(Reuters) – Google announced on Thursday that it will provide legal protection for users of generative artificial-intelligence (AI) systems on its Google Cloud and Workspace platforms if they are accused of intellectual property violations. This move comes in line with similar pledges made by Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies.
Technology giants like Google have been heavily investing in generative AI and striving to integrate it into their products. However, numerous writers, illustrators, and copyright owners have filed lawsuits, claiming that both the use of their work to train AI systems and the content generated by these systems infringe upon their rights.
A spokesperson for Google stated, “To our knowledge, Google is the first in the industry to offer a comprehensive, two-pronged approach to indemnity,” covering both types of claims.
Google’s new policy applies to software, including its Vertex AI development platform and Duet AI system, which generates text and images in Google Workspace and Cloud programs. Notably, the press release did not mention Google’s popular generative AI chatbot program, Bard.
However, Google clarified that the indemnity does not apply if users “intentionally create or use generated output to infringe the rights of others.”
It is important to note that the recent surge in lawsuits regarding generative AI has primarily targeted companies that own these systems, such as Google, rather than individual end users.
AI defendants have argued that the use of training data scraped from the internet to train their systems falls under fair use, as per U.S. copyright law.
Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by David Bario and Aurora Ellis
Credit: The Star : Tech Feed
