Submission: UK Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Consultation 2024-25

Abstract

This is a submission to the UK’s Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Consultation, which closed on 25 February 2025. In this submission I argue the existing computer-generated works exception in s 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (‘CGW’) which currently covers works without a human author, attributing authorship to the person who made the arrangements necessary for the production of the work) should be amended to directly cover works produced using generative artificial intelligence (‘GAI’). I ground the argument in an assessment of GAI’s ‘creative’ capacities using creativity theory – GAI is more than a tool but not fully creative. As copyright protection focuses on cultivating human creativity, copyright should protect GAI outputs that evidence human input (i.e. prompts). However, the duration of such protection should be reduced to reflect the lopsided balance of creative ‘labour’ between a user (entering prompts) and the AI (processing prompts via algorithms trained on datasets). The current CGW exception is a balanced solution in principle due to its reduced duration relative to most other original works (50 years vs 70 years after the author’s death). However, I recommend various amendments to the provision to address issues of authorship and originality, so that it can more expressly target GAI-produced works with the requisite human input.