- OpenAI plans to offer assistance to customers that are facing copyright lawsuits.
- Sam Altman announced the policy during a keynote speech at OpenAI’s first developer day conference.
- The move is likely aimed at reducing consumer anxiety around unresolved copyright claims.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company would protect customers that were facing copyright lawsuits.
Altman said during a keynote speech at OpenAI’s first developer day conference the company would “defend our customers” by paying “the costs incurred if you face legal claims around copyright infringement.”
In a statement posted to the company’s website, OpenAI clarified the policy was called a “Copyright Shield” and available to ChatGPT Enterprise users, as well as its developer platform.
“OpenAI is committed to protecting our customers with built-in copyright safeguards in our systems,” the statement said.
The move is likely aimed at reducing consumer anxiety sparked by unresolved copyright claims against generative AI systems.
OpenAI is already battling several lawsuits over claims the company used unauthorized copyrighted material in ChatGPT’s training data. This includes one suit from a group of authors that numbers “Game of Thrones” writer George R.R. Martin among them. AI image generators have faced similar legal troubles from artists and stock image library Getty Images.
The US Copyright Office has been scrambling to deal with the new challenge posed by AI-generated content for some time. Recently, the office has been mulling new rules for the models and the work they produce.
Insider’s Kali Hays previously reported that Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI were calling for users of generative AI tools to be held responsible for the results produced.
“In evaluating claims of infringement relating to outputs, the analysis starts with the user,” OpenAI wrote in comments to the US Copyright Office, which were made accessible to the public last week. “After all, there is no output without a prompt from a user, and the nature of the output is directly influenced by what was asked for.”
Google, which owns ChatGPT rival Bard, told the US Copyright Office: “Any resulting liability should attach to the user.”
