WIPO Conversation on Intellectual Property and Frontier Technologies

What is the WIPO Conversation?

The WIPO Conversation is an open, inclusive, multi-stakeholder forum intended to provide stakeholders with a leading, global setting to discuss the impact of frontier technologies on all IP rights and to bridge the existing information gap in this fast moving and complex field.

The sessions of the Conversation have a truly global reach. Over the last 5 years, almost 9’000 people have participated in the WIPO Conversation, from 172 countries, including Member States, academia, IP professionals and enterprises.

Ninth session of the WIPO Conversation on "Training the Machines – Bytes, Rights and the Copyright Conundrum"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is accelerating technological progress, revolutionizing industries, and reshaping the way we interact with each other and the information around us. Advances in AI models, especially large language models, and GenAI, are revolutionizing many areas of our lives and proving to be a powerful tool for how we innovate and create. 

Training data is central to the success of all current AI systems. The quality of data directly influences the performance and reliability of AI systems across various applications, and access to diverse training data is also one of the important safeguards against AI bias.

A great proportion of the training data currently used by large language models is collected from publicly available sources, for example, by scaping the Internet. The data sets often contain works such as text, images, designs, and music, which are copyright protected.

The ninth session of the WIPO Conversation provided a platform for deep exploration, aiming to understand the multifaceted relationship between training data and IP. By evaluating current practices, proposing practical solutions, and envisioning future directions, this session fostered a holistic understanding of the impact of training data on the IP landscape.