Today, with the recent boom of Artificial Intelligence (AI), more and more creative works are being generated by AIs that are capable of learning without being programmed by a human. They have become a new source of creativity. IBM, for instance, describes its Watson, a computer system developed by themselves, as one of a new generation of machines capable of “computational creativity.” Google has started funding an AI program that will write local news articles. In 2016, a short novel written by a computer program developed in Japan reached the second round of a national literary prize. Deep Mind, an AI company, has created software that can generate music by listening to recordings.
While AI machines learn from the data provided by programmers to generate a new piece of work by making independent decisions throughout the process to determine what the new work looks like, the work is actually created by the AI itself -referred to as a neural network- in a process akin to the thought processes of humans. This situation takes us back to copyright history and theory, and emerge some central doctrinal questions: What authorship is, or what it should be, and whether authorship should require human genius, or human creativity, or any human input at all, in copyright law. My research will examine these questions.