Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

U.S. Copyright Law Protects Only Human Works

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By Guest Contributor Victoria E. Thornton

You may have seen online images that were created using artificial intelligence (AI) and wondered whether copyright law protects the artist’s efforts. In most instances, apparently not. A recent landmark decision by the United States Copyright Office holds that copyright protects only human-made works.

The Copyright Office’s February 21, 2023, published decision explains why artificially made works are not protected. “Zarya of the Dawn” is a comic book authored by Kristina Kashtanova and illustrated using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program. See U.S. Copyright Office Correspondence to Kristina Kashtanova (Feb. 21, 2023). Though the Office granted limited registration as to the text of the work as well as the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the work’s written and visual elements, it declined to protect the artificially generated illustrations. Id. at 1.

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Why AI Developers Are Being Sued

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There is no clarity of result available to artificial intelligence litigants who tread in the Land of Oz.

Plaintiffs are filing suits against AI developers at a quick pace; their grounds are that AI really creates nothing new but merely reads and copies billions of other peoples’ protected works from the Internet. Using these works, and in reaction to a user’s commands, AI combines elements of existing works into something else, whether art or prose.

The new work may be a derivative of an old, copied work for which the developer needs a license to use the old work. Many authors think so, and have joined together to sue, although for now their suits raise more questions than there are answers.

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How Much Should Artificial Intelligence, AI Advertising Be Regulated?

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Artificial intelligence continues to dominate the news, which is rather remarkable considering all the other happenings of importance. The discussion of dangers posed by artificial intelligence took center stage in Congress when Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, told a Senate panel hearing that society is at a “printing press” moment and that Congress needs to regulate AI.

Altman, whose company created ChatGPT, advanced his three-point plan. He wants: a new federal agency to license AI models, with the power to revoke licenses if a licensee does not comply with standards; implementation of safety standards and evaluations of dangerous AI capabilities; and audits of a model’s performance. An entrepreneur and business leader asking that his industry be regulated is as rare as a beef steak at a vegan banquet. Continue reading →

Impurities in the AI Engine’s Gas Tank

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The European Union respects data privacy; the United States does not.

The Wall Street Journal’s report that E.U. regulators fined Meta, Facebook’s parent, $1.3 billion for privacy violations struck a raw nerve. The United States has no laws to protect the privacy of consumer data, and Meta was fined because it transferred data collected from its European users for storage in the United States.

E.U. regulators expressed concern that this U.S.-stored data would be purloined by American spy agencies without knowledge or legal recourse of the people from whom it was collected purloined.

Instead of stealing consumer data, U.S. spy agencies are now buying, and sharing, vast quantities of personal data, replacing the intrusive surveillance that spy and law enforcement agencies, domestic and foreign, once used. This is the conclusion of a report commissioned by the Director of National Intelligence. The purchase of data is not subject to Fourth Amendment restraints.

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Do You Know What Your Data is Doing?

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The headline is a mouthful, but in the time you read this column your personal data has probably been collected by the more sophisticated vendors with whom you do business and is being used to target you for more purchases. This now-common practice might offend or it might be seen as consumer-useful.  It’s very clear, though, that artificial intelligence plays a role in selecting data capture and crafting the ad messages. Continue reading →

All Sorts of Issues with Artificial Intelligence

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“AI is the next revolution … there is no going back.”

— M. Werneck, executive vice president, The Kraft Heinz Company.

Not all revolutions benefit humanity. Tech luminaries Elon Musk and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio recently warned we might be circling the drain. They, and others, have called for a six-month moratorium on training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than Microsoft’s GPT-4. They caution AI can be dangerous to society in ways not understood.

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