While it's only March, it seems fair to say that the wide release of OpenAI's ChatGPT (chat generative pre-trained transformer) and the novel uses that businesses, entrepreneurs, teachers, students, and tech enthusiasts find for the tool will continue to dominate technology news headlines in 2023. In addition to ChatGPT, there is a flood of other artificial intelligence technology and related services anticipated, and it is important for legal counsel to understand the basics of this technology from an intellectual property perspective, including, most importantly, the various inputs that are required to build a useful artificial intelligence tool via machine learning.

Over the past decade, data scientists and software developers have made incredible advances in the field of artificial intelligence. Algorithmic modeling for artificial intelligence benefits from machine learning by training models on vast data sets. The size and richness of the data set correlate to the precision and value of the models' outputs. Another corollary of this has been that the less complicated an output the modeler is looking for, the more accurate and practically useful such output will be.