This Week in Imaging: Is Generative AI Stealing Copyrighted Work?

by Kathleen Wirth · January 12, 2024

Generative AI courtroom scene generated by Craiyon

During the holidays, one interesting news story came from the NY Times, which on December 27th, announced it was suing OpenAI and Micrsoft.

As per the Times, “The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.”

The lawsuit brings up an interesting issue. Generative AI creates new content – whether a news story, email, blog post, image, or video. But nothing comes from nothing. In order to create that content, generative AI draws from other – typically copyrighted – sources. And the NY Times isn’t alone in its concerns, various novelists are concerned about AI using their copyrighted material, and in the world of theater and movies, there’s concern about studios using actors’ images without permission or compensation.

Ultimately, while it appears generative AI creates unique content, it’s simply an amalgamation of other sources. As Brennan Whitfeld puts it on Built-In: “Their (generative AI) outputs are simply a culmination of human-made work, much of which has been scraped from the Internet and is copyright protected in one way or another.” Legally, that doesn’t bode well for providers such as OpenAI.

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