Safeguarding Copyright Protection in AI Lead Reign: Demystifying the Enforcement through Judicial Precedents

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) in literary authorship has raised significant ethical, legal, and intellectual property concerns. Imagine purchasing a book by your favourite author, only to discover later that it was written using AI. While some readers might not mind, others value the authentic expression of the author’s own thoughts, not computer-generated content which raises ethical concern in the literary world. Due to advancements in machine learning and generative AI, driven by the vast amounts of data fed into these systems, protected works are in threat of being treated as mere training data for AI models. When the AI companies which may or may not have the legal rights to use such protected works, generate content based on user prompts, the user might unknowingly incorporate someone else’s copyrighted material, often without proper citation or acknowledgment. The integration of AI in literary authorship presents significant challenges to existing copyright laws and ethical standards, particularly concerning the unauthorized use of copyrighted material in AI training. It is hypothesized by the author that the liability for copyright infringement primarily lies with the user of the AI-generated work, as they are responsible for the plagiarized content and didn’t deploy their own novel thoughts, thereby lacking intellectual footing. Furthermore, since AI is not a natural person and copyright protection is granted only to human authors, literary works created using AI do not qualify for protection under current laws. This paper examines the challenges of AI-generated literary works, focusing on the potential infringement of copyrighted material used in training AI models. It explores the ethics of using protected works without the authors’ consent and addresses the issue of liability. The paper also investigates the extent of copyright protection for AI-assisted literary works and the criteria for determining authorship in this context. By analysing these issues, the author aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on AI, authorship, and intellectual property rights.