OpenCSCUGenerative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney bring up a lot of copyright questions. This technology is evolving rapidly, as is our understanding of its role in teaching, learning, and researching. Generative AI is the subject of many active lawsuits and significant debate.
The U.S. Copyright Office provides guidance concerning the complex issues raised by AI. A July 2024 report from the office states that existing laws don't provide sufficient protections and proposes the adoption of new laws.
If you want to use AI-generated material:
Creating a useful generative AI tool requires that these tools are "trained" on massive pools of data. All of the existing major AI tools were trained on data that includes massive amounts of copyrighted materials and this training is nearly always done without the permission of the copyright holders in that content. So is this a violation of copyright? This is currently the subject of intense debate and many open lawsuits from authors, artists, and other copyright holders who believe that such training violates their copyrights. Others, including the makers of AI tools, feel that such training activities constitute a transformative fair use and cite such previous cases as Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, Authors Guild v. Google, and A.V. ex rel. Vanderhye v. iParadigms where computer programs used text data mining to create new tools as relevant precedents.