Google said today that it will protect customers who use some of its generative artificial intelligence products if they are sued for copyright infringement. Customers using products that now have generative AI capabilities embedded will be protected, the company said in a blog post, seeking to allay concerns that generative AI could violate copyright rules.
It specifically mentions seven products that it will legally cover: DuetAI in Workspace (including generated text in Google Docs and Gmail and images in Google Slides and Google Meet), DuetAI in Google Cloud, VertexAISearch, VertexAIConversation, VertexAIText embedding API, visual subtitles on VertexAI, and CodeyAPI. Note that Google's Bard search tool is not mentioned.
"If you are challenged on copyright issues, we bear the potential legal risks involved," the company said.
Google said it would follow a "two-pronged, industry-first approach" to intellectual property compensation, which would cover the results of its training data and underlying model creation. This means that Google will be held legally responsible if someone is sued for using copyrighted material in its training data.
The company said compensation around training data "is not actually a new protection." But Google acknowledged that customers wanted to make it clear that its protections covered the possibility that training data contained copyrighted information.
Google will also protect users if they are sued due to results obtained after using its underlying model. For example, if they generate sentences similar to published work. The company notes that this protection "applies only to the extent that you do not intentionally create or use the resulting output to infringe the rights of others."
Other companies have issued similar statements. Microsoft announced that it will take legal responsibility for enterprise users of its Copilot products. Adobe said it will protect enterprise customers using Firefly from copyright, privacy and publicity claims.
Copyright issues have long plagued generative AI platforms, and there are now a growing number of lawsuits against various companies for alleged copyright infringement. One of the latest lawsuits was filed by prominent authors including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jody Picoult.
According to Reuters, Google is facing a class-action lawsuit for allegedly using personal information and copyrighted data to train artificial intelligence models.