Unintentional Infringement by Generative AI: Protecting Niche Creators and Allocating Liability in China and the United States

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_113How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Generative Artificial Intelligence; Unintentional Infringement; Niche Creators

Abstract

The rapid development of generative AI has expanded the range of content creation tools available to users, but it has also created new intellectual property challenges. This article focuses on the phenomenon of ‘unintentional infringement’—defined as copyright violations resulting from AI outputs generated in response to vague or ambiguous user instructions, where the user lacks any intent to infringe. These phenomena urgently need to be addressed because they reflect a fundamental mismatch between the traditional copyright framework—designed for human-centric creation—and the new ways in which AI technology operates, especially the “black box” nature of generative algorithms that obscure decision-making logic. Existing law struggles to address acts without malice, disproportionately impacting niche creators with limited legal resources and barriers to proving AI output infringement. This article compares and analyzes the approaches taken by U.S. law and Chinese law, drawing on judicial precedents and regulatory texts to fill gaps in cross-jurisdictional research. This article draws on Andersen v. Stability AI and proposes a new model for the allocation of liability based on the two core principles of the specificity of user prompts and the degree of creative input of users. By moving away from all-or-nothing liability allocation, the proposed framework adopts a more flexible and proportionate approach. It is beneficial to better encouraging the long-term growth of AI-powered creativity.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Boyan Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/26
TI  - Unintentional Infringement by Generative AI: Protecting Niche Creators and Allocating Liability in China and the United States
BT  - Proceeding of 2025 8th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1038
EP  - 1049
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_113
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_113
ID  - Zhang2026
ER  -