Meet my artificially-intelligent virtual self: creative avatars, machine learning, smart contracts and the copyright conundrum

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have, in recent years, triggered a dramatic paradigm shift in how we conceive of authorship and creation. Intelligent machines, such as those powered by the new GPT-3 neural network technology, are capable of generating expressions, composing text, performing translations and producing other ‘creative’ outputs once thought to be beyond the ability of computers.

This article will focus on intelligent AI applications (or ‘creative avatars’) that are programmed to replicate the ‘style’ of a human author (such as Shakespeare, Rembrandt or JK Rowling), and the regulatory challenges flowing from the generation of such works. While much of the literature in the field has proposed fairly significant modifications to traditional copyright rules in dealing with AI-generated content, this article adopts a different approach by suggesting that interim solutions can be found outside of the ‘copyright box’.

In particular, it will propose a consent-based contract framework, featuring digital watermarks and blockchain technologies, as an interim solution to regulate rights in relation to works generated by creative avatars, at least in the early years of emerging neural network technologies, in an effort to facilitate the dissemination of AI-generated derivative works and to promote the eventual enrichment of the public domain.