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Will ChatGPT Incriminate Itself?: Putting ChatGPT On The Stand

In a recent article, I address ChatGPT’s ability to generate code. In this article, I explore liability for the use of copyrighted code in training ChatGPT.

There are now multiple lawsuits related to the use of publicly accessible data for training AI’s like ChatGPT. Since ChatGTP can answer general questions, I decided to probe it with respect to the issue of copyright violation liability.

First, I provide some legal background and reading material and then a complete transcript of my dialogue with ChatGPT.

Lawsuits and Legal Background

First, I am not an attorney. My academic background in Philosophy and my professional background is as a software developer and a technology executive. This being said, here is my assessment of the current legal situation.

There are at least three major lawsuits in play:

1. Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are being sued for copyright infringement by using copyrighted open-source software source code in training the generative AI behind Copilot to generate code without including the attributions required by the open-source licenses attached to the source code.
2. Midjourney and StabilityAI are being sued for copyright infringement based on the…