Authorship and Advancement in the Age of AI: How Will We Protect Our Creativity?
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The transformative powers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across many industries has ushered in a fierce debate on how human and machine inventions can be discerned, and the legal definitions of authorship. As AI-generated works grow in volume and sophistication, Intellectual Property (IP) law faces unprecedented issues with protecting human originality and creativity.
The ability of current IP laws to differentiate between natural and artificially-generated works are dubious. IP laws traditionally grant ownership rights to human creators, but AI confounds this definition by producing works autonomously and with minimal human guidance. At the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s Digital Arts Competition, the 1st Prize painting was produced by the designer Jason Allen who fed the ‘Midjourney’ AI programme 80 tailored text prompts. This created several overlapped and edited images depicting a ‘space opera’. Instances of AI-generated art underscore the ambiguity of authorship when the creator is non-human, especially as the Colorado State Fair’s submission guidelines did not prohibit AI assistance. This emphasises wider concerns about who should hold copyright for AI-created works and how to prevent instances where AI is used to bypass copyright restrictions on human-authored content.
Increasingly, AI is influencing technological inventions, presenting new challenges for existing patent regulations. AI-driven innovations in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and engineering may render current patent frameworks, which are structured around human inventorship, as insufficient. Debates amongst several top law firms, such as Taylor Wessing, are continuous about whether AI should be recognized as an author under patent law or if new categories should be created to address AI’s contributions specifically as an ‘inventor’ or a ‘co-inventor’. Without adaptation, the patent system risks becoming outdated, potentially stifling innovation rather than promoting it.
Reforming IP law should aim at better defining the parameters of human versus AI authorship. Some advocate for labelling standards indicating whether a work was created by AI or human effort. Social networking site ‘Meta’ recently implemented ‘AI info’ labels to counteract the exploitative effects of AI infringement. Additionally, new technologies, such as blockchain, could be employed to trace and verify the authorship of creative works by recording the proof of the period of existence and Rights Management information for a certain creation. This could potentially assist in the formation of a digital registry of undocumented IP rights, thereby protecting an individual’s innovative contribution. Developing robust mechanisms such as these to protect human-generated content from AI infringement would help to overcome current threats posed by AI's stealthy replication capabilities.
AI’s emergence in the public sphere challenges the very foundations of IP law. To preserve human creativity and ensure equitable recognition of contributions, policies must be crafted to recognize the unique nature of AI-generated works. Not only will this safeguard human authorship, it is essential to sustaining innovation in the age of AI.