US Copyright Office Is Taking Steps Toward Rules for Generative AI

The office opened a public comment period, the last step before new rules proposal.

The US Copyright Office is seeking public input on potential regulations for generative AI, specifically regarding how these technologies utilize the creations of authors and creators.

The office is accepting comments until October 18th to gain insights for their ongoing study, which includes tools like Midjourney, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google Bard. This comment period is typically followed by the proposal of new laws. The Office is examining potential regulatory action and exploring the development of new federal regulations due to “widespread public debate about what these systems may mean for the future of creative industries.”

Massive amounts of information and data are scraped and saved by automated web crawlers and many copyrighted works are exploited without recognizing or compensating the creators responsible for the original content by Generative AI tools, including ChatGPT, Bard, and Meta’s Llama 2.

Companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Tumblr, and news outlets like The New York Times and CNN are increasingly blocking web crawlers through the robots.txt tool, which is old and relatively inefficient.

Still, currently, there is almost no way to avoid content being crawled and used to create AI content. At the moment, copyright law does not address the issue.

Source: Business Insider