AI Vocabulary · 06 Own Your AI
What is Intellectual Property (IP)?
Creations of the mind that can be owned and protected: your know-how, content, code, brand and data.
Intellectual property covers what you create with your mind and can protect: texts, code, designs, brands, inventions, trade secrets and, in practice, the hard-won know-how inside your company. Some of it is protected by law, such as copyright or trademarks; much of it is protected only by keeping it confidential.
AI touches IP in two directions. What you put in, such as documents, prompts and data, may be valuable and confidential. What comes out raises questions too: who owns it, and can it be protected? Those questions are covered under copyright and AI.
Why it matters for you
Your processes, client insights, prompts and examples are what make AI work well for you, and they are also what competitors would like to have. Before you upload them anywhere, know whether the provider may store them or use them for training.
Own it
Treat your context as an asset: your knowledge base, your prompt library, your evaluation examples and any fine-tuned model. Keep them in your own systems, choose tools whose terms leave ownership with you, and decide deliberately what you share.
Where it comes from
The phrase is older than you might think: a 1769 article in the British Monthly Review already used it, during debates about literary property. It became an everyday legal term much later, with the founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization in 1967. Wikipedia: Intellectual property
Related
Your AI Learning Hub
Learn the whole AI Vocabulary, step by step, and build with it. Build it. Own it.