The Authorship Conundrum Caused by GenAI Output (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition Research Paper, No. 26-02), 2026, 24
Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has now reached a level of quality that makes it practically impossible to discern whether specific content was created by human beings or by AI. Based on the assumption that copyright protection is available, and should continue to be available, solely for the expression of human creativity, legal uncertainty about the existence of authorshipreferred to as the "authorship conundrum caused by genAI"raises considerable problems for the administration of the copyright system. Such problems arise in particular in the context of collective rights management for which EU and national law obliges CMOs to remunerate all authors without discrimination and prohibits them from remunerating persons who are not rightholders. To mitigate the problem, the paper discusses presumptions and information duties provided for by statutory law or the by-laws of CMOs.
