AI Copyright Patents

Who should own AI-assisted content?

Currently many legal experts believe that if an AI assists you in a creative activity you are not able to obtain a copyright or patent for that material. Apparently spell check and text completion doesn’t count, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear line in either amount of assist or level of AI contribution.

Some of the issues, problems, questions that I see:

• Focusing only on the use of an AI doesn’t recognize the important and essential contributions made by the participating human(s)
• The human contribution (prompts) are not directly detectable in the output so it is impossible to allocate the amount of creative contribution made by the human and the AI
• It is not measurable how much of the AIs creative output directly comes from its learning corpus. Like with human plagiarism situations such a clear linkage is most easily demonstrated in only the most agreougous situations
• If commercial AI supplier ownership is assumed, then the AI supplier is the only one who can claim ownership of the output. This seems to be a very bad outcome for society and lead to know one using commercial AI suppliers.
• The owner of a machine is presumed to own the output of the machine. It is not owned whoever designed the machine and sold it, nor is the output owned by raw material suppliers.
• AI training seems similar to that of a human student who may use a copyrighted text book in their learning, but is not required to pay the text book author for use of the learned material. (Do I need to pay the author of my calculus text book every time I use calculus?)

The only obvious solution seems to be that outside of some contractural releationship with the AI owner ownership passes to the humans (corporations). It does seem reasonable to recognize that the AI did have a creative authorship involvement, but I don’t see a socieatble benefit to adding a financial or legal burden to the human creative.

Autonomous creation

So what happens if the AI creates something without human involvement? Is a prompt as general as “tell me a story” sufficient to claim human creative authorship?