UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) conducted a webinar on the intersection of generative AI and intellectual property on May 25. One of the topics discussed at the event was how judges and courts can address the legal challenges posed by AI. Thomas Margoni, Research Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the Faculty of Law and Criminology, KU Leuven University in Belgium, headed this discussion with inputs from copyright activist Neil Turkewitz. Why it matters: The legal issues arising from AI have recently been garnering a lot of attention. Cases such as the one filed by artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz against Stability AI, Deviant Art, and Midjourney (claiming that their AI tools have infringed upon the works of thousands of artists) shed light on how generative AI can eat away at the intellectual property of human creators. Besides this, there are other legal problems that AI is causing, with a lawyer recently using ChatGPT to create a court brief only for it to contain fake cases. UNESCO’s discussion on the legal challenges of generative AI can serve as a framework to understand how judges should approach these issues. Which laws do AI-centric cases fall under: Margoni says that there are elements of technical and technological complexity in deciding which data comes under IP and which doesn't. “Judges, of course, will not be asked necessarily to understand that level of complexity. But certainly, familiarizing [themselves] to a certain degree with the processes of learning that machine learning and…
