13 Copyright, intellectual property, and GenAI

Who owns what Generative AI creates?

Using GenAI tools comes with serious concerns about copyright and intellectual property. It is really important to pay close attention to these factors, especially in your coursework.

Copyright is the legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a creative work. Intellectual property is the creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.

As you learned earlier, training a GenAI model requires a huge amount of information (data) from which to learn patterns and relationships.  We generally do not know what information is in a GenAI’s training data, and if it includes copyrighted material. We do not know if the copyright holder consented to having their intellectual property (images, articles, videos, etc) used to train the GenAI.

This also brings up questions about who actually owns new content that GenAI creates when prompted.

• Copyright in the US: In the United States, for something to be protected by copyright, a human being must have created it. This means that things GenAI creates on its own cannot be copyrighted.
• When You Add Your Touch: However, if you take something GenAI creates and then add your own creative changes or expressions to it, your changes can be copyrighted. Many people adjust what GenAI produces, and those human-made changes are likely protected by copyright.

Key Questions

Are you adding copyrighted material into your prompt?

Using other’s work like research papers, magazine articles, and newspaper articles. Publishers often have rules (through their licenses) that prevent you from uploading research papers, magazine articles, and newspaper articles (including those you use for class) to outside services like GenAI tools.

• Safe Use: Feeding self-written practice questions and class notes into NotebookLM to create a study aid.
• Risky Use: Uploading your professor’s past exams, lecture slides, or a classmate’s draft paper to GenAI to summarize class topics