Artificial intelligence makes it so that people are simply no longer needed. And it would seem that new technologies make human life much easier, but, it turns out, not in all areas. For example, the law. And today, in this article, I would really like to deal with the civil branch of law, namely, the concepts of intellectual property.

What is intellectual property: the question seems to be simple, but we need a clear formulation. According to Article 1225 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, it is the result of intellectual activity and the means of individualization of legal entities, goods, works, services, and enterprises that are provided with legal protection. In simpler terms, IP is the fruit of creative and scientific work that is protected by the state in the same way as tangible objects are. In other words, we can say that the key object of protection is what a person has created with their mind, which brings us to our problem: what should we do in this new era of creativity, where paintings are created by neural networks and articles are written using AI?

Intellectual property cannot exist without an author, because creativity must be created by someone, and someone's rights must be protected. However, the law does not protect the idea itself, but rather its embodiment and realization, which are primarily judged by their originality. A work of art must be the result of an author's intellectual effort, individual style, and unique handwriting. So what do we have: an author who has both property rights (the exclusive right to use) and non-property rights (the name, authorship, and integrity of the work), and the work itself, which is protected by the legal system. And that's about it. So where does the machine fit in?

Let's start with the most logical thing to do. No matter how smart and advanced artificial intelligence may be, it's still not a human. What distinguishes them from us is the most important thing that makes us human: our feelings, emotions, intentions, and, in fact, our consciousness. AI operates based on models and algorithms that are still created by the human mind. While it may give the impression of interacting with something alive, neural networks are still a recombination of human work. They may be complex and multi-layered, but they are not acts of creativity.

However, AI is widely used to create works of art in our time. There is an interesting case that happened in the US a decade ago, quite similar to my idea of the place of the machine in copyright. In 2011, a British wildlife photographer David Slater left his camera turned on at the place where the macaques lived, and one of them (later given the name Naruto) took his selfie. Soon it became viral, and here a quite logical question arose: who owns the copyright? After a long series of trials in several courts, which lasted from 2016 to 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that an animal cannot have copyrights because it lacks consciousness. If we disregard the fact that we are using a macaque as an example, we can see that the situations are similar. A human provided the equipment, someone or something pressed the button, and the same human processed the information, resulting in the creation of the final product and the recognition of the author.

In our Civil Code, an author is a citizen whose creative work has created a work of art or science. In other words, the wording of our law immediately protects machines from copyright. Of course, it is possible to create art using a neural network, but it will only be considered art in certain cases:

• 1. Prompt must be an act of art itself, meaning that it must be original and creative, reflecting the author's purpose and vision of the world, and have a unique structure.
• 2. The author has carefully selected and refined the options, rather than accepting the first result that came along.

And again, we come to the fact that AI can't yet create its own works or be a co-author with full-fledged copyrights. Because even in the case I proposed, the machine would be considered an "intelligent brush" that helps "write together," but not a separate legal entity. So, if we're talking about the immediate future of AI in this field, we can safely say that replacing humans is not a concern at the moment, but there may be a new term in law that refers to "human creators" and involves using AI as a powerful tool.

Time is changing rapidly and humanity needs to adapt to the changes at the same speed, which is not always easy.