Protecting Your IP from AI

With AI's volatile state and developers' data-hungry nature, little-to-no legislation restricts AI companies from using anything off the internet to program their AI bots. This doesn't mean that there will never be legislation preventing data harvesting by AI companies; it just does not exist yet. 

Getting a copyright is the first and most crucial step in protecting intellectual property. Any complaint you bring to court without a copyright will be thrown out immediately. Once you have copyrights to your work, you can add specific anti-AI clauses to the paperwork. When publishing your work make sure to include a disclaimer that clearly says AI companies do not have permission to use your work in training their AI models. While this will not prevent them from doing it anyway, they may think twice and won’t be able to claim they didn’t know they were going against your wishes. 

If you are trying to protect visual works from AI, consider using watermarks. Watermarking your work is a form of Digital Rights Management. If someone tries to download your work illegally, it will have an overlay that credits you for the work. This ensures protection to visual work that cannot be done with written text.

Restricting access to your work is a tricky decision, but may ultimately be a solution if you are concerned about your IP being stolen. When publishing your work on the web, you can require viewers to purchase a license or passcode to access your work. While this makes your work more secure, it also severely limits the potential for someone to discover it by accident.