ChatGPT ' Is It Already Payback Time?

• Published date: 20 September 2023
• Subject Matter: Intellectual Property, Technology, Copyright, New Technology
• Law Firm: Queritius
• Author: Joanna Iwanicka

Do you also get the impression that with the official launch of ChatGTP in November 2022, the artificial intelligence industry has taken over not only the Internet, but almost every aspect of our daily lives? By crossing another milestone in the field of artificial intelligence, OpenAI has opened Pandora's box and entered uncharted legal territory. Today, as the first wave of excitement has settled, the inevitable reality check is underway, with high-profile legal disputes over copyright protection on the horizon.

But first, for those who still take a dim view of artificial intelligence and new technologies, let's briefly explain how so-called large language models such as ChatGPT work, and why they can be considered contentious from a legal standpoint.

Currently available AI-powered products including OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 2, Meta's Llama 2, and Google's PaLM 2 are model-based chat boxes that primarily allow users to generate human-like responses of the desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language to text input.

These generative AI tools on the surface look pristine, but when you take a closer look, you will easily spot an incomplete picture of how their datasets were developed and trained. A top concern is whether the massive data collection sourced from the publicly available online information was legal. As you can imagine, more and more media organizations and authors are coming to the conclusion that the training of AI models constitutes a serious and notorious infringement of their copyrights due to the unauthorized use of data.

As we all witness a new era of generative AI, together we are also entering a hazy area of law where copyright infringement lawsuits may be just the tip of the iceberg. While for now the outcome of the potential legal action remains unknown, one thing is already clear. A huge wave of legal challenges is coming for companies working on AI-powered products and the only question is who will be the first to decide to challenge the major technology companies and try to set a precedent in this area.

A couple of examples to illustrate where we are now:

• In May, tech giants Samsung and Apple both banned the internal usage of AI chatbots like ChatGPT over concerns of sensitive internal data being outsourced by the models.
• Media giants including Disney...