Artificial intelligence is the new reality of the 21st century and the speed at which it is encompassing every sphere of life is matchless. It has eased the jobs of people from artists to writers.
For example, now you can get the whole recipe of your favourite dish that you have tried at a restaurant with a single click. The same is the case with people associated with content creation, whether you need a research study or a poem on the themes of love and ambition.
It can generate a perfect work for you, but the ethical question that arises with it is of originality or authorship. Who is the real author of the prose?
AI model that has produced it or the person who has inserted the commands to get the work done? The use of AI for content generation has blurred the lines between originality and plagiarism.
What is AI Generated Content?
Any piece of content, whether a medical paper, audio file, social media reel, infographic, essay, and so on, produced with the help of generative models like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc, is referred to as AI-generated content.
These AI generative models are trained on vast data sets to instantly analyse or search their database to create any type of content. Writers, artists, medical professionals, media professionals, students, and even people from other walks of life are benefiting from the AI tools for creating content pieces.
You can get any kind of idea or a finished product from these tools, but the question of who’s the real owner and whether it is ethically right still remains unsolved.
Who is the Real Owner of the AI Generated Content?
Legal experts and even creative professionals are now debating about the real authorship credits of the content generated using AI tools.
The question of who is the real owner is quite entangled because no doubt a human has given the prompt to the AI tool for creating content pieces, and it has used the available data or works of other people as a touchstone to produce new work.
But it has also done the labour of analysing the command and then available data sets to create a stunning response. This means complete ownership rights can’t be given to anyone because every part is doing half the labour in the content creation process.
- Copyright Challenges:
In 2022, three artists sued multiple generative AI platforms upon using their original works without a license to train their AI models in their styles, allowing users to generate works that would be unauthorised derivative works.
This means the legal and ethical debate about authorship or copyright needs to be settled. However, if you are producing yourself a short story, painting, or film you can get it secured because you are the sole creator of the work.
On the other hand, if AI has generated an obituary for you, it can’t hold the copyright because it has taken inspiration from others or even mimicked the words or style of other artists, which may lead to copyright infringements.
Blurred Lines of Originality
If your content is not original and not generated from the stage of idea to reality solely by you, then you don’t have the right to call it your own creation.
However, Aristotle is of the view that “art is an imitation of imitation derived twice from reality”, which means that nothing in this world is original, everything is a copy of an existing idea. It refers to a philosophical debate about the originality of artworks and whether anyone can call their work solely their own creation or not.
But we’ll limit the discussion to AI tools and originality rights. AI generative tools take inspiration or even frameworks from existing similar pieces and ideas, which means the final product can’t be considered original from tip to toe.
AI simply imitates ideas or even final products of artists and authors to create a new one so it can’t be considered 100% original.
Is Human Creativity Still At Par with AI?
There is no doubt that AI works at a fast pace and produces more work than humans in less time. However, the problem lies in the quality or effectiveness of the generated content on the audience. For example, you can get a custom essay written by any AI tool for your screenwriting project.
It will explore the existing content and the patterns on which it is trained to craft prose for you devoid of subjective experiences and emotions.
On the other hand, when a human is doing the same task, the incorporation of anecdotes, subjective experiences, and emotional depth is evident, which makes the prose aesthetically appealing and engaging for the readers. This means human creativity is still a step ahead of the responses of AI tools.
Ethical Concerns Associated with AI-Generated Content
There’s no harm in using AI tools to generate content for your social media profiles and so on. However, some ethical considerations need to be kept in mind while using that content publicly.
- Transparency and Accountability: The most important thing is to inform your audience about the content creation process if it is generated through any AI tool. You need to disclose the sources from which you have obtained the reels, music, articles, and other types of content so that your audience would be aware of the level of human involvement in the creation of content.
- Privacy Breaches: Sometimes AI generative tools use the personal data of people for creating content and use it in the final results. So you should review the content before publishing it, and if there’s any reference to someone’s personal data, then just remove it to avoid privacy breaches.
- Reflection of Biases in Content: There are evident chances that AI can frame its response based on the biased data available for research. As a result, it produces content pieces that are biased in nature and can ruin the neutrality factor of your article. You should review the prose to remove any biased statements before publishing.
- Looming Cuts on Human Labour: The rise in the capabilities or efficiency of AI tools in producing creative or engaging content for everyone is placing a sword against writers, painters, artists, and other content creators. The content creation process can be automated, but the question of quality and effectiveness, like of human creators, remains open.
Conclusion
AI is here to assist people in making their content creation process faster than the previous time. For example, you can now get more ideas or scripts for reels as compared to the days when you had to search for ideas and write scripts by spending hours on the internet surfing.
Don’t try to solely use AI for creating content because it lacks the human experience, imaginative thoughts, and originality. Make sure to work in collaboration to create the original and best content pieces while considering the ethical dilemmas associated with the process.
Make sure to use AI responsibly to save yourself from plagiarism and originality issues to own the copyrights of the works you have produced.