Human Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Intellectual Property
Ebuka Williams Obidinma Esq. ACIArb | Partner, Synergy Legal Partners
Human Rights in a Digital World — Series Article No. 3
1.0 Introduction
Copyright law is one of humanity’s oldest attempts to answer a deceptively simple question: when a person creates something of value, what does the world owe them in return?
For centuries, the answer has been grounded in a proposition so fundamental that it has rarely needed to be stated explicitly. The proposition is this: copyright law has never been about protecting works. It has always been about protecting people. The novel, the song, the painting, the invention are not the objects of copyright’s deepest concern. They are evidence of something far more important. They are proof that a human being thought, felt, imagined, and created. And it is that human being, not the artefact they produced, that copyright was designed to serve.
This proposition, rooted in the writings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, reinforced by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, and embedded in the moral rights provisions of the Nigerian Copyright Act 2022, has remained largely uncontested for generations. Until now.
The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has placed that foundational proposition under pressure it has never previously faced. AI systems can now produce novels, compose music, generate legal arguments, write poetry, and create visual art, often in seconds, often indistinguishable from human output, and often trained on the creative works of human beings who were never asked, never informed, and never compensated. The question that humanity must now answer is not simply a legal one. It is a moral one. When machines generate value from human creativity, what does justice require?
This article is the third in the Human Rights in a Digital World series. Readers who have not yet read the preceding articles are encouraged to do so, as they establish the foundational framework within which this discussion sits. The first article, Beyond the Physical, established that human rights do not end where technology begins. The second examined the right to privacy in the age of artificial intelligence.
This article examines what may be the most philosophically profound question the series has yet confronted: can a machine truly create? This writer’s answer is no. A machine can generate. It can produce. It can assemble, recombine, and imitate. But creation, in the fullest sense of that word, is a human act. It requires consciousness, intention, emotion, lived experience, and cultural identity. It requires the capacity to suffer, to love, to remember, and to imagine a world different from the one that exists. Machines possess none of these things. And a legal system that forgets this distinction does not merely make a technical error. It makes a human rights error.
2.0 What Is Copyright Really For?
To understand why artificial intelligence poses such a profound challenge to intellectual property law, it is necessary to return to a question that lawyers and policymakers rarely stop to ask. What is copyright actually for?
The instinctive answer, shaped by decades of commercial litigation and legislative debate, is that copyright exists to protect economic interests. It gives creators the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and profit from their works. It prevents free-riding. It creates incentives for innovation.
These are legitimate and important functions. But they are not the deepest answer. The deepest answer was given not by a lawyer but by a philosopher. Immanuel Kant argued in the eighteenth century that a creative work is not merely a commodity. It is an extension of the author’s rational agency, a projection of the author’s will and personality into the world. To reproduce that work without the author’s consent is not simply a commercial injury. It is a violation of the person. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel developed this reasoning further, arguing that property, including intellectual property, is the means by which a person externalises their will and establishes their identity in the world. On this view, copyright is not a commercial instrument dressed in legal language. It is a human rights instrument.
This philosophical tradition gave rise to the concept of moral rights, recognised in Article 6bis of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the foundational international treaty governing copyright to which Nigeria is a signatory. Moral rights are distinct from economic rights. They cannot be sold, assigned, or surrendered by contract. They include the right of an author to be identified as the creator of their work, and the right to object to any treatment of that work which would be prejudicial to their honour or reputation. These rights exist because copyright law recognises, at its most fundamental level, that a creative work is not just property. It is a piece of the person who made it.
Nigerian law reflects this understanding. Section 17 of the Nigerian Copyright Act 2022 provides that an author of an artistic work, manuscript of a literary work or of a musical composition shall have an inalienable right to a share in the proceeds of any sale of that work. The word “inalienable” is significant. It means the right cannot be transferred away, regardless of any commercial arrangement the author may enter into. The law is saying, in plain terms, that no transaction can sever the permanent connection between a human creator and their creation. That is a human rights statement, not a commercial one.
The Nigerian courts have reinforced this understanding. In Oladipo Yemitan v The Daily Times (Nigeria) Ltd and Anor (1980) FHCLR 186, the Federal High Court held that copyright in a literary work belongs to the author who is the one that actually expended the work, labour, knowledge, and skill. Labour. Knowledge. Skill. These are human qualities. They are not qualities that can be replicated by an algorithm, however sophisticated.
