Risks Associated with AI-Generated Content

Have you ever wondered who actually owns the rights to content that is partially generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) including various Large Language Models (LLM) or AI image generators? While there is no easy answer, the bottom line is that there is risk involved in publishing AI-generated content.

There are tangential issues that arise from using these tools. For instance, any queries that you use to generate content are public, thus lacking any confidentiality. In New York, a lawyer used ChatGPT to draft a court filing and the cites that ChatGPT included in its research were famously wrong and led to sanctions of the lawyer. Further, the queries and instructions that the lawyer used were now in the public domain. Any data or information that should be kept confidential until the publication date, should avoid being published.

With the recent rapid proliferation of AI tools, ownership of the work product due to AI generators has led to a big question without a definitive answer. Based on similar case law and some insights from the Copyright Office, there are some guardrails to make sure you aren’t generating higher-risk content than you are comfortable with. Currently, the general rule at the Copyright Office is that only works created by a human author can be copyright protected. If you are using AI-generated content, it should only be used as a framework for the final copy. Think of the AI-generated content as the frame of a house but the internal components should be revised independently.

There is much we do not know about AI-generated content ownership. The best-case scenario is to not use these tools and generate all your content independently so as to avoid copyright and confidentiality issues. If you must use these tools, put as much of your own creativity and added work into the final product. In the coming years, some of the questions we have on this topic will be answered by courts, but in the meantime, we can use the guidance we currently have to mitigate risks involved now. ABI