2nd Workshop on Generative AI and Law (GenLaw ’24)

Excitement about the capabilities of generative-AI systems has touched nearly every corner of ML research and public life. Amid such exhilarating potential, there is also intensifying unease around the development and deployment of generative-AI systems. By now, it is well-known that generative models ingest vast quantities of intellectual property (IP) [8–10], which they can regurgitate verbatim [1–3, 11, 12]. Such memorization has been the continued focus of copyright-focused lawsuits [4], but memorization and copyright just scratch the surface of potential legal issues at play. In the report from our ICML workshop last year, we produced a taxonomy of emerging issues that touch on intent, privacy, misinformation and disinformation, and IP (more broadly) [5]. Indeed, based on the events of the past year alone — executive orders [13], lawsuits [4], new and amended laws [7], and labor strikes [6] — it has only become clearer that there are significant “technical, doctrinal, and policy challenges presented by law for Generative AI, and by Generative AI for law” [5]. Within this challenging and fast-moving landscape, GenLaw has played an important clarifying and cross-educational role. The first GenLaw workshop at ICML 2023 hosted over 400 attendees in person, and our workshop recording has been watched over 1k times. Collectively, our blog and workshop report have been viewed over 25k times. GenLaw has helped pose novel questions (and refine existing ones) that push the frontier of generative-AI system capabilities in ways that attend to important legal considerations. We have been told repeatedly that the keynotes, panels, and conversations at last year’s workshop have even changed the trajectories of numerous Ph.D. students’ research, and have sparked entire new lines of inquiry in law and policy.Building on our past success, our workshop will continue to develop a comprehensive and precise synthesis of the legal issues at play, and of the associated ML research questions that these issues raise. We will leverage ICML’s location in Vienna to widen the scope of our legal engagement to the UK and EU, centering keynotes and panel participation from UK and EU researchers and scholars. Drawing from the research program developed in last year’s workshop report [5], we will concentrate our program on issues of IP, mis-/dis-information, and privacy. Based on (1) enthusiasm from the community to hold another GenLaw workshop at ICML, (2) interest in response to soliciting speakers and PC members, and (3) the continued explosion of general public interest in generative AI, we expect around 300 attendees in person, and at least another 300 virtually.