AI Strategy Council in Japan: The Need to Promote the Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Clarify Laws

There is an opinion that the government’s involvement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) may lead to excessive regulation and corruption.  Certainly, there would be instances where government engagement would not lead to the development of industry in Japan.  However, in order to promote the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it will be necessary to clarify Japanese laws.  It seems necessary to develop legislation that promotes the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) rather than excessive regulation that restricts such use.

First, in relation to generative AI, etc., it is necessary to clarify the relationship with Japanese Copyright Law.  Japan has already enacted provisions that are useful for the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI), such as Article 30-4 of the Copyright Law, which can be foresight.

Although, Article 30-4 of the Copyright Law is very useful, from the viewpoint of increasing the potential of artificial intelligence (AI), further clarification is necessary.  For example, there are issues in relation to terms of use.  It is necessary to clarify by legislation the relationship with terms of use, including how to treat cases where terms of use are inconsistent with provisions such as Article 30-4 of the Copyright Law.

In addition, terms of use can be diverse, long and difficult to understand, and the governing law may not always be Japanese laws.  From the viewpoint of promoting the use of artificial intelligence (AI), it will be necessary to establish standard terms of use for artificial intelligence (AI) that anyone can understand.

The Government of Japan Standard Terms of Use or the Creative Commons License may be useful as references for easy-to-understand standard terms of use, etc.  However, from the viewpoint of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), it is necessary to formulate new standard terms of use that focus on the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI), and clarify the interpretations of such standard terms in a way that the government and private sectors can utilize.  In doing so, it will be necessary to place emphasis on ease of understanding so that ordinary people can easily understand the standard terms.

In addition, one problem in Japan is that legal practice is not clear because the number of judicial precedents is too small to clarify.  If uncertainty remains and there are portions that impede the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI), it will be necessary to clarify such portions by legislation, guidelines, etc., and to make necessary revisions as the times progress.  Alternatively, in the practice of courts, it may be useful to utilize the third-party solicitation system (Article 105-2-11 of the Patent Law; applied mutatis mutandis in Article 65(6) of the Patent Law and Article 30 of the Utility Model Law) introduced by the 2021 Patent Law Amendment 2021 (Law No. 42 of 2021) to obtain opinions from third parties and clarify the treatment by judicial precedents.  Currently, the introduced system concerns patent infringement lawsuits, etc.  However, it will be useful to introduce the system to other intellectual property cases and general court cases, as in the system of Amicus Brief in the United States.

The issue will also be how to realize the interests of copyright holders and those who produce AI learning data not covered by copyright.  It will be necessary to have a system where regular income can be obtained from the government if data are registered as AI learning data, in order to facilitate the utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This will be important as realizing Data Income (DI) for AI learning data.  The author proposed the concept of Cooperation Income (CI) and Data Income (DI) as legal infrastructure for the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) to complement Basic Income (BI) (Yoshinori Okamoto: “Artificial General Intelligence and Intellectual Property”, JSAI SIG-AGI-023-02 (2023)). In response to the problem of so-called technological unemployment caused by the development of artificial intelligence (AI), the realization of Basic Income (BI) has been discussed, but it will be useful to comprehensively discuss Basic Income (BI), Cooperation Income (CI) and Data Income (DI).

Copyright issues could impede the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) under the current situation.  It would be desirable to create a society where both will be realized at the same time: (1) copyright holders have opportunities to earn income by Data Income (DI) to promote the registration of copyrighted works as learning data for artificial intelligence (AI) and (2) people can utilize artificial intelligence (AI) without worrying about copyright.

Further, Data Income (DI) will be important to facilitate the creation of data not covered by copyrights. For example, ChatGPT differs in performance between English versions based on large amounts of data, and Japanese versions based on relatively little data.  In this way, how much high-quality AI learning data can be prepared is directly related to the performance of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In the future, economic impacts from the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to grow, and there will be an era where not only Gross Domestic Products (GDP) but also how much AI is utilized (“Gross AI Utilization” (GAU)) will become important.  In addition, total production of AI learning data (“Gross Data Product” (GDP)) will become important as another new concept of GDP.

The AI Strategy Council in Japan is expected to develop legal infrastructure for the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI).  In order to do so, we believe that one perspective is to promote the use of artificial intelligence (AI), by reducing legal uncertainty as much as possible.