This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Pamela Samuelson, professor of Law and Information at UC Berkeley, discusses whether computer-generated texts and images fall under the copyright law. She says that early on, the consensus was that AI was just a tool, like a camera, so humans could claim copyright in machine-generated outputs to which they made contributions. Now the consensus is that AI-generated texts and images are not copyrightable for the lack of a human author. The urgent questions today focus on whether ingesting in-copyright works as training data is copyright infringement and whether the outputs of AI programs are infringing derivative works of the ingested images. Four recent lawsuits, one involving GitHub’s Copilot and three involving Stable Diffusion, will address these issues.

Samuelson has been a member of the UC Berkeley School of Law faculty since 1996. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a contributing editor of Communications of the ACM, a past fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a member of the American Law Institute, and an honorary professor of the University of Amsterdam. Series: "Data Science Channel" [Science] [Business] [Show ID: 38859]