Legal Attack on Generative AI is Just Starting

The large language models (LLMs) of generative AI like Bard and ChatGPT are very impressive, but they are about to rewrite the law books and companies that use LLMs or have their intellectual property stolen by them need to pay attention.

Item 1 – AI is Feeding on Our Data to Make Money-Where’s My Cut?

AI is ingesting large quantities of art and using that to train themselves. Then the AI uses what it learned to replace the artists for $20 a month or whatever ChatGPT charges. The artists are not happy that their art is being used that way but the LLM proponents say that it is no different than going into a museum, taking pictures of art there (assuming the museums allow that) and then using those pictures as inspiration. The courts and Congress will have to sort this out and for a group of people who struggle to use Zoom, that might be hard. Credit: CyberNews

Item 2 – GitHub Copilot is Being Sued for Abusing the Open Source Software Licenses of the Software it Ingests to Make New Software

GitHub has released a tool they call copilot that writes code for developers. The way that it learns is by ingesting as much code as it can. However, the code that it ingests has a software license agreement attached to it. Some of those licenses require that any code derived from the code must be open source, which of course is not happening. Hence the class action lawsuit. Credit: Data Science Central

Item 3 : Top Tech Talent Warns of AI’s Threat to Human Existence

More than a thousand tech wizards including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Andrew Yang have signed a letter urging AI pioneers to slow down on development because of its potential danger to humanity and to make sure that the risks will be manageable. Credit: Dark Reading

Item 4: The Current Legal Cases Against Generative AI are Just Starting

Currently Microsoft, GitHub, OpenAI, Midjourney, Stability AI and Getty Images are being sued over using copyrighted content to train their systems. Heather Meeker, a legal expert on open source licensing and a general partner at OSS Capital says she expects a flood of litigation over almost all generative AI products. Credit: Tech Crunch

Bottom line is that generative AI only works if they can steal (acquire?) a massive amount of data – whether it is writing or pictures or code or whatever.

And likely a significant amount of it is covered by some sort of legal protection such as copyright or license agreements.

Combine that with a court system that is technically clueless and you have a recipe chaos.

This is not going to get sorted out quickly, but it is going to be a field day for lawyers. Definitely full employment for intellectual property lawyers.

If all of this makes you queasy, contact us. this is going to get much more ugly before it gets better.