Copyright: AI and Copyright

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Waymo), generative or creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art), automated decision-making, and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as Chess and Go). 

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is a creative tool that will form written, visual or video content, often in response to written prompts. Popular GenAI tools include ChatGPT, Google Gemini (formerly Google Bard) and Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bingchat) for written content, and Midjourney and DALL-E for image generation. 

What are the Copyright Issues with GenAI?

Copyright breaches

Open GenAI tools scrape the internet and may be trained on data that is licensed (online library resources) or copyrighted – and the concern is that they often do this without permission, acknowledgement or compensation to the creators and copyright owners of the material used. 

While there is no clear legislation around GenAI training data yet, good academic practice would be to check how the model you are using is trained. You also cannot rely on GenAI producing original work. It can produce work that is copied and is therefore plagiarised.

Use of GenAI and online library resources

The library has agreed to the following 'terms and conditions of use' for most of our e-resources. Therefore when you use our online library resources (databases, ebook collections, online journals, standards etc.) you may not:

• abridge, modify, translate, or create any derivative work and / or service (including resulting from the use of artificial intelligence tools), based on the library e-resources, except to the extent necessary to make them perceptible on a computer screen; 
• use any robots, spiders, crawlers or other automated downloading programs, tools, or devices, to search, scrape, extract, deep link, index and/or disrupt the working of the library e-resources; or, 
• use the library e-resources in combination with an artificial intelligence tool (including to train an algorithm, test, process, analyze, generate output, and/or develop any form of artificial intelligence tool).