Understanding authorship in Artificial Intelligence-assisted works

The advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought about a significant shift in the way works are created, with the blurring of boundaries between human and machine-driven creation processes becoming a prominent challenge. This leads to the question of whether authorship in such works exists and, if so, whom it should be attributed to.This article focusses on an analysis of existing case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and selected EU Member State courts, in order to find indications about what to consider when examining the authorship of AI-assisted works in the European copyright system.Ultimately, a four-step test is proposed which aids in assessing whether there is authorship in concrete works and whom it should be attributed to. The first step asks what persons are involved in the creation process before determining—as second step—the kind of AI system used. The third step analyses whether the persons involved exercised a sufficient subjective judgment in the composition of the work; the final step determines whether they had an adequate control over the execution.