Technology

I'm not so sure that's true, there have been several recent rulings that all reinforce that copyright can only be asserted on the output of actual humans. This even goes back to before the AI stuff, when PETA sued over those monkey selfies. It is quite clear that the output of an AI does not, itself, qualify for copyright protection, because it is not human.

Maybe if a human edits or works with the AI output, the end result might qualify. But then you also have to ask about what went into the AI composition. Here is where it gets less certain. The case of the Monkey Selfie is much clearer: the monkey stole the camera and took its own picture, and that creation was not derived from any other copyrighted work. But these AI are trained on a wide range of copyrighted works, and very few of those works were licensed for that purpose. I doubt that sucking everything into AI will be seen as a fair use of those works. This is different than a search engine, which ultimately steers the user toward the original work. This uses the original work to create something new (and inherently uncopyrightable, since a bot did it), and because of the way AI works it is impossible to credit the original sources.

Congress may have to step in and clarify this, but is probably not interested unless they can use it to harass Hunter Biden.

It's like sueing an artist because they learnt to paint based on your paintings. But also not because the company has acquired your art and fed it into an application.

It's a very tricky area.