Copyright, authorship and AI

Copyright and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)

Important copyright considerations when using generative artificial intelligence are:

Copyright protected works are used to train generative AI models. Training data includes text, artworks, photographs, music, audio, computer code and metadata that have been reproduced and stored in free and commercial AI platforms
Lack of transparency on the source of materials that have been used to train AI systems, which may include copyrighted works from websites, social media and blogs, as well as scholarly works.
Copyright legislation varies around the world. Users of copyright material in Australia have to abide by Australian Copyright law. Australian 'Fair dealing' exceptions are more restrictive than 'fair use' exceptions applied in other countries.
AI outputs may infringe copyright. Copyright protects original works, not ideas or styles. It is easy to create text, music and artwork with AI tools that imitate the style of human creators. AI enables substantial copying of original works which disregards copyright owner's rights and can impact artists' and authors' careers and income.

In many countries, including Australia, only humans can be copyright owners. However, that concept is currently being challenged in some jurisdictions. There is an ongoing international discussion about Generative AI-IP and outputs and "whether AI-generated content should be eligible for Copyright Protection". (WIPO, 2024).

When using AI-generated outputs, it’s crucial to ensure the information is accurate and the source is genuine. Any false or plagiarized content can harm the quality and integrity of scholarly work.

Content in this section has been adapted from Charles Sturt University Library. (2024). Using AI tools at university. Charles Sturt University. Retrieved from https://opentext.csu.edu.au/usingai Available under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Authorship, ethics and AI

Under Australian copyright law, an ‘author’ is:

" a person who creates the work, for example, writing an instruction manual, drawing a graphic, or writing a computer program. For photographs, the author is the person who takes the photograph."

Source Australian Copyright Council Fact Sheet Ownership of Copyright.

When an original scholarly manuscript is written the copyright automatically belongs to the author, and the author is responsible for the integrity of the work.

When content generated by an AI tool has been included in a work, the author is still ethically responsible for the integrity of the entire work.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has the following position statement on the use of AI in scholarly works:

"Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics."

JAMA (an American Health Association network platform) also has published a clear statement on the use of AI in the production of scholarly works as well as setting up a JAMA + AI site for health professionals:

"Nonhuman artificial intelligence, language models, machine learning, or similar technologies do not qualify for authorship."

If these models or tools are used to create content or assist with writing or manuscript preparation, authors must take responsibility for the integrity of the content generated by these tools.

The White paper entitled Generative AI in Scholarly Communications by STM (The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) provides concise advice:

"The paper looks at the ethical, legal, and practical aspects of GenAI, highlighting its potential to transform scholarly communications, and covers a range of topics from intellectual property rights to the challenges of maintaining integrity in the digital age."

AI and scholarly publishing

Major publishers have policies on the use of generative artificial intelligence in articles submitted for publication, as well reviewing and editing.Currently no major publishers permit AI tools to be an author (Ganjavi, et al., 2024).

AI is not considered capable of initiating an original piece of research without direction from human authors. AI also raises issues of plagiarism as there is no guarantee that content is original and not copied from existing sources. While some AI tools can assist in the literature review process, they cannot apply the judgement or evaluation added by the researcher.

The allowable use of GAI and how it should be disclosed varies between publishers and journals.

See the list below for some examples of publisher policies.