Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)
Robert Mahari, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jessica Fjeld, Harvard Law School, and Ziv Epstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
(THE CONVERSATION) In 2022, an AI-generated work of art won the Colorado State Fair’s art competition. The artist, Jason Allen, had used Midjourney – a generative AI system trained on art scraped from the internet – to create the piece. The process was far from fully automated: Allen went through some 900 iterations over 80 hours to create and refine his submission.
Yet his use of AI to win the art competition triggered a heated backlash online, with one Twitter user claiming, “We’re watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes.”
As generative AI art tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have been thrust into the limelight, so too have questions about ownership and authorship.
These tools’ generative ability is the result of training them with...