American Artificial Intelligence (AI) organization, OpenAI, has announced its commitment to defend its business clientele from copyright issues that pertain to the use of the company’s apps and services.
This signifies that if legal action is taken against businesses due to the use of OpenAI’s data that involves copyrighted material, the company will assume responsibility for addressing this legal challenge.
As part of a new program, Copyright Shield, OpenAI disclosed that it’ll pay the legal costs incurred by customers, specifically customers using the “generally available” features of OpenAI’s developer platform and ChatGPT Enterprise, the business tier of its AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot, who face lawsuits over IP claims against work generated by an OpenAI tool.
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The company wrote,
“OpenAI is committed to protecting our customers with built-in copyright safeguards in our systems. Today, we’re going one step further and introducing Copyright Shield—we will now step in and defend our customers, and pay the costs incurred, if you face legal claims around copyright infringement. This applies to generally available features of ChatGPT Enterprise and our developer platform”.
OpenAI’s announcement to shield its business customers using its products is coming after the company launched new models and developer products at its recently held developer conference.
At the conference, the company shared dozens of new additions, improvements and reduced pricing across many parts of its platform.
These include,
- New GPT-4 Turbo model that is more capable, cheaper and supports a 128K context window.
- New Assistants API that makes it easier for developers to build their own assistive AI apps that have goals and can call models and tools.
- New multimodal capabilities in the platform, including vision, image creation (DALL·E 3), and text-to-speech (TTS).
OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and has an updated knowledge of world events up to April 2023. It has a 128k context window so it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt.
The company also optimized its performance so that it can be able to offer GPT-4 Turbo at a 3x cheaper price for input tokens and a 2x cheaper price for output tokens compared to GPT-4.
OpenAI’s rollout of copyright shield is coming following the increased cases of legality of vendors training on data without permission which is being hashed out in courts.
Recently, a bevy of legal action demanding compensation from AI companies has been filed in the U.S. and Europe. The plaintiffs include authors and artists, who have consistently expressed concern about AI stealing their work and producing mediocre derivatives.
This announcement addresses mounting concerns regarding the potential copyright issues associated with generative AI.
It’s no surprise that in a recent survey of Fortune 500 companies by Acrolinx, nearly a third said that intellectual property was their biggest concern about the use of generative AI
OpenAI joins the likes of Microsoft and Google that have announced their commitment to defend and protect users involved in AI copyright accusations. Furthermore, these companies have explicitly stated that their products fall under legal protection.