Joe Faith, a Harding University business instructor and expert on computer systems, predicts vast potential for artificial intelligence and machine learning in the business world, but he sees one particular potential snag already: intellectual property lawsuits.
One was filed earlier this year by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and other religious authors claiming that tech companies used their books without permission to train their AI algorithms.
The suit is one of several accusing OpenAI, Google and others of developing chatbots like ChatGPT and other tools with the unpaid use of writers’ texts.
“A lot of lawsuits are being threatened, and some companies are getting sued, because the data sets they’ve used to train their algorithms were allegedly just scraped off the internet,” said Faith, who spoke to Arkansas Business on AI’s potential in the accounting profession. (See story, Page 1.)
The Huckabee suit is against Meta, Microsoft and Bloomberg LP.
“There are a lot of issues, I believe, with intellectual property, the tracking of attribution of who owns [the property], and what should be the proper payment for those records,” Faith said.
“The problem we’re seeing right now is, the speed with which we’re releasing new AI products is outpacing our ability to make legislation and properly have guardrails.”
Faith said businesses may have jumped into opportunities only to discover later that the AI tools may have been trained with data sets that weren’t open to the public.
“Then, well, you may be partially liable for that,” he said.
“Microsoft, with its partnership with OpenAI, for instance, is saying that they’ll cover some of the costs of legal expenses for companies if they do get sued,” Faith said. “But I’m skeptical as to how long something like that could hold up.”
Despite the hazards, he sees AI and machine learning as revolutionary.
“I do believe this is one of those disruptive things like smartphones or the wireless internet — things that completely change user patterns,” he said.
“We’re going to see a lot of change in the next five or 10 years.”
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