What you need to know about copyright issues surrounding generative AI

"Over the past several months, platforms like ChatGPT, Dall-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have been making waves within the world of advertising for their ability to quickly and competently produce content from text-based user inputs. Some marketers have hailed generative AI as a complete paradigm shift. And at the most recent Cannes Lions festival - the ad industry's biggest annual event - the tech was the undisputed center of attention."

"Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's LaMDA, for example, were trained from huge volumes of text culled from the internet. Through techniques like natural language processing and reinforcement learning, LLMs gradually develop the capability to mimic the information that's fed to them in a training dataset by producing 'original' text which convincingly appears as though it could've been composed by a human being (even if that text occasionally deviates from the truth)."

"But generative AI has a glaring problem - one that's becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to ignore: it's opening up a messy and dangerous web of copyright concerns. The problem with training LLMs Rather than being programmed like traditional computer software, generative AI models are trained using an enormous quantity of data. As generative AI becomes increasingly powerful and accessible, a growing number of voices are rising in protest to what they view as the technology's flagrant disregard for copyright law."

Generative AI tools have rapidly entered marketing, enabling fast content creation from text prompts and drawing strong industry interest. Large language models and image generators learn from enormous datasets scraped from the internet, using NLP and reinforcement learning to produce humanlike outputs. That training approach can reproduce or closely mirror copyrighted works, provoking allegations of plagiarism from artists and creators. Growing public opposition has emphasized potential legal exposure. Two lawsuits were filed in June on behalf of five authors alleging infringement, signaling escalating legal conflict between generative AI deployment and existing copyright law.

Read at The Drum