ABSTRACT
Copyright law regulates creative outputs and contributes to the allocation of legal responsibility, thereby functioning as an institution of accountability. Although generative AI systems produce outputs that simulate human creations, extending authorship to these computational systems creates doctrinal difficulties. This article’s central thesis is that copyright must remain human-centric because authorship is inextricably linked to legal accountability. The article first establishes the anthropocentric baseline of current legal frameworks. By applying the ‘conception versus execution’ framework to the EU originality standard, it argues that human prompting may fail to satisfy the required threshold for expressive control. The article then challenges producer-oriented copyright models and proposed sui generis rights, arguing that such alternative legal fictions may obscure human labour and create a responsibility gap, understood as the difficulty of attributing legal and moral liability for infringing, defamatory or harmful outputs. By allowing corporate platforms to derive economic benefits without bearing legal responsibility, attributing authorship to AI or granting copyright to its outputs weakens the link between legal rights and moral agency. The article concludes that detaching authorship from human agency risks moving copyright away from a coherent institution of responsibility and toward a primarily commodification function.
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Eylül Erva Akın, Copyright as an institution of accountability in the age of artificial intelligence, International Review of Law, Computers & Technology. Published online: 19 September 2026.
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