If AI Helped Me Write This Article, Is It Still Mine?

This is a theme that I seem to come back to quite often: how much AI is too much, and if ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude produce content that I publish, then just who owns it?

Under current Australian law, purely AI-generated content is unlikely to attract copyright protection in its own right. But content made with AI assistance can be protected where there is sufficient human authorship. But what is sufficient human authorship, and who defines it?

Australia’s Copyright Act 1968 protects original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works and generally treats the author as the first copyright owner. When Australia passed its Copyright Act in 1968, nobody needed to specify whether the author had to be human. Who else was going to write it? Artificial Intelligence was the stuff of science fiction – no one expected anyone but a human to be creating content.

Bring it forward nearly sixty years, and we can’t be quite as sure.

This post was inspired by ARIA Chart’s decision to exclude wholly AI-generated tracks. This happened following controversy over Australian DJ Josh Fawaz’s cover of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Like a Prayer” which topped local music charts. The fact that the cover had been AI generated had not been disclosed. (Source: Reuters).

I make no secret of the fact that I use Artificial Intelligence for research. In fact, this article came about because I’d asked my mate Rob the Robot (that’s the cheeky blighter in the image above) what was trending in the news lately, and this story came up. Then I asked for sources, which I in turn checked, and then came up with what you see in front of you. What you see is what I wrote, plus a quote, which I edited, from Reuters.

Let’s look at it this way:

If I asked Rob to come up with a 500 word essay and then just posted it here, the only involvement that I could logically and legally claim is that it was published on my website. I’d have no idea if what was in that content was true, but if it was false, I’d still be responsible.

There isn’t a clean dividing line as to where AI was or wasn’t used. Rather, it’s about where the human contribution actually occurred, and how much of that contribution is contained in the published work.

Rob contributed the image of himself!

ChatGPT and the rest aren’t something to be afraid of, rather, they are a tool to be properly used. When they are misused, or when humans stop thinking and let robots do the thinking for us, then we’re in trouble!