Can IP Survive AI? Rethinking Ownership in the Algorithmic Age

This article asks whether intellectual property law, built around human creativity, can keep up with AI systems that now write, compose, and invent on their own. It starts with cases like Naruto v. Slater and the Thaler patent disputes, which show courts consistently insisting that only humans can be authors or inventors. It then argues that AI is different from earlier tools like cameras, since it can generate genuinely new work with very little human input, making the old reasoning harder to apply. The article looks at how the US, EU, and India are each handling this, especially the unresolved Thaler v. Perlmutter case in the US and the ongoing ANI Media v. OpenAI dispute in India, along with WIPO's efforts to bring these questions to a global table. It ends by pointing to three likely paths forward: crediting the human who directs the AI as author, creating new kinds of protection just for AI-generated work, and finally addressing the unresolved issue of AI models being trained on copyrighted material without consent.