ChatGPT: what the law says about who owns the copyright of AI-generated content; The Conversation, April 17, 2023

Sercan Ozcan, University of Portsmouth; Joe Sekhon, Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, University of Portsmouth; Oleksandra Ozcan, Lecturer, University of Portsmouth, The Conversation; , ChatGPT: what the law says about who owns the copyright of AI-generated content

"The AI chatbot ChatGPT produces content that can appear to have been created by a human. There are many proposed uses for the technology, but its impressive capabilities raise important questions about ownership of the content.

UK legislation has a definition for computer-generated works. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 they are “generated by computer in circumstances such that there is no human author of the work”. The law suggests content generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) can be protected by copyright. However, the original sources of answers generated by AI chatbots can be difficult to trace – and they might include copyrighted works.

The first question is whether ChatGPT should be allowed to use original content generated by third parties to generate its responses. The second is whether only humans can be credited as the authors of AI-generated content, or whether the AI itself can be regarded as an author – particularly when that output is creative."