That picture of your dog as an anime character spun up by ChatGPT? And that corny diss rap you coaxed out of Claude? These are not legally protectable forms of creative expression under current copyright law.

That…could be for the best. But as businesses hand generative AI the keys to more of their marketing, content, and coding operations, what does it mean for their ability to protect the copyrights of critical business materials?

In January, the US Copyright Office released a report holding that works created with generative AI are not eligible for copyright protection without evidence of human creative contributions—and that doesn’t include an elaborate prompt.

Then in March, a federal appeals court also affirmed that art created autonomously by AI cannot be copyrighted, the latest decision in inventor Stephen Thaler’s years-long quest to copyright an output from his “Creativity Machine” AI tool.

Last month, we asked IP lawyers about where the fight around copyright protections stands when it comes to training foundation models. Now, we’re digging into the other side of the equation: questions around copyrighting AI output and what companies need to know if they’re tapping generative AI for creative and development work.

Keep reading here.—PK

One of the go-to ways businesses avoid pesky AI hallucinations could have some unforeseen side effects.

Companies often turn to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as a way to make AI more accurate; the technique essentially turns LLMs into conversational searchbots that surface answers grounded in internal data.

But a new report from researchers at Bloomberg found that RAG can also come with safety risks. They found that for unknown reasons, RAG-based models were far more likely to offer up “unsafe” answers around topics like malware, illegal activity, privacy violations, and sexual content.

“That RAG can actually make models less safe and their outputs less reliable is counterintuitive, but this finding has far-reaching implications given how ubiquitously RAG is used in GenAI applications,” Amanda Stent, Bloomberg’s head of AI strategy and research in the office of the CTO, said in a statement.

The paper’s authors called for more safety research and security exercises to flesh out the risks of RAG-based models. But the finding could have widespread implications for companies that have come to rely on RAG as a way to navigate trusted information for everything from internal employee tools to customer service functions.

Keep reading here.—PK

Cyclists and drivers are often at loggerheads over who has more rights on the road. Could an AI tool help bring peace to these warring factions?

That’s what a new program in Sacramento aims to do: By keeping parked cars out of bike lanes, the effort aims to improve the transit experience for both parties.

The city of Sacramento and the Sacramento Regional Transit District in December debuted an automated bus stop enforcement program using technology from Hayden AI. Now, in what officials say is a first, they’re monitoring bike lanes using camera systems that have been installed on 100 local buses.

“I think it’s a great use of the technology,” Charles Territo, Hayden’s chief growth officer, told Tech Brew. “From a safety perspective, the agency is really getting more bang for the buck. For pedestrians that are having to navigate vehicles parked at bus stops, things are going to improve. And for bike riders who have to navigate people parking in bike lanes, that’s going to change, as well. And ultimately what we’re hoping to see is a change in driver behavior.”

Keep reading here.—JG