What defines authorship?

Let’s take a step back from legal definitions (because I am no lawyer) and evade the strict rules of copyright—instead ask: who gets credit when something measurably novel and unique appears in the world?

Morally? Ethically? These are not trivial questions either, because while many of us seek an answer because it is tied to some kind of financial remuneration, there are other factors that have less direct ties with money.

Is authorship about who owns the message? I mean, if I write a novel—if I sit down day after day and turn a story that was churning around inside my head into a hundred thousand words of logical story prose—I can sell that to a publisher who will print it and we could make money in the process, yes. If that novel told a controversial story and fired up society then I would also find myself practically culpable—as the author—for penning those words. If that story, on the other hand, turned into a cultural phenomenon and motivated millions of people to dress up like my characters and spawned a movie trilogy and a theme park ride, then me, as author of the story would deserve some of the credit. I dreamed it. I worked to create it. I pushed it into the universe. I am clearly the author and due credit for that work.

Things get fuzzier when an algorithm is involved, and clearly that gut instinct many people have expressed—reservations about generative AI and its role in our creative ecosystem—are tied back to authorship and understanding credit.

Who dreamed the idea that birthed a story spewed from a chatbot?  Was it the person typing the prompt, or was the idea stored away in a model-brain database somewhere waiting to be extracted? And if it was little more than an amalgam of pre-existing ideas, then what does that say about personal experience shaping the creative process: what is unique about a human brain mashing up everything we have seen and remembered over a lifetime and regurgitating it as a story?

As I write this I just finished reading a science fiction novel that I would describe as derivative and cliché. It was written by a human and toured through a list of ideas and concepts I’ve seen in a dozen films and read in a hundred stories before: it strung them together in a new way with a twist and a thread that was somewhat novel, but most of the pieces were dreamed by someone else long ago. Does the author deserve credit? Should we hold this up as a work of great human creativity? It made the bestseller list, so—

Who wrote that? Who was the author?

I only ask because we’re going to need to ask it more and more, and if we can’t put our finger on it for human works, how the hell will we cope when nearly everything is touched by an algorithm?