Montreal, Quebec, Canada
June 22, 2025
June 22, 2025
August 15, 2025
Engineering and Public Policy Division (EPP) Technical Session 1
Engineering and Public Policy Division (EPP)
12
10.18260/1-2--56641
https://peer.asee.org/56641
6
Dr. Hortense Gerardo is a playwright, screenwriter, and anthropologist and serves as the Director of the Anthropology, Performance, and Technology (APT) Program at the University of California, San Diego. Her works have been performed nationally and internationally. She is a Co-founder of the Asian American Playwright Collective (AAPC), and head of the Screenwriting competition on the Board of the Woods Hole Film Festival. For more information go to: www.hortensegerardo.com
Jon Wade, Ph.D., is a professor of practice at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego where he is the director of Convergent Systems Engineering and the executive director of the Institute for Supply Chain Excellence and Innovation. Dr. Wade’s focus is on developing research and education to provide ethically sustainable solutions to critical, complex societal problems. Previously, Dr. Wade was the chief technology officer of the Systems Engineering Research Center and chair of Systems and Software Engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology, executive vice president of Engineering at International Game Technology, senior director of Enterprise Server Development at Sun Microsystems, and director of Advanced System Development at Thinking Machines Corporation. Dr. Wade received his S.B., S.M., E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Wade is an INCOSE Fellow.
Since the rise of generative AI large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, artists have initiated lawsuits over copyright infringement. Developers argue for impunity because they do not directly use images and texts that are copyright protected. Yet companies such as OpenAI use human-generated media patterns to train their models, raising significant intellectual property (IP) concerns. Who owns the human-generated patterns that define an artist’s style, and who owns their use, and the distribution of those results? The Generative AI, Artists’ Intellectual Property Rights, and Collective Action (AI2CA) project is working to address these issues to ensure an ethically sustainable ecosystem which is rewarding to artists, AI developers, and producers of their work. This paper provides a description of the current issues with artists’ intellectual rights with respect to artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) followed by an overview of the AI2CA project, a description of the definitions of cognitive algorithms, and a sociotechnical analysis of the current and future possibilities for generative AI ecosystems in comic arts. The focus of the paper is on the socially engaged art (SEA) project which was created as a way to inform artists about cognitive algorithms and the authors’ systems approach to differentiating traditional value streams (TVS) that are currently protected by copyright law, versus the algorithmic value streams (AVS) which are not. The SEA project encourages artists to document their unique cognitive algorithms as a way to support the argument that these are a form of intellectual property (IP). The methodology, expected outcomes, and analysis are presented, along with a set of conclusions and description of ongoing and future work.
Gerardo, H., & Polojärvi, D., & Wade, J. (2025, June), Generative AI, Artists' Intellectual Property Rights, and Collective Action Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . 10.18260/1-2--56641
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