Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the rage and grabs the public’s attention for its almost instantaneous song writing feats to creating deepfakes of all sorts. The possibility of having an almost instantaneous answer to a problem may prompt an employee to seek the answer AI can provide. Even if your company’s employee understands that the initial AI answer may be refined by follow-up questions, this does not mean that the final result is not an intellectual property problem for your organization. Many companies believe their operations are such that the risk of IP infringement is low and there is no need for a formal AI policy. Some view instituting an AI policy as a response to a fad that is more likely to be an issue for education institutes. Others see a new AI policy as one more thing to for HR to maintain and police. I submit that it is best to institute an AI policy now and get ahead of the problem.
As noted, there has been a lot of publicity and multiple public conversations about AI and its surprising ability to rapidly answer questions on multiple topics. This leads many people to believe they understand AI and its ramifications, which in turn leads to a false sense of security with their use of AI. Many casual users do not understand the difference between generative AI models-which scrape the internet for multiple information sources to create a data base-and rules-based AI models—which generally do not scrape the internet and are typically company or application specific in terms of their database. These distinctions between the types of AI and how they acquire their database are of more concern to legal departments and, especially, intellectual property counsel or administrators then they are to the casual user.
