Artificial intelligence and its intellectual property

• Among other situations, generative artificial intelligence is carrying out massive and automated plagiarism
• Legally, how do we manage intellectual property in this technological field?

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is part of our daily lives and offers us many future possibilities, but intellectual property must be taken into account.

The sources of artificial intelligence (AI)

We know that ChatGPT It has been trained using and exploiting digital publications from the media. For their part, many artists and content creators have raised their voices to denounce that generative AIs are carrying out massive and automated plagiarism.

In addition, copyrighted images have been used for training. Legally, how do we manage intellectual property in this technological field?

Lawsuits

With this situation, the demands have begun to arrive. Over the last few months, international media have reported on the filing of legal actions against several artificial intelligence companies for violating intellectual property rights in the training of their systems.

The lawsuits contemplate violations of both copyright and image rights, unfair competition and breach of contract. From the point of view of copyright, they are charged with infringements due to direct violation of the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public communication and transformation.

Products generated by AI

Apart from the works used to train algorithms, artificial intelligence generates products, whether texts, images or videos. And in these cases, who can register their authorship? This is the second legal obstacle that will have to be resolved.

In Spain, the doctrine follows the resolution of the European Parliament on October 20, 2020 "on intellectual property rights for the development of technologies related to artificial intelligence" which, in point 15, recognizes that said intellectual property rights They apply to people:

[…] “considers that works produced autonomously by artificial agents and robots should not be eligible for copyright protection, in order to respect the principle of originality, which is linked to a natural person, and since the "The concept of 'intellectual creation' entails the personality of the author."

In summary, if the work has been created by software it cannot be registered in an intellectual property registry, but it is different if the artist uses software or other electronic means as a tool.

Assisted or generated work?

There is an underlying issue: not all artists or creators reject generative AI. In fact, many use them as new creative assistants or complements, which would maintain the author's creativity and he would be the one to give the instructions or prompts to AI.

And for those cases we use the concept “human creations assisted by AI”, as opposed to “creations generated by AI”.