Copyright law, AI Prompting and output ownership

Questions of AI authorship and ownership can be divided into two broad types. One concerns the vast troves of human-authored material fed into AI models as part of their “training” (the process by which their algorithms “learn” from data). The other concerns ownership of what AIs produce.

Fully aware that vast data scraping is legally untested—to say the least—developers charged ahead anyway, resigning themselves to litigating the issue in retrospect. Publisher Peter Schoppert has called the training of LLMs without permission the industry’s “original sin”—to be added, we might say, to the technology’s mind-boggling consumption of energy and water on an overheating planet.

A deep look at both the inputs to AI models and their outputs. Covers possible outcomes of copyright laws and implications.

_{Quote Citation: Alexander Hartley, “To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT.”, December 10, 2024, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/to-whom-does-the-world-belong/}