The Ethics of Autonomous Art: Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, and the Future of Human Expression- A Doctrinal, Philosophical and Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI), has radically changed the creative industries as it has allowed creating artistic, literary, and multimedia pieces with little human input. Although current copyright policies do a good job at tackling concerns on authorship and property rights, they still fail to tackle the larger ethical and regulatory concerns of AI-generated creativity. The paper discusses the legal, ethical, and empirical aspects of autonomous art critically with a mixed-method approach of analysing the doctrines, philosophical arguments, and empirical research. The paper presents the challenges, such as the loss of human-centred understandings of creativity, ambiguity in attribution, exploitation of data, and the development of a responsibility gap between developers, users, and platforms. Recent empirical results, which rely on the answers of creative professionals, show that the acceptance of AI-generated works is situational, and it is highly dependent on the human factor, transparency, and clarity of regulation. The article states that the current copyright regimes are inadequately structured to encompass AI-generated creativity. It suggests a transitional change in the traditional forms of ownership to the responsibility-based governance forms that focus on transparency, accountability, and fairness. The research adds to the existing discussions by incorporating both legal science and ethical theory and empirical research to come up with a more comprehensive perspective on AI-generated creativity and its role in intellectual property law.