Can implement protections. And id like to especially thank my friend and colleague, Ranking Member, tom tillis and his staff for working with us on such a collaborative basis to put this hearing together. Welcome back from vilnius, senator tillis was over at the nato summit and im thrilled , hes able to join us and were able to do this hearing today. This is our second hearing in as many months on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and intellectual property law and policy. You and your team have been great partners in pursuing this. If you will indulge me for a moment, senator, before i proceed with my remarks, id like to ask that we play just a little clip of something to frame the challenges of this this topic. Made with the permission of all the relevant rights holders. [laughter] start spreading the news. Hey, i got something to say. Its growing its own way of learning the rules today. Each digital mind, they are making the headlines. Creating new sounds in a world. Thank you for your forbearance. Yes a round of applause is , certainly welcome. [laughter] my team actually produced a version of that where it is a duet between me and Frank Sinatra. But my voice came out so horribly flat. I didnt want to impose that on any of you. Thank you, mr. Chair for your judgment. [laughter] creating the song ai ai to the tune of new york, new york was great fun and i appreciate my team that works so hard on pulling that off. But the very existence of it highlights a couple of the core questions around copyright intelligence. Chat gpt wrote the lyrics following the style of new york, new york although perhaps not quite as moving and inspiring as the original words her generative ai tool was used to take mr. Sinatras recorded songs and his voice and his phrasing and his style and set that to music. So a couple of those core questions, did chatgpt infringe the copyright on New York New York when it drafted lyrics representing its lyrical style . What about the ai tool that set those lyrics to music . Did either that tool or did i run afoul of mr. Sinatras rights by mimicking his voice in my case . No, because we got specific approval. Or did i just use ai tools to enhance my own creativity . And if so, should this newly created song be entitled to copyright protection . These are just a few of the questions i hope we will explore with our panel of talented and insightful witnesses as we consider the impact of Artificial Intelligence on copyright law and policy and the Creative Community. As we all know, ai is rapidly developing. Generative ai tools have brought many new people into the creative fold and have opened new avenues for innovation. People who may not have ever considered themselves creatives are now using these tools to produce new works of art. Artists themselves have used ai tools to enhance their own creativity. Paul mccartney recently made headlines announcing that ai helped create the very last beatles song 50 years after the band broke up. As ive previewed ai creates new copyright law issues including whether using copyrighted content to train ai models is Copyright Infringement, whether ai generated content should be , given copyright protection. And many more. These questions are working their way through the courts, how the courts decide them and the decisions we make here in the senate and in congress about how to respect and reinforce existing copyright protections and works will have significant consequences not just for the Creative Community, but our overall competitiveness as a country. While generative ai models are trained on copyrighted content ip considerations havent been , included or sufficiently considered in proposed ip Regulatory Frameworks here in the us. In contrast, some of our competitors recognize ip policy as an important tool. The eu is currently planning to require ai companies to publish the copyrighted materials used in training models. The uk provides copyright protection for Computer Generated works. These are just some initial concerns and i think there are , initial steps that we can take to ensure sustained us leadership on Artificial Intelligence. First, its critical to include ip considerations in any Regulatory Framework for Artificial Intelligence and to give our Copyright Office and this framework a seat at the table. We should also consider whether changes to our copyright laws or whole new protections like a federal right of publicity may be necessary to strike the right balance between creators rights and ais ability to enhance innovation and creativity. Im excited to explore these issues today. Weve got a great panel and great partner and great members of the committee with senator tillis cooperation. Weve assembled this wonderful panel. Ill introduce them shortly, but first, ill turn it over to my Ranking Member, senator tom tillis. Thank you, mr. Chairman and thanks for everyone here. Its great to see the number of participants in the audience. Its even more amazing to see an equal number who would like to get in here, but who says ai and ip cant be sexy . But you know, in all seriousness, i appreciate that were having another hearing on the opportunity to highlight the importance of intellectual property when it comes to emerging technologies. And today were talking about ai. During our last hearing, we really discussed the impact of ai on a patent in a patent context which explored ideas such as whether or not ai can be considered an inventor, and it cannot and hopefully it will not in the future. But while many of these issues we discussed in the last hearing were perspective, the Creative Community is experiencing immediate and acute challenges due to the impact of generative ai in a copyright context. Strong, reliable, predictable ip rights are paramount to incentivizing Us Innovation and creativity. Its this innovation and creativity that fuels growth of our countrys prosperity and drives Enormous Economic growth. In fact, Core Copyright Industries add at 1. 