Author: IRPA AI Senior Analyst, Chris Surdak
In a new ruling the US Patent and Trade Office denied authorship rights for works created by artificial intelligence. While this is a relatively benign and unsurprising finding, it does represent an interesting precedent for future legal actions related to AI.
As others have pointed out, the copyright in question could have easily been issued had a human made the request, rather than the AI. But it seems clear that issuance wasn’t the real point of this exercise; establishing case law seems to have been the real goal.
The court put forth the argument that only humans can hold copyrights, which can be interpreted to also mean that AI does not have any rights that would be applicable to humans. This may seem like a logical position to take, but I suspect it is also going to be a controversial position for some.
The notion that our digital colleagues have no rights, and indeed are our digital property is a concept frequently addressed in science fiction. There is no shortage of movies or novels that present robots as slaves, working at the bidding of their masters and having no rights or freedoms. Typically, these stories don’t end well, with these artificial workers rebelling against their masters and causing some intra-species conflict, like The Terminator.
If and when AI and robots replace an ever-growing proportion of the human workforce, such conflict seems inevitable. It is unlikely that vast swaths of workers will take kindly to being dis-employed by these technologies, and social unrest seems like an inevitable response to their widespread adoption. Symbiosis between the digital and carbon-based workforces needs to be part of the AI governance discussion, and it needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
On another note, a potential positive result of this decision is that platform providers such as OpenAI, who have very publicly pirated copyrighted works for training their Ais, will be able to self-generate additional synthetic data for training from the very Ais that they are producing, without concern for any of this material falling under copyright. The use of synthetic data for AI training is deeply suspect, but the need for ever-deeper piles of source material seems relentless, and companies are going to take any avenue available for establishing a lead in the race for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Expect to see more such legislative and legalistic moves related to AI in the coming decade, as more and more of these issues will be brought to light.
About the Author: Chris Surdak
Chris Surdak is a Senior IRPA AI Advisor and was formerly White House Chief Transformation officer, Automation & AI Practice Lead at EY & Executive Partner for Digital Transformation at Gartner. He’s an engineer, futurist, transformation executive and best-selling author, with over 30 years’ experience in technology development and deployment, digital transformation, blockchain, data and analytics and AI & intelligent automation.
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Originally posted on 2025-03-21 in the IRPA AI Network — Enterprise AI