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ABSTRACT
The current advancements in technology have resulted in the creation of intelligent machines with the intellectual capacity likened to that of humans to learn and generate creative contents autonomously. Prior to the evolution of AI, human beings were the only entity recognised as possessing intellectual capacity to create literary and artistic contents and be granted copyright, or other intellectual property right. However, with the evolution of AI, non-human beings are now producing original literary and artistic contents autonomously, and this makes the notion of “copyright authorship and ownership” and “copyright infringement” more complicated. In Nigeria and most jurisdiction, works generated by AI are unregulated and thus, AI creations are unprotected and left in the public domain and AI themselves not been held accountable for any copyright infringement committed by them. This study in utilising the doctrinal research method, considers the challenges of the current copyright law in regulating AI creations in general. This study addresses the questions of the copyrightability of AI creations. The study considers who should enjoy the benefits of copyright attributed to the creations of autonomous AI systems. The study argued that based on the extant copyright legal regime, AI cannot be granted copyright of their creations, as the extant laws globally only recognise humans as authors, hence, AI is non-human it cannot be an author. The study finds that there are now autonomous AI machines that are capable of generating literary and artistic works without any form of human intervention in the process and this has greatly challenged the current copyright law that only recognised humans as authors. Furthermore, the study found that the inapplicability of the extent copyright law to AI has created a gap in the copyright law, thereby leaving works created by AI unprotected and in the public domain and the developers of AI machines are not compensated for the development of AI. The study recommends that there is a need to rethink the fundamental human-centric concepts of extant IP law and argues for a sui generis system of laws tailor- made for AI-generated materials in a bid to resolving the challenges of AI to the current copyright law and fill the regulatory lacuna in the copyright legal system with respect to AI creations in Nigeria and by extension other jurisdiction whose laws are similar to that of Nigeria.
