Annual Meeting Twin Cities North Chamber

The recent emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) “chatbot” applications like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Perplexity AI raises novel business, legal, and public policy issues for AI application owners, users, and public policy makers overseeing both. Owners developing and commercializing AI applications need to think about how to price them for users, protect them from imitation by rivals, and “feed” them with the proper information. Users need to understand what publicly available AI applications can and can’t do in comparison to proprietary AI applications currently only available under license. Policy makers need to set industry standards and safeguards permitting owners to share best practices, users to assess value for money, and the broader public to have more confidence that AI applications will support rather than subvert economic growth and institutional integrity.  

Join Professor Paul Vaaler of the University of Minnesota’s Law School and Carlson School of Management for a survey of these issues and a discussion of their implications for your businesses and communities. Find out how intellectual property protections like patents, copyrights, and trade secrets apply (or don’t) to AI applications. Learn about how the US federal government is brokering agreements with Big Tech firms meant to set basic AI application technology disclosure standards. Improve your understanding about the safety of business and personal data in an emerging era of 24/7 data “scraping” by AI applications “writing” lesson plans for your daughter’s middle school social science teacher or re-writing business organization charts rendering your job redundant. Come away better informed about who owns AI and what that ownership means for us all.