Could an Artificial Intelligence be a Ghostwriter?

Abstract

Advanced technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, have been pushing nowadays societies toward new ethical and legal challenges, including copyright law dilemmas.The contemporary development of innovative machines and cognitive technologies raises the need to rethink basic concepts such as ownership and accountability.In light of the rules of copyright law, this paper argues that innovative algorithms, such as GPT-3 (an autoregressive language model developed by Open AI to produce human-like text via deep learning), could be considered a modern form of ghostwriting brought forward by the Third Industrial Revolution, as defined by Jeremy Rifkin. The phenomenon of ghostwriting has been notorious sinceantiquity. Although ghost writing is also today, neither national nor international legal systems have yet fully regulated it. Based on the assumption that AI systems operate like ghost writers in terms of their creativity, this paper asks whether AI’s creation should be subject to copyright regulations soon, and if so, to what extent.