AI, intellectual property and regulation

The recent interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and the wide availability of AI tools to the general public means that law makers around the world are struggling to keep up. At the moment, it is unclear how certain laws apply to AI. This includes laws around employment and hiring, intellectual property and copyright, and even driving!

Intellectual property and copyright

One key area which is already causing controversy and discussion online is intellectual property. Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, symbols, names, and images used in commerce. Intellectual property is protected through legal mechanisms, granting the creator or owner exclusive rights to use, reproduce, and distribute their creations for a certain period. 

When you create something, whether that is writing some code, drawing a picture or taking a photograph, you have ownership over that creation. That creation is your intellectual property, and this also applies to things like new inventions or new ideas which you come up with.

Think for a moment about an AI image generator. These tools such as HotPot’s AI Art Generator or DALL-E are able to take prompts from the user and create art. Like large language models, these tools are trained on large amounts of data, and re-use parts of that data to create their art. Because many companies are very secretive about where their training data comes from, many people believe that copyrighted images are being used to train these AI models. If AI models then re-use parts of their art to generate images for users, these images are the intellectual property of the people who made the original works, and not the person generating the image.

It is likely that in future, companies which are training AI art generators will need to reimburse the people whose art has been used to train them, and will need to give people the option to opt out of having their art used.

Reflect

Thinking back to the exercise where you asked your AI tool to generate some song lyrics, who do you think ‘owns’ that ‘song’?

Regulating AI

In the UK, the government is still developing its strategy for how AI will be regulated. They recently published a government white paper (a proposal for new laws) which looks at some of the key areas of regulation, and how this might happen in future.

Some of the key things which you can expect to see in future are:

• It may be required to specify if text, images or code have been generated using AI tools in future.
• AI models which are used in decision-making will need to be transparent about how decisions were reached. This will allow people to understand exactly what data is being used, and to recognise where this might be biased.
• People will be able to appeal decisions made by AI models when they feel that these are discriminatory or incorrect.

AI is such a fast-moving, dynamic area that we may see completely different laws and regulations depending on what the next innovations in AI are, so these might change completely as the next amazing new AI tools appears.

Next step

Now it’s time to take a short quiz on the topics you have learned in this activity.