Fully-funded PhD scholarship in Artificial Intelligence and Copyright

The University of St Andrews School of Computer Science and the Macquarie University Law School are pleased to offer a Global Doctoral Scholarship in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law: The Problem of Authorship. This PhD scholarship is fully-funded and includes fees (home or international) and a stipend for 3.5 years. The PhD will be supervised by Dr Tristan Henderson at St Andrews and Dr Daniela Simone at Macquarie.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly important as businesses begin to use it to undertake work traditionally done by humans. As AI systems become more sophisticated and capable, they become more significant in content creation. But the use of AI complicates the determination of authorship of the work created using it; and, as a consequence, the subsistence and ownership of any copyright in that work. This project will investigate the challenges that arise when copyright’s concept of authorship meets AI from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Authorship is at the heart of copyright law in most legal traditions. Copyright protection usually requires some ‘authorial’ input, but jurisdictions differ on the amount and type of human contribution that counts. As AI transforms creative processes and supercharges content generation at scale more clarity is urgently needed. Many are concerned that AI output will displace human creativity – and as such they question whether it should be incentivised via copyright at all. Human creators who turn to AI to augment and complement their own practices will be equally concerned about whether the use of AI tools affects their ability to exploit their work. There is a public interest in ensuring that creativity is encouraged and rewarded.

Whilst it is clear that human input shapes AI output, AI developers and users have much less control over output than a writer does over the words produced by a pen. Is AI output authored in a sense that copyright can, or should, recognise? This question has important implications for the economic exploitation of work made using AI. Uncertainty and variation between the law of different jurisdictions creates economic and cross-border friction. An important and related question is how market participants – both rights-holders and users of creative work – know whether the level of human input rises to the level of copyrightability. Can technology, the law, or both, help provide these participants with sufficient transparency and control over their input?

Where current research focuses on the technological abilities of AI to respect copyright, or the legal application of copyright to AI outputs, we would like to go beyond this and seek student-led proposals on the application and limits of copyright’s concept of authorship from an interdisciplinary computer science (CS) and law perspective. Projects might address questions such as:

  • What amount and type of human contribution suffices to establish authorship of AI output?
  • What sort of causal relationship must exist between human input and AI output to establish authorship?
  • How can human contribution be verified, measured, traced or evidenced?
  • Is control over the output an appropriate touchstone for authorship?
  • How can existing AI systems be adapted to provide sufficient attribution?
  • How do provisions relating to computer-generated works apply?
  • What is the proper scope of copyright in AI output?

This is a joint Computer Science (CS) and Law project, and the successful candidate should have a foundational knowledge in one or both of these disciplines, and a willingness to engage with other related disciplines. Our experience indicates that successful interdisciplinary projects still reside in a ‘home’ discipline, and so we would welcome proposals that use legal approaches such as doctrinal or comparative methods and are informed by CS, as well as CS-driven proposals such as the development of new AI systems that are informed by legal requirements.

The student would join the St Andrews School of Computer Science’s Responsible and Sustainable Research Theme, and be a part of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance, a research pool of all 14 computer science departments across Scotland. Depending on the focus of the proposal, the student could join Macquarie’s Data Horizons Research Centre, Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence, and/or the Ethics and Agency Research Centre. Resources provided by both departments will include computing equipment, conference travel and access to GPU-equipped servers.

Details on how to apply can be found at https://www.mq.edu.au/research/phd-and-research-degrees/how-to-apply/scholarship-opportunities/scholarship-search/ai-and-copyright-law-the-problem-of-authorship and applications should be received by 3 December 2025. Interested applicants are encouraged to make informal contact with the supervisors first by e-mail: Tristan Henderson tnhh@st-andrews.ac.uk and Daniela Simone daniela.simone@mq.edu.au.