From 007 to Elsa, Vermillio claims it can trace percentage of AI-generated image drawn from pre-existing material

Ask Google’s AI video tool to create a film of a time-travelling doctor who flies around in a blue British phone booth and the result, unsurprisingly, resembles Doctor Who.

And if you ask OpenAI’s technology to do the same, a similar thing happens. What’s wrong with that, you may think?

The answer could be one of the biggest issues AI chiefs face as their era-defining technology becomes ever more ubiquitous in our lives.

Google and OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence is supposed to be just that – generative, meaning it develops novel answers to our questions. Ask it for a time-travelling doctor, you get one that their systems have created. But how much of that output is original?