2.1 The Paintbrush Has Never Been the Painter
There is a simple analogy that cuts through the complexity of this debate with remarkable precision. A paintbrush produces paintings. A camera produces photographs. A piano produces music. Microsoft Word produces novels. None of those tools have ever been recognised as authors. None of them have ever held copyright. None of them have ever received moral rights protection.
The law has always understood, intuitively and correctly, that the tool and the creator are different things entirely. This understanding was so obvious for so long that it never required explicit legislative statement.
Of course the paintbrush is not the painter. Of course the camera is not the photographer. The creative act is not the physical production of the output. It is the human decision, shaped by human experience and human imagination, that determines what the output will be and what it will mean.
Artificial intelligence is a more sophisticated tool than a paintbrush. It is a more sophisticated tool than a camera. But sophistication does not change the nature of the relationship. A hammer that drives nails more efficiently than a human hand does not thereby become a carpenter. An AI system that generates music more quickly than a human composer does not thereby become a musician. The speed and quality of the output are irrelevant to the question of authorship. What matters is whether there was a human mind behind the creative act. And in the case of purely AI generated works, there was not.
2.2 What Copyright Protects and What It Does Not
The Nigerian Copyright Act 2022, under Section 2(2)(a), provides that a literary, musical, or artistic work shall not be eligible for copyright unless some effort has been expended on making it, to give it an original character. The Nigerian courts have been consistent on this point. In Oladipo Yemitan v The Daily Times (Nigeria) Ltd and Anor, the Federal High Court held that copyright belongs to the author who actually expended labour, knowledge, and skill. In Spreevision Ltd and Anor v Nestle Nigeria Plc and Ors (Suit No. FHC/IKJ/CS/183/2012, unreported), the same court confirmed that the author must have devoted skill and labour to the work’s creation.
These are not technical requirements. They are human ones. Skill is developed over time, through practice, failure, and perseverance. Labour is expended by a conscious being who chooses to invest their time and energy in a creative act. Knowledge is accumulated through a lifetime of learning and experience. An AI system does not develop skill. It does not expend labour. It does not accumulate knowledge in any human sense. It processes data and generates outputs. That is a fundamentally different thing. And the law, both in Nigeria and internationally, has always known the difference.
Copyright protects human creation. It always has. The arrival of AI does not change that. It simply makes it more urgent to say so plainly.
3.0 What AI Actually Does and What It Does Not
There is a word that has crept into public discourse about artificial intelligence that deserves careful scrutiny. That word is “creates.” We speak of AI creating music, creating art, creating literature. The usage is so widespread, and the outputs so impressive, that the word has begun to feel natural. It should not. The casual use of the word “creates” in relation to AI systems is not merely imprecise language. It is a conceptual error with serious legal and human rights consequences.
To create, in the fullest sense of the word, is to bring something into existence that did not previously exist, from the resources of one’s own mind, imagination, and experience. It requires consciousness. It requires the capacity to be moved by beauty, troubled by injustice, inspired by memory, and shaped by culture. It requires, above all, the kind of interiority that only a human being possesses. A human composer does not merely arrange notes. They arrange notes in a way that reflects who they are, where they come from, what they have loved and lost, and what they believe the world should sound like.
An AI system does none of these things. What an AI system does, however impressively, is generate. It identifies patterns in vast quantities of human-authored data, learns the statistical relationships between those patterns, and produces new outputs that conform to those relationships. The output may be beautiful. It may be technically sophisticated. It may be indistinguishable, to the untrained ear or eye, from the output of a human creator. But the process that produced it is fundamentally different from the process of human creation. One begins with a person. The other begins with data.
That distinction matters enormously. Not because the output is less valuable in any commercial sense. But because copyright law, properly understood, does not protect outputs. It protects the human act of creation that produced them.
3.1 Built on Human Labour, Generating Inhuman Profits
There is a further dimension to this issue that goes beyond questions of authorship and into the territory of justice. AI systems do not generate their outputs from nothing. They are trained on vast bodies of human creative work. The large language models that power AI writing tools have ingested billions of words of human-authored text, including novels, journalism, poetry, legal scholarship, and academic research. The AI music generation platforms that can now produce
Afrobeats tracks in minutes have been trained on thousands, possibly millions, of songs produced by human musicians over generations. The image generation systems that can produce visual art in seconds have been trained on the paintings, illustrations, and photographs of human artists.
