Dive Brief:
- Google on October 12 announced it will indemnify users of its generative AI products if they’re hit with claims of intellectual property infringement.
- “If you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved,” Neal Suggs, the company’s vice president of legal for Google Cloud, said in a statement released with Phil Venables, the company’s CISO for Google Cloud.
- Copyright issues have become a major concern among intellectual property lawyers because of the way companies use published material to train the large language models that power their generative AI tools.
Dive Insight:
Microsoft offered a similar indemnification promise in September. Both Google and Microsoft are trying to reassure users they won’t become unintentional victims of infringement claims by using products whose self-generated output is based on training that uses copyrighted works. Adobe in 2021 also rolled out an indemnity offer to protect users of its AI-assisted design tools.
Google calls its always-on generative AI product Duet AI, which since early this year has been built into the company’s cloud platform and was added to Google Workspace in August.
In the cloud platform, the product is used mainly for software development and data analytics; in workspace tools, it’s used in creating reports and other content, among other things.
The company says it already offers third-party intellectual property indemnity for all of its services but it added language to make that explicit in connection with its models for creating generative AI products.
“We’ve heard from many of you that while your company appreciates our general services indemnity, you would like explicit clarification with regards to the training data behind the Google models that those services leverage,” Suggs and Venables said in their statement. “We are happy to deliver this reassurance.”
The company is also adding a layer of protection to cover anything users create that triggers third party allegations of intellectual property right infringement.
“The generated output indemnity means that you can use content generated with a range of our products knowing Google will indemnify you for third-party IP claims, including copyright,” the executives said.
Users can’t have deliberately used the products to create infringing content, though. “This indemnity only applies if you didn’t try to intentionally create or use generated output to infringe the rights of others,” they said. Users also need to use company tools for citing sources.
The coverage is automatic. “By offering these indemnities on our public service terms page, customers will automatically receive the benefit of these terms without needing to amend their existing agreement,” the statement said.
