Generative AI could leave users holding the bag for copyright violations

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Anjana Susarla, Michigan State University

(THE CONVERSATION) Generative artificial intelligence has been hailed for its potential to transform creativity, and especially by lowering the barriers to content creation. While the creative potential of generative AI tools has often been highlighted, the popularity of these tools poses questions about intellectual property and copyright protection.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are powered by foundational AI models, or AI models trained on vast quantities of data. Generative AI is trained on billions of pieces of data taken from text or images scraped from the internet.

Generative AI uses very powerful machine learning methods such as deep learning and transfer learning on such vast repositories of data to understand the relationships among those pieces of data – for instance, which words tend to follow other words. This allows generative AI to perform a broad range of tasks that can mimic cognition and reasoning.

One...