In most cases, the human creators whose works formed the foundation of these AI systems were never asked for their consent. They were never informed that their work was being used. And they have never been compensated. There are exceptions: some AI companies have entered into licensing arrangements with publishers, record labels, and content aggregators. But those arrangements are the minority, and they raise a further concern of their own. Where licensing has occurred, it has typically been negotiated between AI companies and large commercial intermediaries, not with the individual artists, writers, and musicians whose creativity the intermediaries represent. The creator remains, in most cases, invisible to the arrangement that determines the commercial value of their work.
Companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, whose large language models represent some of the most commercially valuable technology in human history, were built in significant part on the intellectual labour of human creators who remain largely invisible in the commercial arrangements that followed. The economic value generated by AI systems trained on human creative works runs into hundreds of billions of dollars globally. The compensation flowing back to the creators who made that training possible runs, in most cases, to precisely nothing.
The European Union, through Article 53(1)(d) of the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has begun to address this by requiring providers of general-purpose AI models to publish a sufficiently detailed summary of the content used for training. This is an important first step. But a summary is not consent. And disclosure is not compensation. The deeper question of what justice requires when machines are built on human creativity remains, for now, largely unanswered.
3.2 The Devaluation of Human Creativity
The most significant threat posed by artificial intelligence to human creativity is not, this writer would argue, copyright infringement. It is something more insidious. It is the gradual devaluation of human creativity as a quality that society recognises, celebrates, and rewards.
Consider what it means for a musician to spend twenty years developing their craft. They learn their instrument as a child. They absorb the musical traditions of their culture. They are shaped by joy and sorrow, by community and isolation, by the particular sounds of the city or the village in which they grew up. When they finally compose a song that moves their listeners, the song carries all of that. It carries them.
Now consider that an AI system, trained partly on that musician’s own recordings, can produce a song in their style in forty seconds. The AI song may be technically competent. It may even be commercially successful. But it carries nothing. It has no memory. No cultural identity. No lived experience. No self.
The danger is not simply that the musician loses revenue to the AI system, serious as that is. The danger is that society, saturated with AI-generated content produced at a speed and volume that no human creator can match, gradually loses the capacity to value what human creativity actually represents. If a painting that required twenty years of artistic development can be replicated in twenty seconds, the question eventually becomes not whether the image is beautiful, but whether we still understand what beauty costs. A society that stops valuing human creativity does not merely harm its artists. It diminishes its own humanity.
This is a human rights argument. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the right of everyone to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic production of which he is the author. That provision was written for human beings. It was written because human creativity was understood to be an expression of human dignity. The advent of AI does not make that understanding obsolete. It makes it more important.
4.0 The Nigerian Creative at the Centre
Abstract legal arguments acquire their true weight when they are measured against real human lives. The question of whether a machine can truly create is not merely a philosophical puzzle for academic journals. In Nigeria, it is a question with direct consequences for millions of people whose livelihoods, identities, and cultural contributions depend on the recognition and protection of their creativity.
Nigeria is one of the most creatively productive nations on earth. Its music has reshaped global popular culture. Its literature has claimed some of the most prestigious prizes in the world. Its creative industries represent not merely an economic sector but a living expression of the country’s diversity, history, and genius. It is precisely because Nigeria’s creative identity is so rich and so valuable that the arrival of artificial intelligence in the creative space demands serious, urgent attention.
4.1 Afrobeats and the Sound That Belongs to Everyone and No One
Afrobeats is not simply a genre of music. It is a cultural ecosystem built over generations, drawing from Yoruba percussion traditions, Igbo folk melodies, highlife rhythms, Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat radicalism, and the cosmopolitan energy of Lagos. When Burna Boy sings, or when Wizkid produces a record, or when Omah Lay emerges from Port Harcourt with a sound that stops the world, they are not merely making music. They are drawing on a vast reservoir of human experience, cultural memory, and creative inheritance that belongs to an entire people.
Artificial intelligence is now drawing on that same reservoir. Without permission. Without acknowledgment. And without compensation.
AI music generation platforms such as Suno and Udio, when prompted to generate Afrobeats music, produce tracks by identifying and recombining the patterns, rhythms, and melodic structures present in the vast libraries of human-authored music on which they were trained.
Those libraries almost certainly include the recordings of Nigerian artists. In most cases, the artists were never asked. Many were never informed. And the vast majority have received nothing.
