Skip to main content


It seems that US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and I are in agreement -- I have long claimed that the output of a bot is a speech act by its creator. If my bots say something shitty, that is on me. I think the creator of an AI should be liable for its outputs.

washingtonpost.com/politics/20…

in reply to Darius Kazemi

Does that not also mean that the creator should benefit from its outputs, too? Such as #copyright?
in reply to Éibhear 🔭

@eibhear I would think yes (though you would legally want to treat it the same as any remix)
in reply to Darius Kazemi

I know there have been attempts throughout the world to get courts to agree that AI-generated images (in particular) can be copyrighted, and the general feeling is that they can't, on the grounds that humans are not involved in the creation.

If creators of an AI can be liable, it would be easy to argue that they should be granted #copyright on AI-generated works too. If they could get copyright, it would not be good.

in reply to Éibhear 🔭

@eibhear a big problem is that we are dealing with several different horrible broken legal apparatuses (including copyright) and trying to balance them for least harm
in reply to Darius Kazemi

@eibhear

I think existing US copyright law is good enough.

A chatbot will substantively transform its data set based on a query, and output it according to a prompt and its algorithms. I'd say that makes its operator liable for its ouput (and possibly violating copyrights when creating its data set).

In contrast, a web search should accurately quote and cite sources, deflecting liability to those sources.