Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem

Generative AI will change the nature of content creation, enabling many to do what, until now, only a few had the skills or advanced technology to accomplish at high speed. As this burgeoning technology develops, users must respect the rights of those who have enabled its creation – those very content creators who may be displaced by it. 

AI developers should ensure that they comply with the law concerning the acquisition of data being used to train their models. This should involve licensing and compensating those individuals who own the IP that developers seek to add to their training data, whether by licensing it or sharing in revenue generated by the AI tool. 

Customers of AI tools should ask providers whether their models were trained with any protected content, review the terms of service and privacy policies, and avoid generative AI tools that cannot confirm that their training data is properly licensed from content creators or subject to open-source licenses with which the AI companies comply.

Content creators who have a sufficient library of their intellectual property upon which to draw may consider building their datasets to train and mature AI platforms. The resulting generative AI models need not be trained from scratch but can build upon open-source generative AI that has used lawfully sourced content. This would enable content creators to produce content in the same style as their work with an audit trail to their own data lake or to license the use of such tools to interested parties with cleared titles in both the AI’s training data and its outputs. 

In this same spirit, content creators that have developed an online following may consider co-creation with followers as another means by which to source training data, recognizing that these co-creators should be asked for their permission to make use of their content in terms of service and privacy policies that are updated as the law changes.

Source hbr.org


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