The probability that texts were largely or exclusively generated by AI is significantly higher in certain work categories or text types than in others. The question is becoming increasingly important, because legal and financial decisions, but also selection by humans and machines, will depend more and more on the degree of automation of content.
In our assessment, the decisive factors are the purpose of a text, the economic incentives, the production processes and the importance of responsibility of the parties involved:
- There is a high probability of AI-generated texts (i.e. often created automatically without human control) for product descriptions, promotional websites, blogs without a recognizable editorial team, automatic news summaries, automatically generated travel recommendations, all types of spam and fake reviews, as well as content marketing articles and corporate communications.
- There is a high, but somewhat lower probability of AI-generated texts for advice texts (how-tos, everyday tutorials), automated sports and stock market reports, FAQ texts and chatbot content.
- There is a low probability for texts that require reliable information and creative design. These are literary works (novels, poetry, narratives), investigative journalism and essays (research, personal perspective and experience, influence of the reputation and responsibility of the person drafting the text), academic publications (philological requirements, peer review, quality standards), autobiographies, personal reports, accounts of experiences (subjective experiences, hardly authentically simulable by AI).
There are mixed forms and hybrid texts for which AI systems make suggestions or provide draft versions, but for which a human being takes over the editing and responsibility. As long as the human contribution corresponds to an intellectual individual creation, there is copyright protection for the work.
Only when there is an individual human expression does copyright protection arise (automatically) and the opportunity to receive royalties from a collective management organization such as ProLitteris. Pure AI-generated products are not protected as works.