La Jornada: Creating content with AI does not grant copyright, says expert

“The danger of artificial intelligence (AI) for writers and generators of audiovisual, cinematographic, sculptural, and dramatic content is that the product of AI wants to show off as a work when it is not, and wants to be linked to a credit that does not exist,” said Jesús Parets, legal director of the General Society of Writers of Mexico (Sogem).

During the conference Literary creativity and human originality in the face of content generated by artificial intelligence, held in the context of the 50 years of Sogem, it was emphasized that the human being should not be equated with a fictitious entity, “the first is a subject of rights, the second – through computational means – is an object.”

Parets made this approach in a context of expansion of generative AI tools, which have opened debates on the authorship of content, the use of protected works to train AI models and the recognition of copyright.

“There is no need to mix or confuse the subject with the object. We must not give it a greater scope that it does not have and that is not recognized,” he pointed out.

He explained that the right to credit is recognized in international instruments, such as the Universal Declaration of Copyright. In the case of Mexico, it is a publication requirement, and it is only authorized not to include it in advertisements and propaganda.

“We have a property relationship over the content generated by AI, but not authorship rights,” he reiterated.

One of the characteristics of these generative processes, the lawyer stressed, is the uncertainty about the origin of the material with which they are generated, what it is composed of and whether there is the possibility of violating copyright. “Just because I commission the production of content is not going to give me the place of author.”

He recalled that a case regarding the registration of an image generated by AI reached the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, and it confirmed that the authorship of the work corresponds only to natural persons.

Jesús Parets established that in the process of creating work there is an indissoluble trilogy: the idea, the man and the creation.

He considered that artificial intelligence should not be used to replace, minimize or limit creativity, on the contrary, AI should be an auxiliary tool in the development of creative content. “The originality of the work must have two elements: independent creation and sufficient creation.”

In the case of writers, he highlighted that in the creation process, “our mind does not have a computer program; our cognitive process is fed back by various sources of knowledge. Therefore, when it comes to writing and what we emit, the texts, the contents, are interrelated with a diversity of interpretations.”

Faced with the rise of generative AI, with increasingly sophisticated platforms, the expert considered that the values of human creativity must be defended, without this meaning that synthetic content cannot be used. But he was emphatic in mentioning that it is essential to limit what is human from what is not.

“You can use synthetic content, of course, that is not the problem. The problem is when in a production, in a content the human is mixed with the artificial and it is not delimited. That is the great danger,” he said. “There should be no co-authorship with AI,” he reiterated.

For Parets, originality remains an exclusively human attribute and AI must be understood as an auxiliary tool, not a creative one, and its use must be transparent and accredited.