Commentary: If AI does 99% of the work, should its human creator receive 100% of the copyright?

"If AI does ninety-nine per cent of the work, should you get one hundred per cent of the copyright?

"Granting copyright protection for creative works made using AI isn't about protecting a machine. It's about creating incentives to generate creative content and recognising that AI can help unleash a tidal wave of human creativity.

"Photography once transformed art over objections that it wasn't creative. The same challenge is back now with artificial intelligence. Around the world, whether someone can own copyright in a work made using AI, and what counts as an 'AI-generated' or 'AI-assisted' work, are hotly debated legal questions.

"England and Wales was the first jurisdiction to explicitly allow copyright protection for what it called 'computer-generated work', back in 1988, decades before generative AI systems like ChatGPT existed. The United States Copyright Office, by contrast, has had a 'no AI' rule since 1973. That ban holds even when creators spend hours refining detailed inputs, tweaking hyper-specific parameters, iterating through hundreds of outputs and combining or editing results. This process involves deliberate choices: curating mood, style, composition and message. Dismissing that creative labour ignores the clear intellectual direction and original intent required to produce a finished work.

"Getting clear and correct answers to these questions matters for creatives everywhere. AI is, like other technological advances before it, changing the nature of creativity, and that's something the law should encourage, not punish."