| Hello!
A couple of quick things before I jump into how to use A.I. without making legal mistakes.
Special One-time, Pocket Offer: Live Back Pocket Legal
Inspiration hit at the beach last week: launching my course Back Pocket Legal as a short, live group program with 4 weeks of live Q&A with me would be a great, no-brainer way for business owners who still don’t have lawyer-drafted contracts for all of their offers, or their website policies, and may have other legal questions, to have access to both before I retire BPL and am no longer doing 1:1 work (see below). BPL members will get access to all of my contract templates and policies and all of the modules inside BPL (how to set up your LLC, what to do when a client won’t pay, what you need to know about insurance for your business etc.), from enrollment for 6 months so you can download everything to your hard drive, plus a discount on working with me for trademarks. If you’re interested, hop on my email list via the footer here or send a message via the Contact Form. List members will receive notifications about early bird pricing as a list member (special pricing not reflected on the website!)
Reminders for working with me 1:1:
April 8 is the last day to book a call with me for custom contracts. If you haven’t had your contracts reviewed in a year or more, and/or have had major changes to your offers, we should talk pre-April 8. To book a call and find out more about who needs custom contracts (pls. see the FAQ section of the page), head to Work with Mairin. After April 8, I won’t be doing custom contracts or Power Hours.
***I will still be providing trademark services and of course my contract templates and BPL (and still sending emails with legal tips and posting on my IG), but I’m working on some big law projects and some non-law business ventures 💃🏻 so will no longer have the same capacity 1:1. I’ll talk more about this as I’ve gotten a lot of questions, so if you’re interested in my journey, make sure you’re on my email list and connect on IG!
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Okay, onto A.I. I know A.I. tools can be a huge timesaver in business, but it’s critical to remember when you’re using these tools that results can be inaccurate and biased and there are huge privacy, confidentiality and intellectual property implications…
A.I. is not infallible
Generative A.I. tools like ChatGPT learn from and mimic massive data sets. They give results based on the data they’ve been trained on. In other words, your results are at best as good as the data the tool was trained on. Hallucinations (results that don’t actually exist) can occur, and you can receive very biased as well as inaccurate results.
You’re reading this on a legal site, so presumably you won’t be using A.I. for legal questions and drafting legal documents…right? 😳😳😅 I’ve seen contracts drafted by A.I. that were missing important sections, not tailored to the business owner’s work, industry, or jurisdiction, and were just generally rife with errors, leaving the business owner vulnerable.
A.I. and Confidentiality:
You need to be careful with your intellectual property and your personal information when using A.I. It’s essential to read the Terms and Conditions of any A.I. tool before using it. They’re usually pretty explicit about what they’re doing with your data. This is especially important if you’re using A.I. in client work, sharing confidential information, or even asking ChatGPT about a new idea you have. Data sets training A.I. models are supposed to be screened and cleaned prior to use, but we don’t know how extensive or accurate this is, or what the guardrails are in place. I’d recommend wherever possible opting out of model training and thinking twice about what you’re using A.I. for.
A.I. Note Takers
You also need to be very careful with A.I. Note Takers. I know of at least one case where multiple participants were on a Zoom with A.I. Note Takers, and a participant left, but their A.I. Note Taker stayed behind and was then privy to confidential information that violated a NDA in place. Be cautious and think twice as to whether you need A.I. Note Takers in every Zoom call. If you or your client(s) are sharing personal, private information, I’d advise against using an A.I. Note Taker and read the Terms and Conditions of any A.I. Note Taker you’re using prior to use.
A.I. and Intellectual Property (Copyright and Trademark):
Speaking of intellectual property, a couple things to remember. A.I. images can’t be copyrighted, but if they appear in a larger work, the rest of the work can possibly be copyrighted.*
Articles completely written by A.I. cannot be copyrighted. It doesn’t matter if the article is a byproduct of your carefully curated prompt…if A.I. wrote the whole article, it can’t be copyrighted, and you have no recourse if someone tries to poach it.
Using A.I. to create images of famous brands that are trademarked is still trademark infringement. An example would be using A.I. to make an image of something Disney. That’s infringing on Disney’s trademark which is a terrible idea as Disney is extremely litigious.
*This is actually different in the U.K., which is only one of a handful of countries to offer limited copyright protection for works solely generated by a computer. Make sure you check your country’s laws if this impacts you.
The law is famously behind technology, and much of it is being written via case law as new cases are decided around A.I., particularly with regard to copyright (a ton of huge cases recently regarding big A.I. companies doing large internet data scrapes of copyrighted material to train their A.I. models 🙈), so the law here is continually evolving. The best way to stay out of hot water is to read the Terms and Conditions/Terms of Use of any tool you’re using, use A.I. judiciously, not revealing any new ideas, intellectual property, or personal/private/confidential information, opting out of model training, and making sure you’re clear on A.I. and trademark and copyright.
Questions on any of the above? Anything related to A.I. and law you still have questions about? Please feel free to connect and reach out on Instagram or send me an email! You can also email me with Back Pocket Legal or Work with Me 1:1 questions.
Have a great rest of your week! |