Do AI-generated works infringe copyright?

ARTISTS on online platform community ArtStation recently protested against artificial intelligence (AI)-generated artistic work. This arose when AI-generated work surfaced on the platform. This saga highlights an issue confronting artists and any of us who own copyright: Do AI-generated works infringe intellectual property? Do people have recourse regarding use of their work in generating AI work?

AI art software such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney AI and Stable Diffusion create images based on prompts or images inputted by a user. Other AI software produce textual works, for example, ChatGPT, a chatbot operated by OpenAI. A user can type questions into a text box and the software will respond conversationally. These AI software have produced impressive photorealistic images and natural language responses.

The AI systems powering such software have been fed with existing image and text data, and trained through machine learning. As AI systems require substantial data for training, much of the data fed into such systems are images and text scraped from the Internet. However, one problem is that AI software can produce images or copies of copyright-protected works. OpenAI, which runs DALL-E 2, has recognised this risk for its AI model.