Rebecca Caroe, B2B Marketing Consultant and member of the B2B Special Interest Group, sat down with Sam Irvine, the CEO of Copyright Licensing New Zealand, and asked about Copyright and AI for marketers.

In the fast-evolving landscape of AI-driven marketing, Sam's insights shine a light on the power of AI, legal challenges with Copyrights, and the evolving role of AI. Join us as we explore the AI in Marketing through the eyes of a visionary leader in the field.

Sam Irvine as a CEO of Copyright Licensing New Zealand and a B2B marketer, understands the use cases for AI and marketing. There are two main ones, you can use it internally to manage processes as organisational AI and secondly for external outputs like campaigns and marketing material creation.

Good and Bad Actors

Sam acknowledges the time saving benefits of AI and he warns that many LLM training sets were created with scraped data taken without permission. He notes some legal cases in USA and Europe currently challenging this - Books3 which has 200,000 books pirated from the internet has been taken down after a lawsuit.

The days of tech startups seeking forgiveness not permission is over.

New Zealand has a cross-party political group looking at AI right now but there aren’t yet any legal cases being heard.

Sam’s advice to marketers

Be careful about which tools you choose to use - are they ethical and responsible? Nvida and Adobe have licensed all the images they use from Shutterstock and other photo libraries. The original creator is paid when you use their AI generated images.

A closed AI is one developed internally and trained on the organisation’s own data. An open AI uses public data.

Three risks of using open AI

1. Your input data will be added to the training set. Is this confidential information that you are authorised to put into the public domain? Sam warns against adding client data into an open AI system. 
2. The output you get could include copyright material taken from the LLM training set which could put you into the courts. 
3. You might get an answer which is wrong. Be careful around fact checking those outputs.

As the data sets are being withdrawn, the information used by open AI models is now getting older and less relevant. It’s incumbent on all of us marketers to use AI in the right way and embrace it while protecting ourselves and our clients.

Copyright NZ has courses on copyright, contracts and agreements including AI.

Watch Rebecca’s 12-minute interview with Sam Irvine here.

Source: Rebecca Caroe, 9 October 2023