Susan Kennedy

Generative AI raises pressing questions for both ethics and law. Who should count as the author of AI assisted work? How should intellectual property regimes adapt when outputs are trained on vast datasets of human expression? And what does it mean to say that we “collaborate” with AI. Are we using a tool, partnering with a system, or engaging in something else altogether? This lecture situates these questions within ongoing debates about authorship and attribution. Practical issues such as plagiarism policies, co-authorship rules, and copyright enforcement are important, yet they also expose a deeper challenge. Generative AI destabilizes the very categories we rely on to make sense of authorship and intellectual property. What once seemed like stable frameworks of originality and attribution are unsettled by technologies that blur distinctions between human and machine contribution, product and process, tool and collaborator. Drawing on the philosophy of technological mediation, I argue that generative AI should be understood not as a neutral device but as a technology that reshapes how we create, collaborate, and assign credit. Ethical theories such as virtue ethics and care ethics highlight the values at stake, but they too must be reconsidered in light of these mediations. The task is not only to manage risks, but to cultivate normative imagination about what kinds of authorship and recognition we want to foster in a world increasingly shaped by AI.