For all its hype, artificial intelligence isn't without its psychological, environmental, and even spiritual hazards.Perhaps the most pressing concern on an individual level, though, is that it puts users on the hook for a nearly infinite number of legal hazards — even at work, as it turns out.A recent breakdown by The Register highlights the legal dangers of AI use, especially in corporate settings. If you use generative AI software to spit out graphics, press releases, logos, or videos, you and your employer could end up facing six-figure damages, the publication warns.This is thanks to the vast archive of copyrighted data that virtually all commercial generative AI models are trained on.The Register uses Nintendo's Mario as a prime example of how one might stumble, intentionally or not, into a massive copyright lawsuit, regardless of intent to infringe: if you use AI to generate a cutesy mascot for your plumbing company that looks too much like the iconic videogame character, you could easily find yourself in the legal crosshairs of the notoriously litigious corporation."The real harm comes from the attorney's fees that you can get saddled with," intellectual property lawyer Benjamin Bedrava told the publication. "Because you could have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in attorney's fees over something where the license would have been fifteen hundred dollars."For the moment, media companies seem to be going after AI startups directly, though that could change in a heartbeat depending on the size of your company, The Register notes.As of this month, there were at least twelve ongoing lawsuits from news publishers against AI platforms, alleging theft of copyrighted material, among other abuses. At the center of the debate is the commercialization of news articles, "without which [AI companies] would have no product at all," executive editor of Media News Group Frank Pine said in his commentary on the lawsuits.And earlier this summer, media giants Disney and NBC Universal brought a suit against the AI company Midjourney, essentially accusing it of running an industrial copyright infringement operation based on the studios' intellectual property.Midjourney is a perfect representation of the legal minefield users step into when dialing up AI generated graphics. Side-by-side comparisons show the software will spit out images that are remarkably similar to legally protected media; the prompt "popular movie screencap," for example, leads Midjourney to generate stills that look strikingly similar to films like Marvel's "Iron Man," and the Warner Bros' "The Dark Knight."Maybe that isn't a problem if you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which intellectual property to avoid, but given the breadth of data scraped to build these AI models and the sheer number of people now expected to use them to do their jobs, the idea of a middle-aged office worker unintentionally posting a promo featuring Groot isn't exactly unthinkable.Worse yet, the companies building generative AI have been aware of these legal problems for a while.As far back as September of 2022, Midjourney founder David Holz was brushing off concerns about copyright infringement."There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they're coming from," Holz told Forbes at the time. "It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that’s not a thing; there’s not a registry. There’s no way to find a picture on the internet, and then automatically trace it to an owner and then have any way of doing anything to authenticate it."The founder's dismissive attitude is a great reflection of the AI industry's attitude as a whole: that it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. Unfortunately, that's unlikely to fly in a court of law.More on AI: AI Industry Warns That New Lawsuit Could Destroy It EntirelyThe post Using AI for Work Could Land You on the Receiving End of a Nasty Lawsuit appeared first on Futurism.