into numeric formats the AI can analyze. A deep learning model identifies patterns linking the encoded text and image data and learns which text concepts correspond to elements in images. Through repetitive testing, the model refines its accuracy by matching images to text descriptions. The trained model undergoes validation to evaluate its skill in generating or manipulating new images using only the text prompts provided after the training process. [22] When assembling these training datasets involves making copies of copyrighted works, this has raised the question of whether this process infringes the copyright holder's exclusive right to make reproductions of their works, or if it falls use fair use allowances. [23] [24]
U.S. machine learning developers have traditionally believed this to be allowable under fair use because using copyrighted work is transformative, and limited. [25] The situation has been compared to Google Books's scanning of copyrighted books in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. , which was ultimately found to be fair use, because the scanned content was not made publicly available, and the use was non-expressive. [26]
Timothy B. Lee, in Ars Technica , argues that if the plaintiffs succeed, this may shift the balance of power in favour of large corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta which can afford to license large amounts of training data from copyright holders and leverage their proprietary datasets of user-generated data. [27] IP scholars Bryan Casey and Mark Lemley argue in the Texas Law Review that datasets are so large that "there is no plausible option simply to license all [of the data...]. So allowing [any generative training] copyright claim is tantamount to saying, not that copyright owners will get paid, but that the use won't be permitted at all." [28] Other scholars disagree; some predict a similar outcome to the U.S. music licensing procedures. [25]
Several jurisdictions have explicitly incorporated exceptions allowing for "text and data mining" (TDM) in their copyright statutes including the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and the EU.
In the EU, such TDM exceptions form part of the 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. [29] They are specifically referred to in the EU's AI Act (which came into force in 2024), which "is widely seen as a clear indication of the EU legislator’s intention that the exception covers AI data collection", a view that was also endorsed in a 2024 German court decision. [30] Unlike the TDM exception for scientific research, the more general exception covering commercial AI only applies if the copyright holder has not opted out. [30] As of June 2023, a clause in the draft AI Act required generative AI to "make available summaries of the copyrighted material that was used to train their systems". [31]
Unlike the EU, the United Kingdom prohibits data mining for commercial purposes but has proposed this should be changed to support the development of AI: "For text and data mining, we plan to introduce a new copyright and database exception which allows TDM for any purpose. Rights holders will still have safeguards to protect their content, including a requirement for lawful access." [32]
Indian copyright law provides fair use exceptions for scientific research, but lacks specific provisions for commercial AI training models. Unlike the EU and UK, India has not established text and data mining (TDM) provisions that explicitly address commercial AI systems. This regulatory uncertainty became apparent in 2024 when Asian News International (ANI) sued OpenAI for using its content to train AI models without authorization. While OpenAI offered an opt-out policy that ANI used in October 2024 to block AI scrapers, ANI claimed this measure was ineffective since their content remained available through content syndication. The case also highlighted jurisdictional challenges, as OpenAI argued it was not subject to Indian law because its servers and training operations were located outside the country. [33] [34]
In some cases, deep learning models may replicate items in their training set when generating output. This behaviour is generally considered an undesired overfitting of a model by AI developers, and has in previous generations of AI been considered a manageable problem. [36] Memorization is the emergent phenomenon of LLMs to repeat long strings of training data, and it is no longer related to overfitting. [37] Evaluations of controlled LLM output measure the amount memorized from training data (focused on GPT-2-series models) as variously over 1% for exact duplicates [38] or up to about 7%. [39] This is potentially a security risk and a copyright risk, for both users and providers. [40] As of August 2023 [update] , major consumer LLMs have attempted to mitigate these problems, but researchers have still been able to prompt leakage of copyrighted material. [41]
Under U.S. law, to prove that an AI output infringes a copyright, a plaintiff must show the copyrighted work was "actually copied", meaning that the AI generates output which is "substantially similar" to their work, and that the AI had access to their work. [4]
In the course of learning to statistically model the data on which they are trained, deep generative AI models may learn to imitate the distinct style of particular authors in the training set. Since fictional characters enjoy some copyright protection in the U.S. and other jurisdictions, an AI may also produce infringing content in the form of novel works which incorporate fictional characters. [4] [35]
A generative image model such as Stable Diffusion is able to model the stylistic characteristics of an artist like Pablo Picasso (including his particular brush strokes, use of colour, perspective, and so on), and a user can engineer a prompt such as "an astronaut riding a horse, by Picasso" to cause the model to generate a novel image applying the artist's style to an arbitrary subject. However, an artist's overall style is generally not subject to copyright protection. [4]
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.
