AiGg AMA salon recap pt. 4
The extended AiGg team - along with our wonderful advisors - held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) Salon to address questions from our participants, and it was a wide-ranging conversation.
We’ll cover a little more on environmental impacts and other legal considerations in this fourth recap post.
Thank you to Carrie Giovine, Esq. for opining on legal & Lorax
Q. Carrie, would you like to dig in on where we are from a legal perspective?
A. The last question about the down stream environmental effects…. how do we prevent this right? For a generation that grew up watching The Lorax; and as much as we would love to rally around the optimism, you see the unfettered kind of corporate power that exists today and like, well, how do you make it stop?
'Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.' - The Lorax, Dr. Seuss
And, well. You can pass some laws. If you can all agree on what the laws are, and if you can actually define what the scope of AI is and what you're seeking to regulate.
A patchwork of regulations is coming - someday
California's got some interesting draft legislation underway to try to capture and define the scope of AI and how to manage it responsibly. Whether it's actually going to get across the finish line and when… is it going to be in time? Big question.
But even if you pass a law in California or in the United States it’s not binding on the rest of the world, and so the extent you have this uneven adoption or even different opinions and approaches to how it should be handled. You're gonna have this patchwork for a really, really long time. So if you try to legislate, and it’s ill defined, I think some organizations believe sometimes it's just cheaper to violate the law and pay the fine. And do a mea culpa.
So doesn't really stop somebody from doing anything. Legislation in the short term relies on people coming to this in good faith. Somebody had put a comment in thechat about bad actors… I think bad actors are a problem. I also just think ignorant actors, which is all of us right now are a potential problem.
The legislation right now is challenging. You have a lot of different organizations coming out with their version of how to go about standards that you might adopt or laws that might apply, but they're just isn't a shared view right now globally of what AI legislation is going to look like. And particularly the United States… Congress, during election year, is not governing and actually attending to the nation’s business. So we're going to have to look at states like California and New York so to lead the way.
In the meanwhile, how about copyright protection?
Q. Ron is asking… as creative products become more and more source from AI, a question arises on copyright protection. Traditionally, copyright was granted to the initial creator when AI creates. How will legal ownership be assigned?
A. Copyright law requires that there be a human author. So if you're using AI to create something by itself, you're not getting that copyrighted. If you jointly create something with AI, the part that you can copyright is the part that the human created.
“It's not about what it is, it's about what it can become.” - The Lorax, Dr. Seuss
That begs questions… Let's say I have two images and one was something I created and one isn't. That's really easy to say: OK, I can copyright one, but I can't copyright the other.
What happens when you create text-based content? Now you have to ask yourself, which words did the human contribute? Which words did the AI chatbot contribute? That becomes a little messier, and you know, the Copyright Office is already on record as saying that, you need to have a human author. It's actually written right into the the statute.
And the Patent Office has done the same. So when you go, if you're trying to have some kind of rights and you're want to leverage AI, you really need to follow a set of best practices where you can:
Make sure that you have sufficient human contribution
You can demonstrate what part the human contributed
And there's different ways to do that. We have some best practices up on our website, specifically for creators. Take a look at that and you can always, when you're in a gray area, talk to your IP lawyer so that they can help you.
Navigate that rigrously, especially if it's really important IP. If it's something like a blog post that you don't necessarily care too much about copywriting, maybe you're fine. But if it's branding or packaging or something like that, you're going to want to make sure that you know you've got some sufficient human input there to support your copyright.
Question from Steve to follow on on that. Steve says if two people write the same prompt and produce similar works using those prompts, who owns the work?
A. I'm sure that the courts will be happy to decide that for you. A lot of these things are gonna be facts and circumstances in the area of copyright, it becomes a question of degree and if you've got two similar prompts and then the AI puts something out. You may own the prompt. But if the AI generates it, there's no human right.
That was kind of the argument in the original case that the PTO looked at was that. A scientist had had a computer create something and he said, well, I'm the one that directed the computer. So therefore anything that the computer output should be mine and the USPTO said no, you actually need a human doing the creating.
“I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” - The Lorax, Dr. Seuss
So if AI puts something out for you and then you modify it, hopefully you each come up with something a little bit different.
If you both came up with the same thing, then you better register it. You know, first to register is probably gonna have better rights and in really messy cases, you're in for a nice long, expensive court battle.
To connect with Carrie and learn more, ping us here!
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