CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Rafiga Malikova |
|---|---|
| Title | Copyright protection of the AI-generated works: Who owns AI-generated works? Can AI be an author? The EU and the UK approach |
| Summary | The rise of artificial intelligence surpassed human expectations and consciousness in different ways. Even if we imagined artificial intelligence as a potential conqueror and threat to human existence during previous decades, now we have reached the new decade in which it comes as a creator and, of course, challenges how intellectual property law was regulated till now. Today AI programs are trained to produce paintings, photos, music, recordings, and even an academic paper in a limited time by using a myriad of sources belonging to original creators, who spent hours, even their entire life, to possess this ability or way of thinking. From DALL-E to Stability AI. AI can make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. Also, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company Deep Mind has created software that can generate music by listening to recordings. Several months ago, fully AI-generated films were introduced during the First Annual AI Film Festival, of which the aim is to celebrate and showcase art and artists who are pushing the boundaries of AI filmmaking, achieving what was once considered impossible. From 2022, Chat GPT can write poems, novels, and even blog content which many people would not believe a machine has created them. Despite huge interest towards these newly invented programs, it creates a huge dilemma and raises a novel issue concerning the legal status of AI-generated works. Are they copyrightable? Who should own them? Considering that AI uses a significant amount of the existing data to produce new works/data, does it fulfil the originality/creativity requirement? In the case of recognition of copyright protection of AI-produced works, can these rights belong to non-human persons, specifically to AI itself? What is required for AI to be considered an author? Does this approach respond to the goals of copyright law? Another dilemma comes from the ethical point of view regarding millions of copyrighted subject matter infringed by AI while generating new “works”. Recently, the announcement of Stability AI has caused protests and lawsuits by artists who are against the violation of their intellectual property rights by AI programs. The root of this confusion stems from the fact that the AI-based art generator still needs millions of pieces of data, including original artworks of the artists who did not allow their works to be used and make a profit by the owners of the Stability AI platform. Therefore, ethical aspects of AI training would have a possible effect on answering whether AI-produced works are/should be protected by copyright law. However, they lie outside the questions asked in this thesis. It is not surprising that a large amount of global revenue comes from the outcome of AI-generated works. This is the reason why most scholars, governmental authorities, universities, and individuals commenced to consider the future of the technological improvements related to AI and try to find a way to address different interest groups, such as start-ups, technology leaders and as well as programmers in terms of granting copyright protection to the works mentioned. It is unsurprising that Elon Musk recently announced making an effort to build a new AI-based start-up company to compete with OpenAI in developing AI generative systems. |
| Supervisor | Maria José Schmidt-Kessen |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/malikova_rafiga.pdf |
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