Known Unknowns: Key Unanswered Copyright Questions Raised By Generative AI

The generative AI revolution has arrived. Will copyright law snuff it out?

Despite all the excitement surrounding generative AI tools, a cloud darkens the horizon. These tools need to be trained on massive amounts of ingested content and, according to press reports, this content is often scraped without authorization from third-party websites, raising significant copyright law issues.

Indeed, a number of copyright infringement actions have already been filed against AI tool developers. In January, for example, three artists who claim their works were scraped from the Internet and used to train Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DreamUp filed a class action against the three image generation tools. The lawsuit alleges that a generative AI tool is "merely a complex collage tool" and that every output generated by such a tool is an unauthorized derivative work of the materials used to train the tool.