Beyond Copyright: Tailoring Responses to Generative AI & The Future of Creativity

Betsy Masiello and Derek Slater are the founding partners of Proteus Strategies, a boutique tech policy strategy and advocacy firm.  Catherine Breslin / Better Images of AI / Silicon Closeup / CC-BY 4.0 In less than a year, generative AI has transformed notions of what computers might be capable of. Now, we’re in the midst of a heated debate about what role computation will play in the future of art and the creative industries. There is already a lengthy docket of litigation aimed at generative AI companies, and most of these cases are focused on stopping the training of generative AI on copyrighted works without a license. No doubt, the training of generative AI can implicate copyright, and it’s an important locus of policy debate. Indeed, even at this initial stage of technology development and litigation, copyright is being exhaustively debated. We don’t focus on that in this article. Many scholars, developers, and others have elaborated on why copyright should permit training of generative AI on copyrighted works without a license, and have responded to common misconceptions about copyright – such as the notion that copying, or making use of, a copyrighted work without permission is per se infringement. We find these proponents’ arguments to be quite compelling, but we acknowledge that others view the matter differently, and one cannot make a fully categorical argument about how existing law applies in all cases (even if one just focuses on a single jurisdiction). In any case, while we link to those arguments…Beyond Copyright: Tailoring Responses to Generative AI & The Future of Creativity