Copyright: AI and Copyright

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 or visual content. The content is generated when the user gives the tool written prompts. Popular GenAI include ChatGPT, Google Bard and Bingchat for written content, and Midjourney and DALL-E for image generation.

These open GenAI models scrape the internet to access and use all sorts of data – and the concern for copyright owners is that they often do this without permission, acknowledgement or compensation to the creators and copyright owners of the material used. It's therefore important to understand that the use of copyright works as inputs to GenAI models without authorisation or remuneration to creators and publishers can result in infringement.

Restrictions on use of AI and electronic library resources

The library has agreed to the following 'terms and conditions of use' of our e-resources. Therefore when you use our electronic library resources (databases, ebook collections, 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).