Artificial intelligence offers several challenges related to copyright and intellectual property, including those related to:
- Training data: Can copyrighted materials be used to train for-profit AI tools? Generative AI tools are generally trained on extensive and broad sets of training data that could include images, text, video, audio, raw data, and other information types. AI developers such as OpenAI and Google have not always been transparent about whether they have trained their AI on copyrighted material, and many copyright holders have filed lawsuits against AI developers, claiming their copyright-protected works have been improperly used to train AI tools.
- Information uploaded or added to an AI tool: When you upload content to an Ai tool, are you handing over copyright ownership to the developer? The answer depends on the fine print that you agreed to when you uploaded or entered your content to the AI tool. Similarly, you might be violating copyright or licensing agreements if you upload copyrighted material to an AI tool, such as uploading a pdf of a journal article to an AI tool that summarizes academic articles. Questions about uploading library-licensed content to an AI tool should be directed to your subject librarian.
- AI output: Can you copyright content fully generated by an AI tool? This issue is still being decided in courtrooms around the world, and it's still unclear what the future holds on this topic, as copyright is generally granted only for human-created content. If you do apply for a copyright with the US Copyright Office for content that was partially created by AI, you must include a statement attesting to your use of AI: “An applicant who creatively arranges the human and non-human content within a work should fill out the 'Author Created' field to claim: 'Selection, coordination, and arrangement of [describe human- authored content] created by the author and [describe AI content] generated by artificial intelligence.”
If you have any questions about artificial intelligence and copyright or other forms of intellectual property, please visit our copyright guide or email cipa@syr.edu.
