Authorship and ChatGPT

Is ChatGPT an author? Given its capacity to generate something that reads like human-written text in response to prompts, it might seem natural to ascribe authorship to ChatGPT. However, by scrutinizing the normative aspects of authorship, we argue that ChatGPT is not an author. ChatGPT fails to meet the criteria of authorship because it lacks the ability to perform illocutionary speech acts such as promising or asserting, lacks the fitting mental states like knowledge, belief, or intention, and only with many qualifications can provide testimony. Three perspectives are compared: liberalism (which ascribes authorship to ChatGPT), conservatism (which denies ChatGPT’sauthorship for normative and metaphysical reasons), and moderatism (which treats ChatGPT as if it possesses authorship without committing to the existence of mental states like knowledge, belief, or intention). We conclude that conservatism provides a more nuanced understanding of authorship in AI than liberalism and moderatism, without denying the significant potential, influence, or utility of AI technologies such as ChatGPT.