{"id":368897,"date":"2023-01-20T10:52:08","date_gmt":"2023-01-20T15:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ability-fl-prod.internetbrands.com\/ability-law\/litigation\/filing-a-lawsuit\/can-i-sue-an-artificial-intelligence-company-for-ai-copyright-vi.html"},"modified":"2023-12-26T10:24:13","modified_gmt":"2023-12-26T15:24:13","slug":"can-i-sue-an-artificial-intelligence-company-for-ai-copyright-vi","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.findlaw.com\/litigation\/filing-a-lawsuit\/can-i-sue-an-artificial-intelligence-company-for-ai-copyright-vi.html","title":{"rendered":"Can I Sue an Artificial Intelligence Company for AI Copyright Violations?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n \n
\n

Can I Sue an Artificial Intelligence Company for AI Copyright Violations?<\/h1>\n
\n
\n By Steven Ellison, Esq.<\/a> | Legally reviewed by Joseph Fawbush, Esq.<\/a>\n | Last updated\n
\n \n <\/i>\n Legally Reviewed\n <\/summary>\n\n
\n

This article has been written and reviewed for legal accuracy, clarity, and style by FindLaw\u2019s team of legal writers and attorneys<\/a> and in accordance with our editorial standards<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/details>\n\n

\n \n <\/i>\n Fact-Checked\n <\/summary>\n\n
\n

The last updated date refers to the last time this article was reviewed by FindLaw or one of our contributing authors<\/a>. We make every effort to keep our articles updated. For information regarding a specific legal issue affecting you, please contact an attorney in your area<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/details>\n<\/section>\n

\n
\n
\n

Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n

You may be able to sue an AI company for copyright infringement if it used your protected work to train its model without permission. Copyright law gives you the exclusive right to control how your work is used, including the creation of derivative works. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright gives you the power to decide the terms under which your work may be reproduced. Unless you grant the AI company permission to use your work for this purpose, you may have a copyright infringement claim (among other claims) against the AI company under federal law.<\/p>\n

The landscape between generative AI and copyright law is a new area of the law. If you’re concerned about the prospect of your work being used to help others generate imitations, you may want to consult an experienced intellectual property and copyright attorney<\/a>. A skilled attorney can help you decide whether you have a valid lawsuit. They can also start the court process with a letter to the AI company demanding that they respect your copyright.<\/p>\n

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?<\/h2>\n

There is nothing new about people wanting to create something that can think for itself. For example, in Frankenstein<\/i>, Mary Shelley wrote about a creature composed of human parts that learns to think and feel. Now, we have machines that are close to thinking and feeling for us. We call this artificial intelligence or AI.<\/p>\n

The birth of artificial intelligence, as we think of it today, stems back to 1950. That year, Alan Turing, the father of computers whose story is told in the award-winning The Imitation Game<\/i>, posed the question<\/a> directly: \u201cCan machines think?" Scientists have since spent decades developing software programs that can do things, with varying degrees of success, that historically have required human intelligence to do.<\/p>\n

Current AI Models<\/h2>\n

The technology is developing rapidly, but so far, AI can do some amazing things through machine learning. For example, OpenAI, in partnership with Microsoft and its subsidiary GitHub, developed a system called Copilot that generates open-source code. OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 can generate AI art from text that looks like masterpieces. Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are two other popular text-to-image AI art tools. And DoNotPay<\/a> has announced the world’s first \u201crobot lawyer."<\/p>\n

AI systems must be trained to function. AI programmers use a body of materials called a \u201ccorpus" that is processed by the AI and used to generate its future output. At the risk of oversimplifying, an AI model is only as good as the breadth of its corpus. The more it \u201cstudies," the more it can do, and the more human it seems to be.<\/p>\n

The Role of ChatGPT<\/h2>\n

One AI model that has taken the public by storm is ChatGPT, another OpenAI creation. Released on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT (GPT stands for \u201cgenerative pre-trained transformer") is a large language model that can be used for natural language processing tasks, such as writing articles, essays, books, and even poetry. The architecture was developed by an OpenAI team of researchers led by Rewon Child, David Luan, Alec Radford, and Jeffrey Wu.<\/p>\n

One of the key features of the ChatGPT architecture is its ability to learn from large datasets. OpenAI claims that the model has been trained on a \u201cmassive" amount of data. Although they have not publicly released the amount of data, what it is, or where it came from, OpenAI believes it to be \u201cin the range of hundreds of billions of words.<\/a>"<\/p>\n

AI raises a concern for anyone who creates, writes, draws, drafts, paints, programs, or codes for a living. What if an AI company is using your work to train its AI model? They didn’t ask permission, they won’t give you credit, and they certainly didn’t pay you for it.<\/p>\n

What if AI Rewrites Your Story? Potential Copyright Issues<\/h2>\n

Let’s say you’re a professional fiction writer. After years of supporting yourself as a barista in a local coffee shop, you come up with an idea for a new fantasy series. Your first book, Isilmir’s Hammer<\/i>, was a New York Times Best Seller and won you a Hugo award.<\/p>\n

Your second and third books, Isilmir’s Bane<\/i> and Kalabar’s Doom<\/i>, were even more successful. You have been approached by Hollywood about drafting a screenplay. <\/p>\n

Unbeknownst to you, WriteAI, the developers of an AI natural language generation model of the same name, used your books as part of their enormous training corpus. They decide to make WriteAI available for free.<\/p>\n

Benedict Arnold, a 12-year-old kid from Nebraska who loved your series so much that he named his dog \u201cIsilmir," decides to make his own fan fiction based on your style. So, he creates a WriteAI account and tells it to produce a fantasy novel in your style about a dwarven lord, Kerilbow. A few minutes later, WriteAI spits out a roller coaster of an epic. Benedict calls it Kerilbow’s Threat<\/i>, uses Midjourney (an image generator) to create cover art, and self-publishes the story on Amazon.<\/p>\n

What took you years to make takes him all of 40 minutes. You’re not even mentioned in the acknowledgments. WriteAI is so good that the story reads just like you wrote it. \u201cThis can’t be right," you think. Well, in the eyes of the law, it isn’t.<\/p>\n

Copyright Law and AI<\/h2>\n

Since the 1790s, federal copyright law<\/a> has protected original works of authorship fixed in a tangible form. A copyright gives the holder exclusive rights, including the right to:<\/p>\n