A new bill introduced in the US Congress aims to force artificial intelligence companies to disclose what copyrighted materials they used to train their generative AI models.
The bipartisan bill, introduced earlier this week, would require full transparency from companies ahead of releasing any generative AI product that could potentially reproduce copyrighted works.
This legislative push comes amid growing concerns over the unauthorised use of copyrighted art, literature, music and other creative works to train advanced language models and image generators. Many AI companies have been tight-lipped about what data their systems were exposed to during training.
US Democratic Representative Adam Schiff said “AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives. We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections. My Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act is a pivotal step in this direction. It champions innovation while safeguarding the rights and contributions of creators, ensuring they are aware when their work contributes to AI training datasets. This is about respecting creativity in the age of AI and marrying technological progress with fairness,”
If passed, the new law would mandate AI companies to provide detailed provenance reports listing all copyrighted works their models ingested and replicated, potentially opening them up to copyright infringement lawsuits.
The bill reflects growing legal scrutiny over the copyright implications of AI models trained on broad data sources. Several lawsuits have already been filed by artists and authors alleging their works were used without consent to develop systems like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT.
While proponents argue the legislation is needed to protect creators' rights, critics in the tech industry worry it could stifle AI innovation by forcing companies to be overly cautious about their training data.
The proposed US law represents one of the first major legislative efforts to grapple with the thorny copyright issues raised by generative AI.