The commercial dimension of this is significant. According to Techpoint Africa, in 2025 an entity known as Urban Chords released an AI-generated album, Choir Refix, which debuted at number 43 on the Nigerian Official Top 100 Albums chart, with 834,000 on-demand streams. That figure represents real listenership, real cultural space, and real commercial value, generated by a system that produced its output by learning from music that Nigerian and other human artists created.
At the same time, Nigerian entrepreneurs are building in this space. KorinAI, founded by Philips Olajide-Philips and Solomon Ogunbowale, is a Nigerian-built platform that allows users to generate royalty-free music in Afrobeats, Afropop, Afro-jazz, Amapiano, and gospel styles within minutes. The platform has real commercial and creative utility. But it raises a question that its founders, and Nigerian policymakers, must eventually answer: if the AI system generating these tracks was trained on the works of Nigerian musicians, what do those musicians owe it, and more importantly, what does it owe them?
Jinmi Abduls, a Lagos-based producer and founder of Chase Music Nigeria, who has worked with Oxlade, Teni, and Joeboy, captures the essential limit of AI with precision. Writing in Techpoint Africa in February 2026, he stated: “The next trend in music is AI. I think it’s here to enhance our creativity and not to take it away.” But he is equally clear on what AI can never do: “AI will never be able to be inspired. And that’s the switch.”
Inspiration is not a technical process. It cannot be optimised, scaled, or automated. It is the product of a human life, lived fully, in all its complexity and contradiction. That is what Nigerian music has always been. And that is what no AI system can replicate.
4.2 Literary Publishing and the Written Soul
Nigeria’s literary tradition is one of Africa’s most distinguished. From Chinua Achebe’s foundational novels to the internationally celebrated work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, and a generation of writers who have brought Nigerian voices to global audiences, Nigerian literature represents a body of creative achievement that is inseparable from the identities of the human beings who produced it.
That body of work is now being used, without consent, as training data for AI systems. Research published in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics in April 2025, examining the impact of generative AI on the Nigerian book publishing industry, confirmed that AI tools have been adopted across the publishing sector in West Africa, including for writing, editing, production, and marketing. The same research identified a critical challenge: AI algorithms independently generating content blur the lines of authorship, making it increasingly difficult for publishers to determine who actually created a work.
Consider what is at stake. A Nigerian author spends five years writing a novel. They draw on their childhood, their family history, their community, their language, their grief, their joy, and their particular way of seeing the world. The novel is published, celebrated, and eventually, like millions of other human-authored texts, absorbed into the training data of an AI system. That AI system can now generate prose in the style of that author, at a speed and volume that no human writer can match, without attribution, without compensation, and without any acknowledgment of the creative foundation on which it stands.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is the current reality of the global publishing landscape. And Nigeria’s writers are among its most exposed, for a reason that compounds the injustice further.
Research has found that over 85 percent of AI training data comes from the Global North, while less than 6 percent covers non-Western genres and traditions. This means that African creative voices, including Nigerian musicians, authors, and artists, are dramatically underrepresented in the systems that are reshaping global creative industries. AI tools attempting to generate
Afrobeats tracks or Nigerian literary prose do so from a thin and inadequate foundation. They may produce something that resembles the surface of the culture. But they cannot produce its depth, because they have not been adequately trained on it. The result is a double injustice: Nigerian creativity is underrepresented in AI systems, and yet those systems are still deployed in Nigerian markets, generating value from a cultural tradition they have never properly learned.
4.3 What Nigerian Law Currently Provides and What It Does Not
The Nigerian Copyright Act 2022 has not expressly addressed the question of AI authorship. The Act defines an author by reference to the word “person,” but whether that definition extends to, or excludes, AI systems has never been directly tested before a Nigerian court. There is no Nigerian judicial precedent on the matter, and no specific legislative provision addressing the copyright status of AI-generated works. This silence is not a minor technical gap. It is a legal vacuum at the heart of one of Nigeria’s most valuable industries, and it is a vacuum that the rapid advancement of generative AI is filling faster than any legislature has yet been able to respond.
Comparatively, the US Copyright Office has stated in its 2023 guidance that AI-generated content cannot be copyrighted where no meaningful human involvement is present. The UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 attributes authorship of computer-generated works to the person who makes the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work. Nigeria, by contrast, has made no such determination. The law is silent. And in the creative economy, silence is not neutrality. It is an open door.
