The Question of Human Authorship and Gen AI
By: Annie Hanlon, Alex Porter, Tim Porter, Christina Lee Storm, and Rachel Jobin
The future of creative production depends on one question: who is the author?
In an era where AI can generate lifelike images, scripts, music, and animations, the entertainment industry faces a fundamental challenge - proving human authorship.
To understand the challenge, we can look back to a peculiar incident in 2011. A curious macaque monkey named Naruto, in Indonesia, grabbed a professional wildlife photographer’s camera and snapped a now-famous selfie. When the photograph was published, an animal rights group sued on Naruto’s behalf, claiming the monkey should hold the copyright.
The court ultimately ruled that only "persons or corporations" can legally claim copyright, not animals. The language of the U.S. Copyright Act simply doesn't grant animals the right to sue.
This ruling is the key to understanding the Gen AI problem. The U.S. Copyright Office agrees: If an AI model produces an image, video, or text without enough "sufficient human input," it simply can't meet the legal threshold for copyright protection. They've explicitly stated that just typing a few descriptive words (a "prompt") into an AI system is usually not enough to qualify the user as the human author.
Why is this a crisis for Hollywood? The entire financial structure of the M&E industry is built on clear ownership. Studios, creators, and investors rely on Intellectual Property (IP), the content's legally recognized ownership, to determine a project's value, finance its production, and monetize its distribution globally. Without clear authorship, there is no IP. Without IP, the economic model of film and television collapses. The industry urgently needs a way to prove a human artist, not the machine, remains the master of the final creative work.
Exploring the Copyright Problem in The Bends
To solve this IP crisis, innovators turned to R&D The Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California (ETC) set out to understand how to demonstrate human authorship in generative AI workflows and thus apply for copyright protection for the R&D short film The Bends.
The Bends Producer, Christina Lee Storm, alongside Annie Hanlon, co-founded a startup launching Playbook AIR, a platform to tackle the trust layer. Together with Mod Tech Labs, led by Alex and Tim Porter, they are building a framework for documenting and verifying human authorship in generative production workflows.
Playbook AIR, is a security, provenance, and compliance platform that automatically tracks the human touchpoints within an AI-driven creative process. Enabled by the MOD automation architecture, it runs quietly in the background of a production pipeline, capturing metadata and authorship data without disrupting the artist’s creative flow.
For The Bends, the system tracked key elements of human creation, from director Tiffany Lin’s original character design to the iterative development of visual assets, ensuring that each step could be verified as the work of a human artist and ultimately provide the necessary evidence to successfully apply for copyright protection for the final film, securing its valuable Intellectual Property (IP).
The key is to capture enough data to ensure that all assets within a copyright submission can demonstrate human authorship. One of the technologies that facilitates the tracking of assets through the production pipeline is Wacom Yuify which adds a hidden Micromark to the artwork, proving it’s an artist's creation. It doesn’t change the quality of the art or how the image looks, it keeps authorship safe.
Copyrighting Generative AI Content is not Simple
The Playbook AIR enabled by Mod Tech Labs partnership was built around a simple goal: make provenance and authorship tracking invisible to the artist. Manual “prompt logs” and other workarounds are slow and incomplete. Artists cannot be expected to record every micro-decision they make while working. Automation allows these records to be collected passively, reducing friction while preserving essential proof of authorship.
Still, major challenges remain. Each studio and production pipeline operates differently, which means any provenance and authorship tracking system must be modular and adaptable. The architecture behind Playbook AIR must accommodate a variety of data sources and workflows without requiring additional effort from artists or engineers.
The broader legal landscape is equally uncertain. Recent court cases and Copyright Office guidance continue to redefine the boundary between “transformative” and “derivative” works, two distinctions that determine whether an AI-assisted output can be protected. With leadership changes and evolving standards at the U.S. Copyright Office, the industry remains in a precarious state of flux.
Within that uncertainty, The Bends serves as an R&D test case, a live experiment in how automation, documentation, and human-in-the-loop design can coexist within a generative production environment.
Copyright Enables Responsible AI
At a time when AI tools are becoming a routine part of filmmaking, design, and animation, the need for transparent provenance systems is critical. Without them, artists risk losing recognition for their creative input, studios risk releasing works with unclear ownership, and the acceleration of generative AI workflows in the entertainment industry risks an insurmountable problem.
By embedding provenance tracking directly into the production pipeline, projects like The Bends demonstrate that protecting human authorship does not have to come at the cost of innovation. The work of ETC, Playbook AIR, and Mod Tech Labs contributes to a growing conversation about responsible AI in entertainment and how creative ownership is defined, protected, and valued in the years ahead. Playbook AIR integrates the rigorous frameworks set by technical standards bodies and security organizations, while ensuring compliance with IP regulators and aligning with creative standards by industry professional organizations like the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (TV Academy) and the Producers Guild of America (PGA) to validate the protection of human artistry.
As AI continues to evolve, the lessons from The Bends highlight a path forward: automation that safeguards creativity, compliance that supports artistry, and collaboration between legal, technical, and creative communities to ensure that innovation and authorship remain aligned.