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Copyright

AI Risk

"According to the U.S. Copyright Office (n.d..), copyright is "a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression" (U.S. Copyright Office, n.d..). Generative AI is designed to generate content based on the input given to it. Some of the contents generated by AI may be others' original works that are protected by copyright...

Overview

A source-backed snapshot of this AI risk.

"According to the U.S. Copyright Office (n.d..), copyright is "a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression" (U.S. Copyright Office, n.d..). Generative AI is designed to generate content based on the input given to it. Some of the contents generated by AI may be others' original works that are protected by copyright laws and regulations. Therefore, users need to be careful and ensure that generative AI has been used in a legal manner such that the content that it generates does not violate copyright (Pavlik, 2023). Another relevant issue is whether generative AI should be given authorship (Sallam, 2023). Murray (2023) discussed generative art linked to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and indicated that according to current U.S. copyright laws, generative art lacks copyrightability because it is generated by a non-human. The issue of AI authorship affects copyright law's underlying assumptions about creativity (Bridy, 2012)."

Techniques0Attack methods connected to this risk.
Mitigations0Defenses that may help with related attacks.
Records2Source records unified into this concept.

Risk profile

How the MIT AI Risk Repository categorizes this risk.

Domain6. Socioeconomic and Environmental
Subdomain6.3 > Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort
Entity1 - Human
Intent1 - Intentional
Timing2 - Post-deployment
CategoryRegulations and policy challenges; Resistance to Misuse
SubcategoryCopyright

Merged risk records

Source records unified into this canonical risk concept.

2 recordsView all →

MITRISK-Nah2023-33.03.01 - Copyright

"According to the U.S. Copyright Office (n.d..), copyright is "a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression" (U.S. Copyright Office, n.d..). Generative AI is designed to generate content based on the input given to it. Some of the contents generated by AI may be others' original works that are protected by copyright laws and regulations. Therefore, users need to be careful and ensure that generative AI has been used in a legal manner such that the content that it generates does not violate copyright (Pavlik, 2023). Another relevant issue is whether generative AI should be given authorship (Sallam, 2023). Murray (2023) discussed generative art linked to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and indicated that according to current U.S. copyright laws, generative art lacks copyrightability because it is generated by a non-human. The issue of AI authorship affects copyright law's underlying assumptions about creativity (Bridy, 2012)."

Domain6. Socioeconomic and EnvironmentalSubdomain6.3 > Economic and cultural devaluation of human effortSourceGenerative AI and ChatGPT: Applications, Challenges, and AI-Human CollaborationYear2023

MITRISK-Liu2024-30.04.04 - Copyright

The memorization effect of LLM on training data can enable users to extract certain copyright-protected content that belongs to the LLM’s training data.

Domain6. Socioeconomic and EnvironmentalSubdomain6.3 > Economic and cultural devaluation of human effortSourceTrustworthy LLMs: a Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' AlignmentYear2024

Mitigations

Defenses that may help with related attacks.

No propagated mitigations. No defense is available through the connected attack methods.

Source evidence

Research source for this risk, when available.