These comparative positions illustrate that the international community is actively grappling with these questions. Nigeria must join that conversation with urgency. Not because the answer is simple, but because the cost of continued silence falls disproportionately on Nigerian creators who lack the resources, the platforms, and the legal infrastructure to protect themselves in its absence.
A conversation must now begin in earnest about what the next iteration of Nigeria’s copyright framework should look like. Not to stifle innovation, not to restrict the development of AI tools, but to ensure that when AI systems generate value from Nigerian creativity, Nigerian creators are not left entirely outside the arrangement that determines how that value is distributed.
5.0 What Justice Requires
This article has, to this point, examined what copyright is for, what AI actually does, and what is at stake for Nigerian creators. All of that analysis leads to a single unavoidable question. Not a legal question, but a moral one. When machines are built on human creativity, when they generate commercial value from the intellectual labour of human beings who were never asked and never compensated, and when the legal frameworks designed to protect those human beings have not kept pace with the technology exploiting them, what does justice require?
This writer’s answer rests on three propositions. They are stated here not as settled law, because in several respects the law has not yet settled them, but as principled positions that the law should adopt, and that Nigeria in particular has both the opportunity and the obligation to consider.
5.1 First Proposition: AI Companies That Train on Human Creative Works Without Consent Are Extracting Value Without Accountability
The business model of generative AI is, at its foundation, a model of extraction. An AI company ingests human creative works, uses those works to train a system capable of producing commercially valuable outputs, and then sells access to that system for profit. In most cases, the human creators whose works made that system possible receive nothing. They did not consent to participate in it. And many do not even know it happened.
The legal debate about whether this appropriation constitutes copyright infringement under existing law is genuinely complex, and different jurisdictions are arriving at different answers.
Courts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union are currently grappling with cases brought by writers, visual artists, and musicians whose works were used to train AI systems without their consent. The outcomes of those cases will shape the global legal landscape for years to come.
But this article does not rest its argument on the technical question of whether existing copyright law has been infringed. It rests on a prior and more fundamental question. Even if a court were to find that using human creative works to train an AI system falls within a fair use or fair dealing exception, that finding would tell us what the law currently permits. It would tell us nothing about what justice requires.
Justice requires that when commercial value is generated from human creative labour, the humans whose labour made that value possible are recognised, and where their contribution is identifiable, appropriately compensated. This is not a radical proposition. It is the foundational principle of intellectual property law, restated for the AI age.
5.2 Second Proposition: Human Creativity Deserves Recognition as an Extension of Human Personality and Dignity
This is the boldest proposition in this article, and this writer advances it deliberately and without apology.
For too long, the discourse around copyright and artificial intelligence has been conducted entirely in economic terms. Who owns the output? Who profits from the system? How are licensing fees to be calculated? These are important questions. But they are not the most important questions.
The most important question is this: what are we actually trying to protect? The answer, as this article has argued from its opening paragraph, is people. Copyright law, at its deepest level, is a recognition that human creativity is an expression of human personality. When a person creates, they project something of themselves into the world. Their work carries their voice, their vision, their identity, their dignity. As the Harvard Law Review’s landmark 2025 article notes, drawing on the scholarship of Professor Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, moral rights protections reaffirm the author’s work as a reflection of its creator and a testament to the author’s autonomy and dignity.
This writer proposes that in the age of artificial intelligence, this understanding must be elevated from a philosophical foundation of copyright law to an explicit legal principle. Human creativity should be recognised, in Nigerian law and in international instruments, as an extension of human personality and dignity, deserving of protection not merely as economic property but as a dimension of the human person.
This proposition has support in existing law. The moral rights provisions of the Berne Convention already protect the author’s personality interest in their work, independent of any economic consideration. The Nigerian Copyright Act 2022 already provides for inalienable rights that cannot be surrendered by commercial contract. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights already recognises the moral and material interests of authors as a matter of human rights.
What is needed is not a new legal principle but the explicit application of existing principles to the challenge that generative AI now presents.
When an AI system generates a work by recombining patterns learned from human creative expression, it is not merely using data. It is drawing on something that belongs, in the deepest sense, to the people who created it. The law must say so plainly. And it must provide remedies that reflect that understanding.
5.3 Third Proposition: Nigeria Has Both the Opportunity and the Obligation to Lead
The first two propositions apply globally. This third proposition is specific to Nigeria.
