World Wild West: Intellectual Property Challenges with Generative AI

While certain forms of artificial intelligence (AI) have been integrated into daily life for years now, the use of generative AI has seen a sharp rise in popularity and adoption in the past year. Products such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat, or Bard now give virtually anyone with access to the internet a free tool that can almost instantly generate text and images in response to a prompt. Yet the widespread use of this technology has created a slew of intellectual property concerns. These include disputes over the uncompensated and often unsanctioned use of copyrighted materials by developers in the data sets that train their models, the challenge of patenting work created by AI, and questions over who is entitled to compensation in such cases.