Recht·IE Forum·9 mrt

Metaphors we judge (AI) by: a rhetorical analysis of artificial copyright disputes

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is too complex to fathom directly in a technological sense. At the very least, that is true for most lawyers, who instead orbit these ‘black boxes’  metaphorically  without ever touching their core. As a consequence, language and rhetoric matter even more than they did before in copyright disputes. This article aims to analyse how the key questions concerning copyright and AI, indeed, largely revolve around metaphorical thinking, and how these metaphors affect our legal reasoning and judgements on these matters. In doing so, it provides an overview of European and US approaches to the most essential AI-related copyright questions with a strong emphasis on language.