Nigeria is not a passive observer of the global AI revolution. It is a participant in it, as a creator, as a consumer, and increasingly as a builder of AI tools and platforms. The emergence of Nigerian AI ventures such as KorinAI demonstrates that the country has the entrepreneurial capacity and the technical ambition to shape this space, not merely to be shaped by it.
But ambition without a legal framework is exposure. And Nigeria’s creative industries, among the most valuable and the most culturally significant on the African continent, are currently exposed.
The Nigerian government has an opportunity that will not remain open indefinitely. It has the opportunity to become the first major African nation to develop a comprehensive legal framework governing the intersection of artificial intelligence and intellectual property, grounded not in a mechanical transplant of foreign models but in Nigeria’s own constitutional values, its own creative identity, and its own understanding of what human dignity requires.
Such a framework should address, at minimum, four things. First, it should establish clear rules on the use of Nigerian creative works as training data for AI systems, including transparency requirements and consent mechanisms. Second, it should create a legal basis for creators to seek recognition and, where appropriate, compensation when their works are used to train AI systems that generate commercial value. Third, it should determine the copyright status of AI-generated works in the Nigerian context, filling the legal vacuum that currently exists. Fourth, it should establish that human creativity, as an expression of human personality and dignity, is entitled to protection that no technological development can diminish.
This is not an argument against AI. It is an argument for people. Nigeria can have both a thriving AI economy and a legal framework that honours the human beings whose creativity makes that economy possible. The two are not in conflict. They are, in fact, interdependent. An AI ecosystem that extracts value from human creativity without accountability will, in time, destroy the very creative culture it depends upon. A framework that protects human creators is not an obstacle to innovation. It is the foundation on which sustainable innovation must be built.
6.0 Conclusion
This article began with a question that copyright law has always carried within it, even when it did not ask it aloud. When a person creates something of value, what does the world owe them in return?
Artificial intelligence has forced that question into the open. It has built commercial empires on human creative labour without consent. It has entered Nigeria’s most valuable creative industries and begun generating value from a cultural inheritance that belongs to the Nigerian people, without accountability to the people it draws from. And it has forced copyright law, for the first time in its history, to answer the question it previously left unasked: Is generation the same as creation?
This article’s answer is no. Generation is a mechanical process; creation is a human one. The output may be indistinguishable; the process is not.
This article has argued three things: that copyright law has never been about protecting works. It has always been about protecting people; that AI systems do not create, they generate. They are sophisticated tools, but tools nonetheless. The paintbrush has never been the painter; and that human creativity deserves recognition as an extension of human personality and dignity, a principle already embedded in the Berne Convention, the Nigerian Copyright Act 2022, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that must now be stated explicitly in response to a technology that places it under unprecedented pressure.
Nigeria’s creative industries deserve a legal framework adequate to protect them. The Nigerian Copyright Act 2022 was not designed for a world in which generative AI could produce Afrobeats albums in three days or generate prose in the voice of a celebrated Nigerian author. That conversation must begin now. And it must be guided by one principle: technology exists for humanity, not the other way around.
The question this article has asked is not ultimately a question about machines. It is a question about us; about what we value; about what we believe creativity is and what we think it is worth.
Artificial intelligence may transform the way we create. But it must never diminish the value, dignity, or rights of the human beings whose creativity it depends upon.
References and Authorities
Legislation and Constitutional Instruments
Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended)
Nigerian Copyright Act 2022, ss 2(2)(a) and 17
European Union Artificial Intelligence Act (EU) 2024/1689, art 53(1)(d)
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Paris Act 1971), art 6bis
UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Cases
Oladipo Yemitan v The Daily Times (Nigeria) Ltd and Anor (1980) FHCLR 186
Spreevision Ltd and Anor v Nestle Nigeria Plc and Ors (Suit No. FHC/IKJ/CS/183/2012, unreported)
International Instruments
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), art 27
US Copyright Office, Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence (2023) <https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf>
Journal Articles and Academic Works
‘Recovering Personality in Copyright’s Originality Inquiry’ (2025) 138 Harvard Law Review 1123 <https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-138/recovering-personality-in-copyrights-originality-inquiry/>
Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, ‘Copyright and the Moral Right: Is an American Marriage Possible?’ (1985) 38 Vanderbilt Law Review 1
You can read the first part of the series here.
