In August 2023, the Swedish government decided to position Sweden as a leader in AI adoption for public administration, encompassing the entire judiciary system, from district courts to the Supreme Court.
AI is not new. For example, the most prominent online video platform has used an AI to run its search and recommended content since 2016. The recent upswing in popularity comes from Open AI´s decision to make AI software publicly available. This means that generative AI is now available in a form that anyone can access. With these tools any person can ask a generative AI program, readily available for free online, to answer a question, code a webpage with buttons with different functions, write a recipe, or write a poem. Not only is text available, but other software can also create images, video, music, sound, and speech.
There are four concerns that should be taken into consideration when using AI: copyright, model collapse, misinformation, and bias.
Copyright
AI can be instructed to generate content mimicking specific styles, which raises questions about intellectual property and transparency. Generative AI is trained on datasets, often comprising images or texts sourced without explicit permission, leading to uncertainties about the legality of this practice.
The issue extends to written works, exemplified by a 2020 case in the U.S.A. where Thomson Reuters accused Ross Intelligence of unlawfully copying content from its legal research platform Westlaw to train a competing artificial intelligence-based platform. This likely caused Ross Intelligence’s shutdown in January 2021, citing the costs of the “spurious” litigation.
Currently there are ongoing disputes involving many tech companies including Meta Platforms (META.O), Stability AI and Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI. In these lawsuits, the companies are facing authors, visual artists, and other copyright owners over the use of their work to train the companies’ generative AI software. The lack of legal requirements for transparency regarding dataset sources further complicates the ethical landscape surrounding generative AI.
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