We have now entered the era of generative artificial intelligence, a type of AI that can create new content based on datasets of existing content it has been “fed” and trained on. In this new era, generative AI developers are building the minds of these machines by training them on content created by humans of the past and present, from Shakespeare to Atwood, Caravaggio to Koons. Thus far, we have marvelled at the creations that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have produced, but this use of AI raises crucial ethical and legal questions.

It takes enormous amounts of data to train a generative AI program like ChatGPT, and in order to build these tools cheaply and quickly, developers are committing mass copyright infringement. These datasets are largely created by combing and scraping the internet for every type of content, from articles, books and artwork to our photos and tweets. These methods give rise to some big questions: Is the use of our copyright-protected content for training generative AI models legal? Does the use of copyrighted content for training AI fall under fair-use exceptions in the United States and fair dealing in Canada? Do we have a right to compensation when our work is being fed to the machines?