I asked the following question to Chat GPT: Does GPT Chat threaten intellectual property?
And his answer was the following: “Chat GPT itself does not threaten intellectual property, since it is a natural language processing tool that does not have the ability to own or claim copyright. However, using GPT chat to produce content that infringes copyrights or to plagiarize existing works could be considered a threat to intellectual property.”
I tried to replicate the exercise on Google, and I searched for the following term “Tik Tok and intellectual property”. The first results launched by the first page of Google responses were a series of hyperlinks to the Tik Tok support center with the aim of clarifying concepts and policies about the platform’s position on this controversial issue. In summary, Tik Tok claims to be against intellectual property infringements and in case of receiving an infringement notification, the easiest thing is for the creators to fix each other.
In today’s digital age, remixing content has become an integral part of our culture. Technology has allowed us to create, share, and consume content faster and more accessible than ever before. The demand for instant gratification content is increasing as user attention span decreases year on year, and a 2015 Microsoft study confirmed that humans have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, reaching just 8 seconds. Whether or not you believe in the methodology that Microsoft used to draw these conclusions, it is enough to do an exercise individually for you to measure the seconds you spend “scrolling” on the Instagram feed until you actually find that captivating content. Among Internet user habit statistics, 167 million Tik Tok videos are consumed in one minute on the Internet and an average of 500 hours of content is uploaded on YouTube per minute. In that time, people consume hundreds of thousands of hours of content and send millions of messages, emails and texts. These statistics speak volumes, it is humanly impossible to manage this vast amount of content manually and to excel as a creator, you need to have a large and strong creative team to keep up the cadence and quench the demand.
Since the birth and exponential growth of the major search engines and digital platforms, The high demand for online content has led to a growing reliance on artificial intelligence and other software to create, curate, and manage content faster and more efficiently. From automatic text generation to music and art production, AI and other algorithms are increasingly being used to meet users’ content needs. While this can be beneficial for content creators and businesses looking to grow their online presence, it also raises important questions about the authenticity and quality of machine-generated content. And for content creators, the competition is high. Many seek to create content that spreads like a virus, reaching millions of people in a matter of hours. On social media, virality is the holy grail of attention. In the case of content creators who, in most cases, are the “one-man-show” of their social networks -in which they record, edit and post produce content before publishing- solutions such as ChatGPT become a tool that encourages the brainstorming process and directly attacks the famous writer’s blockeven for cases that seem as mundane as writing the description of the photo on Instagram.
All of this has led to a remix culture where users can take elements of an existing work and create something new. What will happen to intellectual property? While this can be beneficial for the ecosystem of content creators and businesses looking to grow their online presence, it also raises important questions about the authenticity and quality of machine-generated content.