Is AI actually an Intellect Property ?

"Innovation is always risky, and the complexity of the landscape makes these markets tricky to predict, so Intellectual Property remains a powerful business asset when it comes to addressing some of our biggest challenges,”

• Steve Evans
  {Proffesor, Cambridge University , UK}

Intellectual Property (hereinafter as IP) and Aritificial Intelligence (hereinafter as AI), both are considered as the rising trends of the modern techno world. While people are becoming aware of their own intellectual property rights (hereinafter as IPR) , the use of AI has also increased with a sudden boost. AI being used everywhere, from college assignments to writing songs, from asking questions to solving examinations, it’s present everywhere, but the main question that arises,

IS THE AI-GENERATED CONTENT AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?

CAN A SOFTWARE GENERATED MATERIAL BE COPYRIGHTED?

The role of AI in the field of IP is debatable in today’s time, some consider it to be a good innovation and step towards the future, but some people also say that when it comes to AI-generated or software-generated subject matter, they tend not to be considered as intellectual property (IP); rather, they are referred to as the results of algorithms that are based on programmes that use prompts, tokens, and the highest possible probability on the Internet of Things.  AI is capable of producing art, be it literary work like short stories, poems, music, and even artistic works like a drawing or the mapping of a sculpture, the use of AI creates a situation of threat  for the artists in this field as it mostly sources from the most probable and likable outputs available on the Internet, which may put their expression of creativity at risk of theft and not even get paid for their hard work.

The Indian Copyright Act 1957 also states that Copyright Protection is given to original work created by humans. This leaves a gray area while talking about the works that were totally created by using AI tools and having no original work. In the framework of copyright rules, AI-generated work presents an unusual challenge in determining authorship and ownership. In order to reduce the threat posed by artificial intelligence, humans need to have an innate capacity to govern their intellectual property. The Monkey Selfie Case (Naruto v Slater, 2018) in the US elucidated and stated that “work created by a machine or a mere mechanical process cannot be registered under copyright.” 

Talking about how the AI created works in respect to the Copyright and IP laws, it is very complex to safeguard the content because it is not considered as original and mostly doesn’t have any basis to fit in the hypernym of Intellectual Property.