- Over two-thirds (69%) of people believe AI generated material can be presented as their own work if they provided the prompt and approved the final version
- Meanwhile, 54% believe AI-based work should be clearly marked
- 7,200 adults were surveyed, located across the US, the European Union, the UK, and Latin America
A growing disparity in how AI generated content, tasks, and tools are assigned ownership and expectations on accurately marking their origins is emerging, according to a new survey by Use.AI.
Furthermore, the findings indicate an emerging dichotomy between human-claimed authorship of an AI work and clear labeling of the work as AI.
Different attitudes based on settings for the AI work have also been identified, such as private emails and school or professional reports.
The chicken or the prompt?
The developing adoption of AI appears to be introducing new attitudes to acceptable creativity, with the emerging model of what is described as “authorship by direction,” where the AI is trusted to create a first draft, which is then revised and claimed by a human.
The statistics shared by Use.AI – a tool that aggregates AI models into a single interface – highlight how AI is being used more extensively, with a human-originating prompt leading to drafts and versions from the machine, followed by editing from the human.
While the AI has contributed, only a human name appears on the finished product, which raises questions of ownership and authorship.
“AI is separating the production of work from the ownership of it. People are increasingly prepared to direct the process, approve the result and take the credit, but there is still no shared standard for when AI’s role should be visible to everyone else,” says Use.AI’s Managing Director, Ihor Herasymov.
With 69% of those surveyed considering AI-generated work their own if they produced the prompt, 46% claiming they would keep AI involvement with their work under wraps, and 54% feeling AI use should be disclosed, we’re some way from agreement on AI use across creative tasks.
Authorship vs. editorship
Herasymov’s observations point to a constantly evolving set of standards around the creation and use of AI-generated materials. Interestingly, this is happening against a backdrop of growing unease over the use of AI in creative tasks.
The implications of claiming ownership of automated work generated upon instructions to an LLM trained on as much human writing, art, music, and cinema as possible are considerable, and go way beyond questions of ethics. Copyright is just one element, and the most obvious, but we’re also moving into a landscape where inputting a prompt on employer-owned hardware takes authorship away from the person at the keyboard.
Ultimately, the task of prompting and revising means anyone using AI in this way stops being the author, and becomes the editor – and that is before the true ownership of the output is determined.
