Artificial intelligence has dominated intellectual property news since the public introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot, in November 2022. Now, 2024 starts off with court decisions and procedural rulings that took shape in 2023 in lawsuits that were filed over the collision of creative content with generative AI programs. Most of the complaints allege copyright infringement and related claims prompted by the unlicensed copyright works that AI companies input into their AI programs.

There are many legal questions to answer, including: how the copyrightability of expressive content that includes elements created by AI will be determined; to what legal extent AI programs may be trained via unlicensed copyrighted works; and whether AI companies have a viable “transformative” fair-use defense to infringement claims as well as to what extent the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. v. Goldsmith, 14 S.Ct. 1258 (2023) — which narrowed the transformative use defense — may impact AI companies.