He-sAId-she-sAId: The Emerging World Of AI Disputes

• Published date: 04 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration, Technology, Libel & Defamation, New Technology
• Law Firm: AlixPartners
• Author: Tim Roberts, David Waterfield and Denisa Maxim

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a hot topic in boardrooms, universities, governmental offices, and the media. Companies are racing to adopt AI technologies to improve their business processes, reduce costs, address labour shortages, upskill personnel, address ESG-related concerns, to name but a few examples. Generative AI (GenAI) tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, which can create various types of data (text, images, and other media), have been garnering a lot of media attention recently, reigniting the debate around AI. While it is clear that AI technology has many potential applications, the true depth of the transformation and the risks it brings to our society are yet to be fully comprehended.

The response from policymakers, so far, has been somewhat disparate. Some policymakers are responding to the perceived risks by revising and proposing new legislation, such as the European Union's AI Act, which is still in draft. In the UK, the Prime Minister's office recently announced that the country will host the first global summit on AI safety this autumn, on the premise that the UK has a "global duty to ensure this technology is developed and adopted safely and responsibly."

In this article we will explore ways in which some applications of AI technology bring risks in relation to intellectual property protections, defamation, and transparency and biases, and how these risks have sometimes crystalised into legal disputes.

AI: the inventor, creator, and author?

AI technology can now be used to create new artwork, write articles, review literature, produce interior designs, and much more. While in some cases the results are still not as advanced as desired, it foretells a world where AI applications might augment, or even replace, the contributions humans bring to the world of art, literature, design and more.

At present, some of the services AI technology provides create concerns around ownership, sources of inspiration, equitable distribution of rights and rewards, and protection of intellectual property (IP). In some recent cases, the source of a dispute is the access and use of copyrighted work that was used as training datasets for AI models. For example, Getty Images has accused Stability AI Inc of copying millions of its photos without a license, to train its AI art tool Stable Diffusion. According to Getty, this infringes its copyrights, violates its terms of service, and affects competition, which includes impacts...