Google Defends Against AI Users Generative Of Intellectual Property Demands

Google will defend users of a generative artificial intelligence system on Google Cloud and Workspace platforms (photo: twitter @Ben66570Benson)

Google announced on Thursday 12 October that it will defend users of a generative artificial intelligence system on Google Cloud and Workspace platforms if they are accused of violating intellectual property rights. Google joins Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies that have made similar promises.

Big tech companies like Google have invested a lot of funding in generative artificial intelligence and are vying to integrate it into their products. Copyright owners such as leading writers, illustrators, and other intellectual property rights owners have filed a lawsuit that the use of their works to train artificial intelligence systems and the content generated by the system violates their rights.

"According to our knowledge, Google is the first in the industry to offer a comprehensive approach and covers two aspects of guarantee protection, which specifically includes these two types of claims," a company spokesman said.

Google says their new policy applies to software, including the Vertex AI development platform and the AI Duet system, which generates text and images in Google Workspace and Cloud programs. However, the press announcement did not mention a more well-known generative AI chatbot program than Google, Bard.

The company also said that this guarantee does not apply if users "deliberately create or use the resulting results to violate other people's rights."

Recent lawsuits against generative AI are generally addressed to companies that have such systems, including Google, and are not individual users.

The AI defendants said that the use of training data taken from the internet to train their system met the requirements as a reasonable use under US copyright law.