Hey Reader,

AI is all the rage and for good reason. The technological advances of the last few years have been mind blowing. And now that AI is pretty mainstream, especially in the blogging industry it's time for a potential legal reckoning...

There are tons of lawsuits out there regarding AI, but it comes down to two main issues.

1. If you use AI to create blog posts/images/etc. - is that work protected by copyright?
2. Did AI companies infringe on people's copyright by scraping information to train the technology?

The answer to the second question is still pretty up in the air and there are lots of big companies, artists, and authors duking it out with AI companies in the courts.

But there actually has been some guidance about the first question. It pretty much comes down to "human authorship". But what does that mean? The copyright office has described,

“whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”

Let's talk about some examples.

You give AI some keywords and ask it to write a blog post

If you take the content produced by AI and post it as a blog post as is, it's not going to be protected by copyright. The implication being anyone could copy that blog post from your site and there really wouldn't be much you could do since in the eyes of copyright law - you didn't write it, a machine did.

Does this mean I can't use AI in writing blog posts?

Not necessarily, it just means you can't only use AI, at least not if you want to be able to claim copyright. For example, I like to use AI on some of my sites to spit out a super duper rough draft - the goal is really to get words on a page - to avoid staring down a blank page. I then go through multiple rounds of edits and formatting before I get to the final version. In this case, a lot of the final content is of my own making - I'm using AI as an assistant, so should be protected by copyright.

What about images?

It's about the same if you have an image generated and make significant edits it's possible to have copyright protection.

That being said I think there are going to be a lot more issues with images and how the AI tools train on them. (this looks at the second question above). In my opinion, I think artists are going to have an easier time (than authors) proving infringement by the AI companies and the future of AI image creation will involve licensing deals.

But my concern is this, if an AI company is found to have infringed on a visual artist's copyright, what does that mean for the image you created? Will you be required to remove it? Pay a fee? Who knows?

As usual, the law takes a long time to catch up with technology so only time will tell. But I predict written content created with AI (as an assistant) will continue to grow - though with some added filters to ensure it doesn't produce anything too similar to copyrighted material. But image generation will likely move to a fee-based model to ensure residuals and license fees are covered.

AI is here to stay but it might be time to think about how you're using it and what protections your work will have as a final result.

What do you think about using AI as a blogger? What AI do you like to use? Hit reply and let me know!

Best,

Liz

Please note: Copyright falls under the category of intellectual property law which is a specialized area of law. I am not an intellectual property expert. So please be sure to do your own research if you're not sure about a piece of work you created with AI.