Are We Machine or Are We Author? Rethinking Authorship and Its Ties to Copyright Amid Artificial Intelligence Creativity

ABSTRACT With the development of generative Artificial Intelligence, the question of the nature of authorship in the copyright system has returned. Disillusioned with traditional answers based on the concept of copyright, we turn the tables and consider why we ask about authorship in the first place. In the following paper, we show that the real problem of machine creativity concerning copyright law is of epistemic origin (the attribution problem), why neither granting nor not granting copyright would solve this problem, and why it has actually been replaced within the academic discourse by a pseudo‐problem. Finally, we propose an outline of a solution that goes beyond the scope of the current dispute: to reject the dogma that the author is inseparable from the copyright; to attribute works for epistemic, not only economic reasons; to (re)define machine authorship in copyright law through duties; and—going forward—to reconsider the role of the author as a legal concept.