What are members' views on the use of AI in writing?

[Stanley Steamboy]

The primary point I was going to make however, and I am not sure if I made this here before, so indulge me if I'm repeating myself, but text generated by an AI can not be copyrighted. You, as a human, have copyright in your own work, but you don't own anything an AI produces. So no publisher will touch you, because you don't own the work. Technically you can't even upload it to KDP or Ingram either as they all have a checkbox for you to assert that you are the copyright holder of the work. And if AI generated that work, even if you'd substantially rewritten it afterwards, you don't own it. No one does.

Are you sure about that? If I hire a human ghost writer, I can copywrite what they produce for me. Who actually does the work is not the basis for ownership.

 

[davesag]

Are you sure about that? If I hire a human ghost writer, I can copywrite what they produce for me. Who actually does the work is not the basis for ownership.

The ghostwriter, being human, owns the copyright in their original work. They then assign or license it to you, which means you then own the copywriter. The ghostwriter retains their moral rights as those are unassignable; they are innate.

Works produced by an AI legally can't be copyrighted, just like recipes can't be copyrighted (which is why all recipe books are full of waffle about how such and such a lasagne was their grandfather's favourite thing, and oh the snows go on forever…)

Copyright law is consistent about this across many jurisdictions, and certainly amongst countries that are part of WIPO.

My brother has just written a very detailed book on this very topic. See https://aicopyright.ai