Google said it would protect customers who use some of its generative artificial intelligence (AI) products if they are sued for copyright infringement.

As reported by The Verge, Friday, Google announced in a blog post that customers who use products that are now embedded with generative AI features will be protected. The tech giant is trying to allay growing concerns that generative AI could run afoul of copyright rules.

Specifically, seven products are mentioned that will be legally protected, namely Duet AI in Workspace (including text generated in Google Docs and Gmail as well as images in Google Slides and Google Meet), Duet AI in Google Cloud, Vertex AI Search, Vertex AI Conversation , Vertex AI Text Embedding API, Visual Captioning in Vertex AI, and Codey API. Google's Bard search tool was not mentioned.

"If you are sued on copyright grounds, we will be responsible for any potential legal risks," Google said.

Google said it would follow a “two-pronged, industry-first approach” to intellectual property redress, which will include training data and results generated from its foundation models. This means, if someone is sued because Google's training data uses copyrighted material, Google will assume the legal risk.

The company said that the indemnification around training data is not actually a new protection. However, Google acknowledged that customers wanted explicit clarification that its protections cover the possibility that training data harvests copyrighted information.

Google will also protect users if they are sued for the results they get after using its foundation model. For example, if they produce sentences that are similar to published work.

The company notes that those protections only apply if the user does not attempt to intentionally create or use the resulting results to violate the rights of others.

Not only Google, Microsoft also announced that they will be legally responsible for enterprise users of Copilot products. Adobe said it will protect enterprise customers who use Firefly against copyright, privacy and publicity rights claims.

Copyright issues have dogged generative AI platforms, and more lawsuits have now been filed against various companies for allegedly violating copyright. One of the most recent lawsuits was filed by famous authors such as George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jodi Picoult.

Google is facing a proposed class action lawsuit for allegedly harvesting personal information and copyrighted data to train AI models.