Who Owns Your ChatGPT Output?

Who Owns Your #ChatGPT Output?

This happened while I was drafting this post!

Summary: 

●     A new publication called The Rationalist debuted on ‘Hacker News’

●     It sparked a conversation, which is a tremendous outcome for a debutant 

●     A reader comments that the content didn’t read human-written

●     Readers suspected, investigated, and revealed the plagiarism. 

●     Think-and-it’s-done remixing of info highlights the dark side of Generative AI. 

Is The Rationalists a plagiarist? 

Or is its AI tool thoroughly incompetent? 

Or… is anyone actually bothered about plagiarism? 

Who owns a sequence of words?

Answers will emerge, but not anytime soon. For now, there’s another more pressing question:

If you’re a #chatgpt enthusiast (I say chatGPT, but I mean any #generativeai tool) you ought to ask: who owns my chatGPT outputs?

A thought experiment

Imagine this. 

Act 1: You compile a book of puzzles and word problems using chatGPT.

Act 2: You share it on r/ChatGPT, as a demo. 

Act 3: A month later, you find your (is it actually yours?) booklet, on sale as a Kindle book, for $9.99, supposedly authored by one Raven Pincher. 

Can you sue them? Will the trial go to court? Will they be found guilty? 

Of course, the kernel-question is :who has the rights to the book? 

Is it OpenAI? (It’s the language model that created the content.)

Is it you, the prompter? (Your instructions made the model create something meaningful.)

Is it Mr. Pincher? (He monetized it first.)

Or is the ownership shared? If so, in what proportion?

Let’s ask #chatGPT3. 

Evasive, incomplete, and misleading (given I’ve researched this deeply).

Then, do I know? Well, sort of. We’ll see. Stay with me.  

Excuse the brashness. But I believe I can hold a stimulating conversation with an Intellectual Property lawyer on this. 

You will too. Read on. 

But first, know these terms

The three key terms in the context of this article are:

1. Input,
2. Output, and,
3. Content

Unless you take the time to properly understand these, the entire post will seem like corporate jargon to you.

With respect to the screen grab below, the following are applicable:

●      Red Rectangles: Input

●      Yellow Rectangle: Output

●      Red And Yellow Rectangles Together: Content

Input

According to the #openai terms of use “You may provide input to the Services”, which is termed as “input”. 

Basically, anything that you enter into the text box on ChatGPT is considered input.

Output

As per the Terms of use, “Output” refers to any and all reciprocations given to you by ChatGPT in response to your input(s).

Content

Put very simply, input and output, when referred to collectively, are known as “Content”.

Read OpenAI’s terms of use, though their definitions don’t go much further. 

Why are these terms relevant? 

You’ll see in a moment. 

OpenAI’s stance on ownership of ChatGPT’s content

So what does OpenAI say, about who owns the outputs of chatGPT?

For Input

According to the Terms of Use published by OpenAI, all input is owned by you, and all rights [to the extent of the applicable (regional) law] are assigned to you.

For Output

OpenAI says: “... subject to your compliance with these Terms, OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output”.

Clear enough. But did you stumble over ‘assigned’? Yes? You’ve hit the weak spot then. 

OpenAI has used the word “assigns” instead of “transfers”. That’s important. .

In simpler words:

Transfer would mean that you were the complete owner of ChatGPT content. 

But “assigns” reduce that scope. 

So, OpenAI also owns the rights to ChatGPT content, along with you.

However, you are responsible for:

●      how you use your output, and 

●      not infringing copyright laws applicable to you

You can monetize your ChatGPT content, but so can OpenAI, if they want to, and neither of you can claim damages against each other.

Back to our thought experiment. Who’d win the lawsuit?

Our question was: are you entitled to damages?

Here’s what a judge might think.

You Are Entitled To Damages

●     If you can prove that You created the content before the other party(ies).

●     If you had a significant role to play in selecting and curating the content of the book (selection).

●     If your inputs to the tool were sufficiently unique (proper shaping).

●     If the other party(ies) cannot prove their independent effort in the content creation process

You Are Not Entitled To Damages

●      If you are in the United States. 

[Under US law, AI-generated content is not owned by anyone (it is public domain)]

●      You did not disclose the role of AI in content creation.

●      The other party(ies) arrived at the same output as you, independently.

Note: These are conjectures. Nobody has the answer.

I’m a creator. What should I know?

The following tips should help:

• Highlight that you’ve used AI in the creation process 
• Don’t hide behind legal gibberish 
• The consumer must know if you used AI in your content.  
• Mention this clearly. 
• Superimpose AI-generated text on copyright-protected visual assets
• IP protected elements could be art you have created, a photograph you have taken, or background music you have created.
• This would lend a lot of weight to your IP rights claims over the content.
• For example: use an image you own, as a background to a poem written (in part or in full) by ChatGPT.
• Add watermarks to your content.

Self-explanatory, I hope. But you’d look odd. I might do this if I were compiling chatGPT outputs for commercial purposes. Not otherwise. 

Until Next Time

Trust me, there will be a next time, given the recent upsurge in popularity that ChatGPT and similar tools have seen.

For instance, a student in the US was just failed because his teacher caught him using ChatGPT

Sooner or later, a case like ours will come to the surface, guaranteed.

Now that you have read this article, you will at least have some idea of how it may play out.