Last year, an artificial intelligence engineer at Google caused a massive stir when he claimed that an AI chatbot he was experimenting with was “sentient.” (See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient-why-that-matters/). While AI tech has not yet brought us sentient artificial intelligence, i.e., AI that is not just following a programmed algorithm, AI chatbots that have come into wide use in the past months, like ChatGPT, have caused a massive stir in their own right, demonstrating that sentience is not required for AI technology to be massively disruptive and to raise a host of complex social, business and legal questions.

The current AI implementations follow steps and algorithms programmed by humans. (See //www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USPTO_AI-Report_2020-10-05.pdf at ii) ( In a USPTO survey, the “majority viewed the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—intelligence akin to that possessed by humankind and beyond—as merely a theoretical possibility that could arise in a distant future.”) When the AI is tasked to create something, whether that is a piece of art, an essay, a legal brief, a song, a screenplay, or a piece of software code, it needs to look at other material for a starting point, i.e., “inspiration” for what it is creating, so to speak. This raises interesting legal issues when such source material, often called training materials, is copyrighted or trademarked. If the source material is not copied exactly, can the AI be considered a copier or can it escape infringement because what it creates is a transformative independent development? Following very closely in time to the release of virally popular generative AI apps, we are now seeing a first wave of lawsuits that have been filed to test these very questions.

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