Copyright

South Africa may need to review its Copyright Act to cater for emerging technologies such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

There are two aspects of concern regarding AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Copyright

1. Who is the creator of the AI

2. During the generating of text by a SI service like ChatGtP what about the copyrighted text inadvertly used by ChatGtp to create the content

Generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT are powered by foundational AI models, or AI models trained on vast quantities of data. Generative AI is trained on billions of pieces of data taken from text or images scraped from the internet.

One problem is that output from an AI tool can be very similar to copyright-protected materials. Leaving aside how generative models are trained, the challenge that widespread use of generative AI poses is how individuals and companies could be held liable when generative AI outputs infringe on copyright protections.

WHEN PROMPTS RESULT IN COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS

Researchers and journalists have raised the possibility that through selective prompting strategies, people can end up creating text, images, or video that violates copyright law. Typically, generative-AI tools output an image, text, or video but do not provide any warning about potential infringement. This raises the question of how to ensure that users of generative-AI tools do not unknowingly end up infringing copyright protection.

Nelson Mandela University subscribes to Turnitin as a plugin for Learn (Moodle), a learning management system. 

Turnitin is a similarity and plagiarism detection tool. Turnitin’s AI writing detection helps educators, publishers, and researchers identify when AI writing tools such as ChatGPT may have been used in submitted work. Gain insights on how much of a student’s submission is authentic, human writing versus AI-generated from ChatGPT or other tools.

In South Africa, the copyright amendment bill of 2017 does not explicitly address the generation of artworks by means of AI but, in terms of our extant Copyright Act of 1978, the term “author” is defined in a way that includes creators of “computer-generated works”

AI generated content has no human author but the Copyright Act dictates that the “author” of a computer-generated work is the person responsible for making the arrangements for the creation of the work.

The meaning of “making the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work” is not entirely clear and it is likely here that the debate will arise.