MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 47.03.03

Copyright challenges (training models using copyrighted output)

Category: Legal challenges

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Description

"Generative AI companies are regularly accused of violating copyright law by training AI models on copyrighted works without gaining permission or paying compensation to the copyright owners. In fact, a substantial number of copyrighted documents and books have been incorporated into the training datasets of generative AI models."

From Regulating under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (G'sell2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Domain: 6. Socioeconomic & Environmental
Subdomain: 6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort
Causal entity: Human
Intent: Intentional
Timing: Pre-deployment

Subdomain definition: AI systems capable of creating economic or cultural value, including through reproduction of human innovation or creativity (e.g., art, music, writing, code, invention), can destabilize economic and social systems that rely on human effort. This may lead to reduced appreciation for human skills, disruption of creative and knowledge-based industries, and homogenization of cultural experiences due to the ubiquity of AI-generated content.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

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How other frameworks describe this risk

Loss of creativity/critical thinking
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Cultural dispossession
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Copyright infringement
International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)
Risks of copyright infringement
International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)
Copyright Violation
Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)
Intellectual property rights violations
Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)
Impact on Intellectual Property Rights
Generating Harms - Generative AI's impact and paths forwards (EPIC2023)
Intellectual Property
AILUMINATE: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommons (Ghosh2024)

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