The crisis of authorship and the right to knowledge in the AI era

The text analyzes the tension between the actual production of content by AI (author-in-fact) and the attribution of authorship in a legal sense (author-in-law). The author indicates that copyright is a normative construct that currently requires human agency for protection to be granted. Using the examples of the Naruto monkey and Stephen Thaler, it is shown that autonomous AI systems cannot be recognized as creators under American law. The key problem remains determining the degree of human contribution in an AI-assisted work. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, prompting alone is insufficient to recognize the user as an author; specific creative expression and control over the elements of the work are necessary, which calls into question the status of many contemporary generative contents.