Copyright infringement

International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI

Bengio et al. (2024)

Source

Sub-category

Risk Domain

6Socioeconomic & Environmental

6.3Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort

AI systems capable of creating economic or cultural value, including through reproduction of human innovation or creativity (e.g., art, music, writing, coding, invention), destabilizing economic and social systems that rely on human effort. The ubiquity of AI-generated content may lead to reduced appreciation for human skills, disruption of creative and knowledge-based industries, and homogenization of cultural experiences.

"The use of large amounts of copyrighted data for training general- purpose AI models poses a challenge to traditional intellectual property laws, and to systems of consent, compensation, and control over data. The use of copyrighted data at scale by organisations developing general- purpose AI is likely to alter incentives around creative expression."(p. 62)

Entity— Who or what caused the harm

Human

Due to a decision or action made by humans

AI system

Due to a decision or action made by an AI system

Other

Due to some other reason or is ambiguous

Intent— Whether the harm was intentional or accidental

Intentional

Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal

Unintentional

Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal

Other

Without clearly specifying the intentionality

Timing— Whether the risk is pre- or post-deployment

Pre-deployment

Occurring before the AI is deployed

Post-deployment

Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed

Other

Without a clearly specified time of occurrence

Supporting Evidence (2)

"General- purpose AI models are usually trained on large data sets sourced online, giving rise to concerns over breaches of copyright, lack of creator compensation, and the potential for economic disruption. Copyright laws aim to protect intellectual property and encourage written and creative expression (600, 601). They grant the creators of original works the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, and perform their own work. However, the third- party use of copyrighted data as training data may be legally permissible in certain circumstances, for instance on the basis of the ‘fair use’ exception in the US (602), by the ‘text and data mining’ exception in the EU (603), by the amended Copyright Act in Japan (604), under Israeli copyright law (605), and by the Copyright Act 2021 in Singapore (606). Beyond copyright, artists and other individuals sometimes feel their style, voice, and likeness are not sufficiently protected, which may implicate other forms of intellectual property such as trademarks and brands."(p. 62)

"Recent advances in general- purpose AI capabilities have largely resulted from large- scale web scraping and aggregation of data to train general- purpose AI models (607, 608), often containing copyrighted works, or used without consent from the data’s creators. This applies to creative works including text, images, videos, and speech, and other modalities that are increasingly used to develop general- purpose AI models."(p. 62)