Locating the Creativity Machine in the Age of Agentic Copyright

On July 2, 2024, Paul Jurcys will speak at the ATRIP Congress in Rome and present his latest research on copyright in the age of AI. ATRIP stands for the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property - an a prestigious group of IP experts.

In his presentation, Paul will offer an interdisciplinary perspective to show how creativity has always entailed a process of networked co-creation involving humans and multiple technologies. Earlier, dominant narratives of and about creativity over-emphasized pure human creativity ex nihilo and were overly simplistic or naïve as empirical descriptions of a more complex process. 

The emergence of generative AI challenges earlier paradigms of creativity and reveals the reality of all creativity as a networked, situated, contingent process of co-creation. This is already enough to make generative AI hugely disruptive because the infrastructure – the legal, political, and economic institutions – that we have in place to support to facilitate human creativity is based on this naïve view of pure creativity and an earlier social contract with technology, which is now undermined and challenged by the Creativity Machine. 

In his presentation, Paul will explore how generative AI stretches, bends, warps, and breaks this infrastructure. He will focus on copyright as the main institutional mechanism for facilitating and protecting creative works, and it is paradigmatic of our earlier social contract with technology as it reduces creativity to authorship. Paul will argue that the whole infrastructure around creativity needs re-imagining as a result of this ongoing change. We are at the end of the first stage of the digital revolution and are now entering an AI Revolution, and, consequently, we need a new social contract with technology. 

So What are the main features of this new social contract? 

Any new contract with technology must entail a partnership between humans and machines. This involves or requires a double move:

Firstly, the new social contract with technology must be human-centric – not in the sense of emphasizing our uniqueness/distinctiveness but in that it must respect the dignity and autonomy of individuals to empower them and maximize opportunities for creativity, i.e., we need a more modest form of human-centricity that bring humans down to Earth and in which we regard ourselves not as Gods but mere mortals. 

Secondly, this new social contract also requires a flat ontology in the sense that it respects the role, power, and dignity of the machines in the creative process and doesn’t reduce the technology to a mere secondary appendage of the creator. 

Such a double move is vital because the likely end-state of this story is the emergence of post-human hybrid identities in which humans and AI merge to create new possible opportunities for creativity.

For more insights, check this draft paper on “Google Zero” and the future which he define as the “Agentic Copyright.”