How Generative AI Turns Copyright Law Upside Down

Abstract

While courts are litigating many copyright issues involving generative AI, from who owns AI-generated works to the fair use of training to infringement by AI outputs, the most fundamental changes generative AI will bring to copyright law don’t fit in any of those categories. The new model of creativity, generative AI puts considerable strain on copyright’s two most fundamental legal doctrines: the idea-expression dichotomy and the substantial similarity test for infringement. Increasingly, creativity will be lodged in asking the right questions, not in creating the answers. Asking questions may sometimes be creative, but the AI does the bulk of the work that copyright traditionally exists to reward, and that work will not be protected. That inverts what copyright law now prizes. And because asking the questions will be the basis for copyrightability, similarity of expression in the answers will no longer be of much use in proving the copying of the questions. That means we may need to throw out our test for infringement, or at least apply it in fundamentally different ways.