Copyright, Education, and Generative AI: Getting with the programme?

Christof Koolen (Centre for IT & IP Law, KU Leuven) and Guido Noto La Diega (University of Strathclyde)/September 19, 2024 /Leave a comment

Generative AI (GenAI) is promising to revolutionise higher education. Whether it concerns legal scholars using ChatGPT to write their essays, computer science majors relying on GitHub Copilot to generate programming code, or art students turning to Midjourney to create visual artistry: the relevant AI tools to assist with educational assignments are readily available online. The ability for students to complete parts of their curriculum by means of automated tools has caused unease in academic communities in light of the growing inability to properly distinguish between honest student work and AI-generated submissions. Academic integrity and plagiarism issues in this context ultimately also lead us to copyright law. For instance, can students claim AI-generated output as their own intellectual creation? Do students expose themselves to liability for copyright infringement when using GenAI output? This blog post – based on our journal article published in the European Intellectual Property Review – takes a closer look at these questions, while also seeking to address the wider tension that exists between GenAI and copyright.

I.              GenAI at odds with copyright law?

The interplay between copyright law and AI has received a great deal of attention following the surge in popularity of ChatGPT. This increased level of attention is understandable when one considers the inner workings of GenAI applications. For instance, on the topic of training data, AI models are trained by parsing immense textual and visual datasets, which may include copyright-protected works. As a result, these works may be reproduced by AI applications (Figure 1). In 2024, this particular topic attracted significant interest when in the US the New York Times took legal action against Microsoft, claiming that OpenAI’s (unauthorised) use of NYT articles for AI model training constitutes copyright infringement.

Another much-discussed issue is whether AI-generated works meet the threshold of originality to merit copyright protection. A related question then arises as to who would be able to claim ownership of such a work: the person who provided the input prompt, or perhaps the AI tool itself? In any case, a discussion is needed on what it means to be “an author” in the context of AI-generated output (see, for instance, here and here).

Photo: Shantanu Kumar from pexels