Who Owns AI's Output?

In November 2022, ChatGPT took the world by storm, demonstrating that a chatbot could be sufficiently refined to be practical and useful (unlike earlier attempts like Microsoft's disastrous Tay chatbot back in 2016). Now, after just two short years, generative AI technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, progressing quickly from simple text and image generation tools to advanced multimodal models that produce highly competent outputs across text, images, video, audio, and code. Generative AI is not just generating content and art and code, however. It also is generating tons of problems for business and society, especially when it comes to figuring out who owns the outputs produced by these systems. After all, individuals and companies are increasingly using generative AI to generate sophisticated, commercially valuable outputs.