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AI and the Copyright Conundrum

There’s no question that artificial intelligence (AI) tools are evolving rapidly. But not without issues—copyright, privacy, and recent “spicy” images generated by X’s Grok without being prompted. This article explains some of the challenges with the “training” that AI systems undergo to enable them to answer a broad range of queries.

Monday, September 08, 2025

We are writing a lot about AI these days because …well, it’s developing quickly, and as one author said, the AI you are using today is probably the least functional one you will ever use. That’s because new capabilities are added seemingly daily, and new providers and solutions are popping up everywhere.

One huge issue I’m sure you have read about is how these AI systems are “trained.” According to a recent explanation by Axios, “Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, [Google’s Gemini], or Anthropic's Claude were built by ingesting the totality of human information online—everything from news stories by Axios to social media postings by you…By 2025, content produced by billions of internet users helped shape the massive digital corpus that modern AI models were trained on—mostly through public, web-accessible data. Think any content—posts, blogs, forums, websites, Wikipedia edits, reviews, and videos.”

Image generated by Google Gemini. Note the small ai in the lower righthand corner.


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About Cary Sherburne

Cary Sherburne is a well-known author, journalist and marketing consultant whose practice is focused on marketing communications strategies for the printing and publishing industries.

Cary Sherburne is available for speaking engagements and consulting projects. To get more information contact us.

Please offer your feedback to Cary. She can be reached at [email protected].

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