LW4641 Chap.5 Authorship and AI Generated Content
Authorship and AI Generated Content
The question the course puts to AI
One stated aim of this course is to understand how artificial intelligence has challenged, and may reshape, copyright's central doctrines. Authorship is where the pressure is greatest.
The course materials record that no court has recognised copyright in a work made wholly by a non-human, so the practical question is how much human contribution is enough and how it has to show in the result.
Three positions on a spectrum
The United States Copyright Office sorts claims into three groups.
Prompts alone are treated as insufficient, because the system fills the gaps between instructions and the same prompt yields different results, so the user controls the idea but not its expression. Where a human supplies an expressive input that remains perceptible in the output, protection covers that input.
Where a human selects, modifies and arranges AI material with enough creativity, the result can be original as a whole.
Decisions that mark the line
Burrow-Giles v Sarony held long ago that a photographer who posed and arranged a portrait was its author despite the camera.
In the Suryast matter a style-transfer image was refused registration for want of creative control, while in the Rose Enigma matter registration was limited to the human pictorial elements that stayed perceptible.
The Beijing Internet Court in Li v Liu took a process-focused view and held that an image built through repeated choices of prompts, parameters and layout was original.
Hong Kong's own rule
Section 11(3) of the Copyright Ordinance takes the author of a computer-generated literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work to be the person who undertook the arrangements necessary for its creation, and s198(1) defines computer-generated as generated in circumstances with no human author.
Such works last fifty years from the year they were made. The government consultation treated AI output as falling within these provisions; critics point to an originality paradox and to the many people who might claim to have made the arrangements.
What this chapter covers
- 01
No accepted non-human author
- 02
Prompts alone and the black box problem
- 03
Expressive inputs that remain perceptible
- 04
Selection, modification and arrangement
- 05
Burrow-Giles, Suryast and Rose Enigma
- 06
Li v Liu in the Beijing Internet Court
- 07
Computer-generated works under s11(3) and s198
Worked example · free
Decide who, if anyone, is the author of an AI image
- 3Assess the first designer's contribution.
- 3Assess the second designer's contribution, input and arrangement separately.
- 2Apply Hong Kong's computer-generated works rule and conclude.
Key terms
- Prompt
- The input a user gives a generative system, such as text or an image, describing the output wanted.
- Expressive Input
- A human-authored work fed into an AI system, protected in the output only so far as it remains perceptible there.
- Computer-generated Work
- Under s198(1), a work generated by computer in circumstances where there is no human author; s11(3) names the person who made the arrangements as its author.
- Human Authorship
- The requirement, applied in United States registration practice and litigation, that a person, not a machine, originate the work.
Authorship and AI Generated Content FAQ
Is an image made with an AI tool protected by copyright in Hong Kong?
It may be. Section 11(3) of the Copyright Ordinance treats the person who made the arrangements for a computer-generated work as its author, and the government consultation took the view that AI output falls within that rule. The work still has to be original, which is where critics say the provision struggles.
Does writing a detailed prompt make me an author?
On the approach in the course materials, usually not by itself. The system fills the gaps between instructions and the same prompt gives different results, so the prompt fixes an idea rather than its expression. Repeated prompting has been described as rolling the dice rather than painting.
How long does copyright last in a computer-generated work?
Under s17(6) of the Ordinance, fifty years counted from the close of the year the work was made, rather than for the life of an author plus fifty years, because by definition there is no human author whose life can be measured.
Exam move
Take three AI images of your own with increasing human control: a bare prompt, an uploaded sketch, and a heavily edited composite. For each, write who the author is under s11(3), under the United States approach and under Li v Liu. Three short paragraphs will give you material for both parts of the paper.
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