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Human Authorship in Copyright Law examines one of the most consequential questions emerging in the age of generative AI: can copyright law continue to function without a human author at its centre?
As AI systems increasingly generate text, images, music, and audiovisual content with minimal human intervention, longstanding assumptions around originality, authorship, ownership, and creative labour are beginning to shift. Against this backdrop, the primer explores how copyright systems across jurisdictions have historically understood the idea of the author and why the requirement of human creativity continues to remain doctrinally significant.
The publication traces evolving legal approaches across the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, China, India, and other major jurisdictions, while unpacking emerging tensions around AI-generated outputs, public domain principles, and the future of creative rights.
What the Primer Explores
β’ Why copyright law was historically designed around human creative labour
β’ Whether AI-generated outputs should attract copyright protection at all
β’ How different jurisdictions are approaching AI authorship and originality
β’ The growing debate around AI as a tool versus AI as a co-author
β’ The implications of AI-generated content for creative industries and copyright systems globally
As generative AI becomes increasingly embedded within creative and commercial ecosystems, these debates are no longer theoretical. They are beginning to shape the future of innovation, ownership, and the boundaries of intellectual property law itself.
But if AI systems can generate expressive works at scale, what exactly remains uniquely human within copyright doctrine?
And if copyright exists to protect human creative labour, does that rationale still hold when the βcreatorβ is non-human?
Authored by Akshat Agrawal, Founder, AASA Chambers | Visiting Fellow, The Dialogue, this publication is part of The Dialogueβs Primer Series on AI & Copyright.
Download the full primer to explore the doctrinal foundations, comparative legal developments, and unresolved policy questions shaping the future of authorship in the AI era.
