Computer creativity: artificial intelligence and copyright

... Sci-fi authors have long offered us a glimpse of a future where machines are capable of original thought and action without human input. For years lack of sufficient computer processing power stopped this becoming reality, until cloud computing came along and suddenly tipped the balance. It now feels like we are in a corporate space race to develop sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning systems, with ethicists, lawyers and regulators sprinting to understand how the developments will affect society. This article addresses one very specific impact of the growth of AI capable of creating original works: who will own the copyright in these works? What actually amounts to AI is still being debated, and no established definition has been set, but it has been described as synthesized intelligence1 through both computer software and hardware, essentially ‘… constructing computer programs … capable of exhibiting intelligence’.2 Definitions of intelligence vary widely between academics and researchers, but could be argued as being the ability to ‘… reason, achieve goals, understand and generate language, perceive and respond to sensory inputs, prove mathematical theorems, play challenging games, synthesize and summarize information, create art and music, and even write histories’.3