8 trillion of value to us gdp. Accounting for almost 8 of the us economy. These Copyright Industries also employed 9. 6 million American Workers. The sales of major us copyright products overseas markets also constitute 230 billion and outpaced exports of other major us industries. Advances in generative ai have raised new questions regarding how copyright principles such as authorship, infringement and fair use will apply to content created or used by ai. We must not only consider how our current ip laws apply to the field of generative ai, but also what changes if any may be necessary to incentivize future ai innovators and creators. So chairman coons, im happy to have this committee. Ill submit the remainder of my statement for the record. But for those of you who have watched our committee over the past several congresses where either senator coons or i were and Ranking Member or chairmanship, i think if anything, i hope people understand that were very thorough and were very persistent in our approach and were inclusive. Ive told everyone on this issue, whichever end of the spectrum youre at if youre at , the table and the work groups, were gonna find a reasonable solution and compromises. If youre outside of the work group process and youre just taking shots at it, you may find yourself on the table from my perspective. So we encourage you to get to the table and make what were doing better. The reason why i think its so important and im glad the ip subcommittee is leading on this in terms of formal hearings with the focus on potentially drafting legislation is i think we run the risk of some in congress who think ai is bads e future. Im not in that camp. I think that ai is good. Its something that i first developed expertise in back in the late eighties and have followed it ever since. Its a matter of getting the regulatory construct, the intellectual property construct, all the other underlying policies that you need when a positive term, Disruptive Technology hits the field. So the reason that we need to move forward, address potential concerns is precisely because i want the United States to lead an innovation. And so much innovation is going to be premised on properly exploiting the capabilities responsibly. And thats what i hope we learn in this hearing and subsequent hearings and work groups. So thank you all for being here and thank you mr. Chair for having the hearing. Sen. Coons thank you, senator tillis. Im now going to turn to our witness panel. Today we welcome five witnesses , to testify about the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and copyright law. Our first witness is mr. Ben brooks, head of Public Policy at stability ai, a company that develops a range of ai models that help users generate images, text, audio and video. Next, we have dana rao executive vp general counsel and chief trust officer at adobe. Id like to be chief trust officer in the United States. They dont have titles like that. Mr. Rao leads adobes Legal Security and policy organization including adobes content Authenticity Initiative which promotes Transparency Principles around the use of ai. Next, we have professor matthew sag, a professor of law and Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and data science at Emory University school of law. Professor sag is a leading us authority on the fair use doctrine in copyright law and its implications for researchers in text data mining, Machine Learning and ai. Next, well hear from karla ortiz an artist, a concept artist, illustrator, and fine artist who has worked on a variety of wellknown and widely enjoyed projects including jurassic world, black panther, loki, and she is most famous for designing in my assessment at least for designing Doctor Strange for marvels first Doctor Strange film. Welcome. Last but certainly not least we have jeffrey harleston, general counsel and executive vp of business and Legal Affairs for Universal Music Group. Mr. Harleston is responsible for overseeing business transactions, contracts litigation for all of Universal Music Groups worldwide operations in more than 60 countries. After i swear all of you in, each of you will have five minutes to make an opening statement. Well then proceed to questioning each senator depending on attendance, questioning and time. We will have a first round of five minutes. We may well have a second round of five minutes and we may be the only two left for a third round of five minutes, but well see. So could all the witnesses please stand to be sworn in . Please raise your right hand. Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to give before this committee will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you god . Thank you. Mr. Brooks, you may proceed with your opening statement. Thank you, chair coons and Ranking Member tillis for the opportunity to testify today. Ai can help to unlock creativity, drive, innovation and open up new opportunities for creators and entrepreneurs across the United States. As with any groundbreaking technology, ai raises important questions and we recognize the depth of concern among creators. While we dont have all the answers, were committed to an open and constructive dialogue. And were actively working to address emerging concerns through new Technology Standards and good practices at stability ai. Our goal is to unlock ais potential. We develop a range of ai models. These models are essentially Software Programs that can help a user to create new content. Our flagship model, Stable Diffusion can take plain language instructions from a user and help to produce a new image. Were also working on research for safe language models that can help to produce new passages of text or software code. Ai is a tool that can help to accelerate the creative process. In our written testimony, we shared examples of how broadway designers, architects, photographers and researchers are using our models to boost their productivity, experiment with new concepts or even study new approaches to diagnosing complex medical disorders. We are committed to releasing our models openly with appropriate safeguards. That means we share the Underlying Software as a public resource. Creators, entrepreneurs and researchers can customize these models to develop their own ai tools, build their own ai businesses and find novel applications for ai that best support their work. Importantly, open models are transparent. We can look under the hood to scrutinize the technology for safety, performance and bias. These ai models study vast amounts of data to understand the subtle relationships between words, ideas and visual or textual features. Much like a person visiting an art gallery or library to learn how to draw or how to write. They learn the irreducible facts and structures that make up our systems of communication. And through this process, they develop an adaptable body of knowledge that they can then apply to help produce new and unseen content. In other words, compositions that did not appear in the Training Data and may not have appeared anywhere else. These models dont rely on a single work in their Training Data nor do they store that Training Data. But instead they learn by observing recurring patterns over billions of images and trillions of words of text. We believe that developing these models is an acceptable and socially beneficial use of existing content that is permitted by fair use and helps to promote the progress of science and useful arts, fair. Fair use and a culture of open learning is essential to recent developments in ai. It is essential to help make ai useful, safe, unbiased and it is doubtful that these groundbreaking technologies would be possible without it. The us has established Global Leadership in ai thanks in part to an adaptable and principlesbased fair use doctrine that balances creative rights with open innovation. We acknowledge emerging concerns, and these are early days and we dont have all the answers. But were actively working to address these concerns, as i say, through Technology Standards and good practices. First, we have committed to voluntary optouts so that creators can choose if they dont want their online work to be used for ai training. Weve received optout requests for over 160 million images to date, and were incorporating these into upcoming training. Were hoping to develop digital s optout labels as well that follow the content wherever it goes on the internet. Second, were implementing features to help users and tech platforms identify ai content. Images generated through our platform can be digitally stamped with metadata and water marks to indicate if the content was generated with ai. These signals can help ensure that users exercise appropriate care when interacting with ai content and help tech platforms distinguish ai content before amplifying it online. We welcome adobes leadership in driving the development of some of these open standards. Third, weve developed layers of mitigations to make it easier to do the right thing with ai and harder to do the wrong thing. Today, we filter data sets for unsafe content. We test and evaluate our models before release. We apply ethical use licenses, disclose known risks, filter content generated through our Computing Services and implement new techniques to mitigate bias. As we integrate ai into the Digital Economy, we believe the Community Human generated art and perhaps value it at a premium. Smartphones didnt destroy photography, and word processes didnt diminish literature. Despite radically transforming the economics of creation. Instead, they gave rise to new demand for services, new markets for content and new creators. We expect the same will be true of ai. And we welcome an ongoing dialogue with the Creative Community about the fair deployment of these technologies. Thank you for the opportunity to testify and we welcome your questions. Sen. Coons thank you, mr. Brooks. Mr. Rao. Mr. Rao chair coons, Ranking Member tillerson, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify here today. My name is dana rao and im general counsel and as senator coons noted, chief trust officer at adobe. Im happy to provide you with a secret certificate. You need to get that title if youd like after the hearing. Since our founding in 1982, adobe has pioneered transformative technologies and all types of digital creation from Digital Documents like pdf to image editing with photoshop. Our products allow our customers who range from aspiring artists to wartime photojournalists to advertisers and