Anthropic PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public-benefit startup founded in 2021. It researches and develops AI to "study their safety properties at the technological frontier" and use this research to deploy safe, reliable models for the public. Anthropic has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
Music and artificial intelligence is the development of music software programs which use AI to generate music. As with applications in other fields, AI in music also simulates mental tasks. A prominent feature is the capability of an AI algorithm to learn based on past data, such as in computer accompaniment technology, wherein the AI is capable of listening to a human performer and performing accompaniment. Artificial intelligence also drives interactive composition technology, wherein a computer composes music in response to a live performance. There are other AI applications in music that cover not only music composition, production, and performance but also how music is marketed and consumed. Several music player programs have also been developed to use voice recognition and natural language processing technology for music voice control. Current research includes the application of AI in music composition, performance, theory and digital sound processing.
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its stated mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.
Artificial intelligence art is visual artwork created or enhanced through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) programs.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is a large language model released by OpenAI in 2020.
DALL-E, DALL-E 2, and DALL-E 3 are text-to-image models developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions known as prompts.
GitHub Copilot is a code completion and automatic programming tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI that assists users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocompleting code. Currently available by subscription to individual developers and to businesses, the generative artificial intelligence software was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021. Users can choose the large language model used for generation.
OpenAI Codex is an artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI. It parses natural language and generates code in response. It powers GitHub Copilot, a programming autocompletion tool for select IDEs, like Visual Studio Code and Neovim. Codex is a descendant of OpenAI's GPT-3 model, fine-tuned for use in programming applications.
Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence program and service created and hosted by the San Francisco-based independent research lab Midjourney, Inc. Midjourney generates images from natural language descriptions, called prompts, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion. It is one of the technologies of the AI boom.
Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on diffusion techniques. The generative artificial intelligence technology is the premier product of Stability AI and is considered to be a part of the ongoing artificial intelligence boom.
A text-to-image model is a machine learning model which takes an input natural language description and produces an image matching that description.
LAION is a German non-profit which makes open-sourced artificial intelligence models and datasets. It is best known for releasing a number of large datasets of images and captions scraped from the web which have been used to train a number of high-profile text-to-image models, including Stable Diffusion and Imagen.
A text-to-video model is a machine learning model that uses a natural language description as input to produce a video relevant to the input text. Advancements during the 2020s in the generation of high-quality, text-conditioned videos have largely been driven by the development of video diffusion models.
ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in 2022. It is currently based on the GPT-4o large language model (LLM). ChatGPT can generate human-like conversational responses and enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid investment in and public attention to the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Some observers have raised concern about the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation.
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination is a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there is a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with erroneous responses rather than perceptual experiences.
A generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) is a type of large language model (LLM) and a prominent framework for generative artificial intelligence. It is an artificial neural network that is used in natural language processing by machines. It is based on the transformer deep learning architecture, pre-trained on large data sets of unlabeled text, and able to generate novel human-like content. As of 2023, most LLMs had these characteristics and are sometimes referred to broadly as GPTs.
Generative artificial intelligence is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models learn the underlying patterns and structures of their training data and use them to produce new data based on the input, which often comes in the form of natural language prompts.
The AI boom is an ongoing period of rapid progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that started in the late 2010s before gaining international prominence in the 2020s. Examples include protein folding prediction led by Google DeepMind as well as large language models and generative AI applications developed by OpenAI. This period is sometimes referred to as an AI spring, to contrast it with previous AI winters.
Suno AI, or simply Suno, is a generative artificial intelligence music creation program designed to generate realistic songs that combine vocals and instrumentation, or are purely instrumental. Suno has been widely available since December 20, 2023, after the launch of a web application and a partnership with Microsoft, which included Suno as a plugin in Microsoft Copilot.
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