Decoding Authorship: Is There Really no Place for an Algorithmic Author Under Copyright Law?

Abstract

The third technological revolution is dragging the world, incrementally but surely, into an era where Artificial Intelligent (AI) is taking over cultural production from human beings. Nevertheless, authorship remains largely defined in humanistic terms across Western cultures as a projection of the image of the “romantic author” emanating from the 18th century. Although it is not spelt out in the law, judges do seem to demonstrate remarked reluctance to grant authorship status to AI. The developments in three important areas may enable a reconstruction of the human-centric authorship ideology: a structural pro-corporate prejudice, a low threshold for originality, and the judicial avoidance of aesthetic assessment. Distilled to its essence, AI can be as equally creative as human beings as they follow the same laws of cultural production. In dealing with the resulting ownership issue of AI authorship, an altered “work made for hire” doctrine is proposed as a promising solution design template.