As AI systems churn out increasingly convincing images, music, and prose, a growing chorus in tech and academia claims machines should be recognized as authors. Caterina Moruzzi pushes back, arguing that authorship is not about output alone, but about agency, responsibility, and expression—qualities today’s AI systems do not possess.

In 2018, the computer scientist Stephen Thaler applied to register the image titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise with the U.S. Copyright Office. On the application form he listed a generative system he created, the “Creativity Machine,” as the work’s sole author. After several requests for reconsideration, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued its final decision on March 18, 2025. The court framed the issue in simple terms: “Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976?” Its answer was no: “The Creativity Machine cannot be recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being.”

What may look like a purely legal ruling has become a landmark case for AI and creativity. By reaffirming human authorship as “a bedrock requirement” for copyright, the court traced a clear demarcation around humans as the sole possible locus of authorship, taking a stand on the broader question of what authorship really is.

Not everyone accepts the human-only requirement. Law professor Ryan Abbott argues for “AI legal neutrality”, which holds that law ought not discriminate between human and machine behavior when they perform the same creative or inventive activity. Computer scientist Advait Sarkar pushes from the cultural side: authorship is historically and culturally contingent and personhood has not always been a prerequisite for attribution of authorship, so our concepts should evolve to encompass emergent AI-mediated practices.

The rest of this piece argues for keeping authorship human while updating it beyond the solitary genius: today’s AI lacks the capacities authorship presupposes, but this should not prevent us from recognizing and crediting the distributed human practices through which much creation happens.

What is an author?

On the surface, authorship might seem to be nothing more than a matter of causal production: whoever, or whatever, is the most direct cause of a work’s existence would be its author. But as soon as we look at familiar cases from everyday life and art, it becomes clear that our account of what an author is asks for more than mere causal production.

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We react very differently to cases where the output looks similar, but the process behind it differs.

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Take the following example: I accidentally hit a few pots of paint on a warehouse shelf, the paint spills, and it leaves splashes on the floor. By contrast, consider the work Autumn Rhythm (Number 30). Both are just pigment on a surface, and they might even be visually similar, but while in the first case we would not be tempted to debate whether I am the “author” of the paint splash, we clearly recognize Jackson Pollock as the author of Autumn Rhythm.

Now, compare a toddler striking piano keys at random with an experimental music piece by Pauline Oliveros. In both cases, we might hear unexpected clusters of sound, even long stretches of silence. The toddler caused the sounds, but causation alone does not seem enough for an authorship claim.

Finally, think of the patterns carved by wind on a rock, and a land sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy. Both may involve similar materials and shapes, and yet we do not credit the wind as their “author.”