AI battle will be fought on copyright – 06/25/2023 – Ronaldo Lemos

Among the many things that the arrival of artificial intelligence will change, one of the most relevant will be copyright. It will be in this field that much of the regulatory battle will be fought. Copyright could decide, for example, how the benefits of AI can be shared with society as a whole. Or even change the competitiveness of each country with regard to the ability to create AI models.

The fact is that today everything is open, and there are many proposals on the table. It is worth analyzing some. In the US, the current rule is that works created using AI do not generate copyright. An emblematic case is the comic strip called “Zarya of the Dawn” (Zarya da Aurora). The author attempted to register the work with the US Office of Protection. But she was denied registration because the images had been generated by AI. The office accepted to register only the texts and the graphic order of the work. The images of each comic were left without any protection.

A completely different position is being proposed by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor and one of the pioneers of digital law. Lessig argues that AI creations should be copyrighted. And that right should be assigned to the person who generated the work (through instructions and interactions with the AI). However, for the author to receive this right, he would have to register the work in a kind of “public register”, which would make it easier to identify who owns each creation. Lessig’s proposal is bold.

It would trigger a global “gold rush” for the creation of all sorts of AI-created images and content, which would then be recorded. From then on, these images could generate income for those who created them, in the form of licensing. It is a vision that sees AI as a tool of human creativity. Its impact is difficult to predict, but the proposal is provocative.

In Japan, the proposal is different. The country has allowed copyrighted works to be used to train AI tools. This has led some people to call Japan “machine learning heaven”. The country wants to become a leader in this area and has gone to great lengths to authorize the use of any protected work for this purpose.

However, the model I find most intriguing is the proposal to create a new type of copyright applicable to individualized artificial intelligences. In my view, we are approaching the time when each person will be able to have their own AI. A musician, like Drake or Gilberto Gil, would be able to gather his entire life output and turn it into an AI, which would then be copyrighted.

Any creation of works related to that artist must then happen in collaboration with his personal AI. The result of this collaboration would be shared between the original creator and those who used his work. In other words, if Gil had his own AI, his work would be alive and open to collaborations. At the same time, if someone were to co-create with your AI, they would have to share in the benefits resulting from that collaboration.

This approach of having an individualized AI is preferable to having the entirety of a creator’s work simply assimilated into one big model, where it would become just another ghost inside the machine.

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