Who Owns the Output? Authorship, Creative Labour, and Innovation Capability in Human‐AI Collaboration

Generative AI is radically transforming how creative authorship is understood, attributed, and governed across the world’s cultural and creative industries. As AI systems increasingly produce outputs that organisations and audiences recognise as creative, foundational assumptions about who authors creative work, who receives credit for it, and what protections attach to it are being radically destabilised in ways that existing frameworks, overwhelmingly designed around Western, human‐centred models of authorship, are ill‐equipped to address. This paper argues that authorship and creative labour are mutually constitutive phenomena that must be theorised and governed together, across the full diversity of institutional, cultural, and legal contexts in which human‐AI creative collaboration is taking place. Two original conceptual frameworks are introduced in response to this challenge. The Authorship Contribution Spectrum reconceives creative agency as a graduated continuum spanning four positions, from human‐led collaboration to AI‐led generation with human curation, offering a principled basis for aligning attribution with actual creative contribution. The Creative Labour Transformation Framework charts systematic shifts across four professional dimensions as creative work moves from execution‐centred to orchestration‐centred practice, identifying the governance conditions required to sustain innovation capability through this transition. The frameworks are situated within a comparative analysis of five regulatory regimes spanning the European Union, the United States, China, India, South Asia, and Sub‐Saharan Africa. Illustrative cases from Lexus and Coca–Cola anchor the frameworks in organisational practice. The findings carry implications for responsible innovation practice, talent governance, and the international management of human‐AI creative collaboration.