Generative AI's Collision with Copyright Law

Pamela Samuelson

International Conference on Machine Learning 2025 · Invited Talk

Pamela Samuelson, a distinguished legal scholar, delivered a compelling talk at ICML 2025, dissecting the intricate and often contentious relationship between generative AI technologies and established copyright law. The presentation illuminated the current legal landscape, marked by a surge of lawsuits challenging the legality of using copyrighted works as training data for large-scale AI models. Samuelson's core message underscored that copyright law is an undeniable and increasingly critical regulatory force for machine learning, a reality many in the technical community might wish to ignore but cannot.

AI review

Pamela Samuelson delivers a technically competent, well-structured survey of the current US copyright litigation landscape as it bears on generative AI training data. The talk is clear, practically relevant, and unusually valuable for an ML audience that is often underexposed to legal first principles. It is, however, fundamentally a legal survey talk rather than a research contribution — it synthesizes existing doctrine and ongoing cases but does not advance a novel legal thesis or produce a result the field did not have before. For ICML specifically, this earns its place as an invited…