ChatGPT: Legal Considerations

Everybody is busy dreaming up ways of using ChatGPT or other generative AI similar to it, getting it to tell us the secret to making more money or making their work more efficient or getting more sales. There are tons of articles out there about their exploits. But few seem to consider the legal implications of blindly using ChatGPT.

Myself, I’m aware of the tendency of ChatGPT to “hallucinate” and give incorrect information and also I know not to feed it personal data. But there are other pitfalls to be aware of. Here’s a link to an Inc. article outlining at least 5 things to consider when using ChatGPT. As a way of instilling that information more firmly into my brain, I will list them out here and maybe briefly discuss what the article meant about that legal implication, but it will be very beneficial to actually read that article itself.

1 Fact check the AI generated content

How does this translate into legal issues? Well, I think it is related to truth in advertising: you can’t do false advertising. So, if you are marketing and you use AI generated materials, scrutinize them very closely to make sure no false facts have slipped in.

2 Don’t generate image of celebrities

I realize there are some fan arts and they probably don’t fall into legal trouble (I’m not a legal expert so …), but in the realm of business, you could run into “copyright infringement, rights of publicity violations, or trademark infringements.”

3 Consider your own copyright protections

I think AI generated materials are not copyright protected but the materials generated by humans are. If there is a blend of AI and human, “the use of AI needs to be disclosed, but the human-created portions can be subjected to copyright protections.”

4 Protect your data or intellectual property

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory as it has been written about before. This dictum even extends to code: you may have proprietary code that competitors would love to get their hands on. Make sure your developers do not pass them through the AI (unless you have a home-grown version that is not connected to the outside world) as AI tends to keep everything fed into it as further training data.

5 Protect your customers’ data

This one is also self-explanatory. You will most likely have to train your employees on when and how they can use customer data to make sure they don’t inadvertently enter private data into these large learning machines.

This is a brand-new world we are entering, and we all have to learn how to navigate through this. We can’t shy away from it because others will be entering it and using these new tools to their advantage, and it could be used against you. We just have to be cautious about how we use the tools.