The death of the AI author
Donna Craig, Ian R. Kerr · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025
Much of the recent literature on generative AI asks whether its increasing sophistication should cause us to rethink embedded assumptions about the meaning of authorship. In this chapter, we argue that the threshold for authorship does not depend on the state of the art in AI. Rather, the very notion of AI-authorship rests on a category mistake—it is an error about the ontology of authorship. Claims of AI authorship depend on a romanticised conception of both authorship and AI. Therefore, building on the established critique of the romantic author, we contend that the death of the romantic author also and equally entails the death of the AI author. We offer, instead, a relational account of authorship that reorients debates about copyright's subsistence in AI-generated works; but it also transcends copyright law, going to the normative core of how law should think about robots and their role in human relations.