Artificial Intelligence

There are copyright considerations that need to be kept in mind when using artificial intelligence (AI) tools or content to assist with your study, research or teaching.

AI inputs and outputs each have their own distinct copyright considerations.

Copyright clearance should be conducted on each item ingested into an AI tool to avoid infringement, whether uploading a document to an AI study tool, scraping large datasets for a literature review, or building an AI learning model. 

Copyright clearance may involve one of the following methods.

• Determine that copyright doesn’t apply or has expired
• Use openly licensed materials, such open education resources (OERs) published under a Creative Commons license
• Use commercially licensed materials that allow text and data mining
• Obtain permission from the rightsholder

Note that University course materials and course readings are considered third party materials, which also require copyright clearance to be ingested into an AI tool.

See the Copyright – Research & Publishing page for more information.

Different jurisdictions have different approaches to determining copyright subsistence in content generated by AI.

Under Australian copyright law, it is widely considered that copyright does not subsist in AI outputs because they do not have the necessary human creativity, skill or labour involved in their production. The United States (US) Copyright Office has reached a similar conclusion, determining that works that contain no human authorship cannot be registered. However, the US Copyright Office does make a distinction for works that are conceived and executed by humans but somehow assisted by technology.

In contrast, New Zealand (NZ) copyright legislation includes express provisions for ‘computer generated' works. Under NZ law, the author is simply considered to be the person who made arrangements for the creation of the work. A similar approach is taken in Ireland, India and Hong Kong.

Regardless of the copyright status, the Terms of Service for AI platforms typically mandate certain conditions in how their outputs can be used. Some providers, such as Adobe, Google, and Microsoft, also offer to indemnify users from any potential copyright infringement that might result from the use of outputs from their AI platform.

While there is no legal requirement to attribute AI outputs, attribution is still recommended to comply with academic standards, ensure transparency, and for record keeping purposes.

We have summarised how the Terms of Services of some of the major AI content generation tools dictate how their outputs can be used. The resources below are loosely listed from least restrictive to most restrictive in each category.

Please note that Terms of Use may be revised without notice. The below summaries were last confirmed in July 2023.

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