Seven legal issues created by Gen AI

Generative AI (Gen AI) is a form of artificial intelligence that has the capability to create different kinds of content, such as text, images, audio, and synthetic data based on the data they have been trained on. Chat GPT, Google Bard, Perplexity AI, Jasper AI, Copy. AI, Midjourney, Copilot and Firefly are a few examples of Gen AI. Gen AI relies on machine learning, and the tools associated with it are trained on vast amounts of data, frequently encompassing billions of pages of text or images. Depending on the methodology employed by the AI tool developer, the training datasets may include freely accessible and unencumbered information (pure data), protected materials (such as copyrighted works), or a combination of both. Gen AI is in a vast growing Phase across all over the world. In the vast growing phase current legal mechanisms are unable to regulate the content generated by Gen AI. 

Legal issues

Gen AI has raises many legal challenges and issues some of them are as follows:

First legal issue is that Gen AI creates its contents, writing and its information from various resources available on the internet but it does not provide appropriate citation, source or authority that breaks many laws related to copyright, IP, etc.

Second legal issue is about copyright. Section 3(2) of The Copyright Act, 2059 (2002) states that “any translation, arrangement, sequential arrangement of work or collection of works presented as original from viewpoint of presentation, collection or expression, data or database readable with or without support of machine, any proverb, folktale, folk song falling under folk expression or any other derivative works based on folk expression shall be protected as original work, without prejudice to the copyright of the original work.” Section 2(b) of the same act mentions that ‘Author’ means a person who creates a work and section (h) defines that ‘Copyright owner’ means the author of a work in cases where the economic right of that work is vested in that author, a person or organization in cases where the economic right of the work is primarily vested in the person or organization other than the author, and a person or organization, in cases where the economic right of the work is transferred to that person or organization. So, what about the work, authorship and copyright ownership of Gen AI. Gen AI is pushing copyright into a state of crisis. Last year, over a dozen copyright lawsuits related to AI were filed in the United States, significantly increasing compared to the total number of filings from 2020 to 2022.

Third legal issue is about The Patent, Design and Trade Mark. We have no clear laws whether new content generated by AI tools such as patent, design or trademark works, can be protected by IP rights, and if so, who owns those rights. Section 3(1) of the Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act, 2022 (1965) states that “A person desirous of obtaining right over any patent shall register such patent in his/her name under this Act.” Further, section 6 (1) (b) of the same act mentioned that in the circumstance where the applicant him/herself is not the inventor of the patent sought to be so registered nor has acquired rights over it from the original inventor such patent cannot be registered. Gen AI has no personality. So, how should it be regulated?  These are not generated or created by the human mind. 

Fourth legal issue is about expertise and professionalism. In many issues such as medical counseling, legal counseling and other work there needs expertise and professionals for these works but in the case of AI it is very difficult to establish professionalism and expertise. How can current legal mechanisms address these? 

Fifth legal issue is about the privacy and confidentiality of a person. In context of Nepal Article 28 of Constitution of Nepal provides Right to privacy, Individual Privacy Act 2018, National Criminal codes 2074, Act Relating to Children, 2075 and other prevailing laws regulates the data protection about individual privacy. These are applicable to persons What about the breach of these rights and laws by Gen AI as It has remarkable power and capacity of reading data from millions of websites including confidential websites also.  One of the remarkable examples can be the case of Brian Hood, A mayor in Australia’s Victoria state where Chat GPT has made false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery. The Mayor had warned to file a lawsuit against Chat GPT.  

Sixth legal issues is about ethics of AI As one of the ‘AI Ethics Survey in Nepal’ conducted by Shreyasha Paudel and Aatiz Ghimire it has found some gaps in AI ethics understanding “As pointed out by most of our respondents across all three surveys, there is a lack of national policy and guideline related to Artificial Intelligence in Nepal. Existing laws are very limited in addressing many ethical problems that may arise from the rapidly growing AI industry.” 

Seventh legal issue is about Autonomous AI. It is an advanced form of AI .AI in this category can “proactively and autonomously evaluate options—making decisions or challenging the status quo.” when it comes to autonomous AI “the decision rights are with the machine.” In present time one of the notable examples of autonomous AI can be the advent of the fully autonomous vehicle, driverless taxi in San Francisco whose emergence may become reality in Nepal also after some time. Nepal must be ready for regulating such types of vehicles through proper legal mechanisms.  

Other uses of autonomous AI can be found in the corporate management context, there are already several specific autonomous AI applications in use. They perform tasks such as autonomous robotic trading of securities and handling of loan applications. The use of such systems is not yet widespread but is, according to an Accenture study on the promise of artificial intelligence, “increasingly becoming commonplace.” Nepali lawmakers must be also aware about these issues Nepal is not far from suffering from these issues.  

Conclusion 

Only human beings are social actors but machines and technologies are not the social actors. Gen AI is one of the very complex and intelligent technologies that is about to play the role of social actors.  So it must be treated differently from other technologies. It is necessary to regulate Gen AI by making specific laws as in the present context of globalization and advancement of race in technology no state can be away from Gen AI.