You will be able to name the copyright risks of pasting material in and of publishing what comes out.
Kelvin, from lesson 4.1, has two new ideas. The first is to paste a competitor's menu descriptions into an assistant and ask for "something like this but for our bakery". The second is to generate a cartoon mascot for the bakery's packaging. Both feel harmless. Both carry risks, and they sit at opposite ends of the process: one in what goes in, the other in what comes out.
Lesson 4.1, Who owns AI output is still being decided, was about the output's ownership. This lesson is about the ways you could end up using someone else's work, or breaking an agreement, without meaning to.
What you paste or upload into an assistant can cause trouble before any output exists, and not always because of copyright.
Start with confidentiality. A client's draft report, a supplier's price list or a partner's unreleased product photos may be covered by a contract or a non-disclosure agreement. Uploading them to an AI tool can breach that agreement, whatever copyright law says. This links back to module 1: the same tool and account questions apply.
Then there are licence terms. Stock photos, fonts, paid research reports, e-books and online courses usually come with a licence that says what you may do with them. Some licences now say explicitly that the material may not be uploaded to AI tools or used to train models. If you've accepted those terms, uploading the material may break them.
Finally, copyright itself. Copying a substantial part of someone else's work into a tool, and then publishing output that reproduces it, can raise copyright questions. Kelvin's competitor's menu descriptions are someone else's writing. Asking for "something like this" and getting back a lightly reworded version of the same text could be a problem. Asking for menu descriptions in a warm, playful tone, without pasting theirs, is a different request.
Even with a clean prompt, output can land close to existing work.
Image generators can produce pictures that strongly resemble a well-known character, a famous artist's distinctive style, a recognisable logo or a specific photograph. Kelvin's cartoon mascot might come out looking a lot like a character from a popular animated film, because the model has seen that character thousands of times. If he prints it on boxes, he could face a complaint from the company that owns the character, or a trade mark issue if it looks like another brand.
Text generators can occasionally reproduce passages from their training text, especially well-known material such as song lyrics, famous speeches or popular book passages. Code assistants can produce snippets that match existing code, which may come with an open-source licence attached.
The person who publishes the output is usually the one who receives the complaint. "The AI made it" isn't likely to be much of a defence for a business that printed it on packaging.
Several lawsuits about AI and copyright are under way in different countries. They've been brought by news publishers, authors, artists, image libraries and others, mostly about whether training AI models on their work without permission was lawful. Some have reached early decisions on particular points, and others are at earlier stages.
You'll see headlines claiming that one ruling has settled the question. Be careful with them. A decision in one country's court on one set of facts doesn't decide the law elsewhere, and many decisions are appealed. There is no settled worldwide outcome you can rely on, and there may not be one for some time. For your purposes, the practical point is simple: the training question is unresolved, so the safest risks to manage are the ones you control, which are your inputs and what you publish.
Every AI tool has terms of service, and most include a section about output: what rights you have to what the tool generates, and what you may do with it. These differ between providers, and sometimes between plans from the same provider.
Some terms say you own the output, to the extent the law allows. Some give you a licence to use it. Some restrict certain uses, such as using output to build a competing AI model. Some business plans include a promise by the provider to defend customers against certain copyright claims about output, with conditions attached. Others offer nothing of the kind.
The terms can't decide copyright law for you. A provider saying "you own the output" doesn't guarantee that any court would agree you hold copyright in it. What the terms do decide is the agreement between you and the provider, and that's worth knowing before you use output commercially.
Kelvin had never read his image tool's terms. When he finally did, the section on output took him a few minutes to find, tucked under a heading about content, and it said less than he'd assumed. Most providers put it somewhere similar, usually near the parts about your account and acceptable use.
Read the output section of your assistant's terms of service and summarise in three sentences what it says you may do with what it creates.
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