ChatGPT: Leading the law in Copyright Infringement, Labour Theft, Restrictive AI Practices and Regulatory Legislative Amendments.
ChatGPT is the topic of the month, with many professing its genius. Today we will delve into the intellectual property concerns surrounding the simulated AI content creator that could land you and your business into some hot water.
Disclaimer this article has personal bias throughout and should not be received as individual legal advice.
Stereotypical Hysteria
Many across the newsfeeds of social medias including LinkedIn are proclaiming from the rooftops ‘this is the new google.’ Those quick to the front always make me wonder what they're trying to make up for, were they naysayers when the internet first launched, now wishing to redeem themselves?
The first to buy bitcoin, the first to buy NFT, the first to buy into Meta, is it all conceived from a sheer desperation to be at the forefront of something? So desperate they dive into the water without research? The ones posting rash, bold statements as if it made them the Neil Armstrong of tech.
Those bold statements become headlines, and those headlines become the beliefs of people who don’t care for context or source credibility, consequence or ethical boundaries.
I digress from my main thesis because here I find this minority to be fundamentally detached from the consequences of continual AI development. Specifically its possibility for negative human disruption on our lower socioeconomic members in our communities.
AI is rife with consequences and ethical issues that will affect its main cause for existence; you. ChatGPT relies on your content. Your intellectual property. Almost anything you contribute to the internet, AI learns from. Without our content, ChatGPT wouldn’t exist and since I am no humanitarian lawyer I’m going to get back to discussing this topic from the perspective of my specialty.
The Basics: What is Copyright Law
Copyright is the exclusive and automatic right of any creator of expressive work whether via computer programming, art, literature or music and more. This does not require registration but is rather an automated privilege upon public access and/or publication.
Copyright controls the distribution, display, and copying of the original work; not ideas. Copyright infringement is when such work is copied without permission, simple enough.
On a technicality, if someone describes a brilliant idea in an article, you could re-write that idea in your own article and copyright it. This is because the idea isn’t copyrighted, only the expression of the idea is.
That is why the chance of copyright infringement within ChatGPT is a seemingly small one.
ChatGPT and Labour Theft
Although copyright infringement would be a hard case to argue, there is no denying that ChatGPT is exploiting your content as free labour. As it learns how to articulate vast subjects it also learns how to articulate a subject in the style of well-published writers.
All of this knowledge creates a smoothie of literature for someone (anyone) to poach and paste with only a 1-5% rate of plagiarism on ‘turnitin.’
With all of this clever advancement you would think at least a source reference wouldn’t be too big of an ask, right?
Alas, it’s not just university students who leave their referencing until the very end. It seems ChatGPT don’t even put one in at all.
With all of this traffic generated via ChatGPT content, where is the compensation for those of us providing its education? Or is our compensation simply the honour of accessing it (when the traffic permits)?
What if I don’t want AI to use my content?
By example, Elon Musk has already blocked IP traffic and API access to prevent AI mechanisms from exploiting the content available on twitter (and if you know much about Elon and ChatGPT this is quite interesting).
AI companies provide opt-out clauses which I would recommend looking into if you are a content creator, blogger, podcaster and so fourth.
International Responses to ChatGPT
You know the equation for adductive reasoning, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck? Recently I've had to use this with the Chinese government.
It's no secret that China and intellectual property law don't have the best relationship. I had to learn Chinese characters in postgrad just to ensure all bases of international registrations were covered.
China usually don't prescribe to the laws here in Australia, or the EU; they don’t join in on our treaties either. It tends to make the lives of Aussie IP attorneys a little more complicated.
For years as an analogy, I've seen China as a dragon. However in this topic, China is presenting as an ethically-motivated, analytical and cautious quacking duck. China has pulled out all of the stops for watermarking, referencing and credit sourcing for these new AI resources. They’ve even ensured that all operations utilising this form of AI be regulated as of January 10th.
China are behaving in stark contrast to the U.S. free for all we see happening which I really, really like. Maybe if it weren’t western proprietary we would all be behaving a little more cautiously too.
Terms of Use
One of the main features of ChatGPT is its ability to never give two users identical answers. With this considered, whilst we wait for legislation to catch up, my overarching response to friends looking to use ChatGPT as a content creation tool is this;
Re-write the given outputs as much as possible,
Do not reference existing authors within your initial requests,
Publish ChatGPT content with a disclosure statement informing your audience that this article was generated with the use of AI.
P.S. This article was written by AI (just kidding).
Comments