Intellectual Property Issues and Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Courts

The recent explosion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications like ChatGPT and StabilityAI has led to incredible opportunities and incredibly powerful use cases. These tools allow users to provide simple text prompts to an application, which can then produce anything from art to movie scripts to essays to computer programs.

This has also led to critical challenges and threats for artists and creators. For example, when generative AI apps use copyrighted materials of artists and creators as inputs to their learning models, do they owe the copyright holder any compensation? When is the output produced by a generative AI app an infringement?

As the world grapples with this new and complex field, artists, creators, and other businesses have taken to the courts in a first wave of early lawsuits - the resolution of which may provide important guidance as to how our current intellectual property laws do or do not apply in this space.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define generative AI

2. Explore the intellectual property and other legal challenges that the mainstream use of generative AI apps pose

3. Explain how current intellectual property laws, including patent law, copyright law, and trademark law (as well as other regulations) apply in this space

4. Identify what we can learn from the early wave of lawsuits involving generative AI that have been brought under various legal theories