Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the digital world, and Bangladesh is increasingly becoming part of that transformation. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Midjourney are now widely used to create written, visual, and software-based content with minimal human involvement. While these technologies offer significant opportunities, they also challenge the traditional foundations of copyright law, which has historically been built to safeguard human labour, creativity, and originality.

Although Bangladesh’s Copyright Act, 2023 modernised several aspects of digital copyright protection, it remains largely silent on the growing problem of AI-generated work and the resulting questions concerning authorship, originality, and accountability.

Modern copyright law is fundamentally built upon the assumption that creative works originate from human intellectual activity. International copyright frameworks such as the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the TRIPS Agreement implicitly assume the existence of human authorship, without acknowledging mechanical or automated authorship.

J.A.L. Sterling, a significant figure in the advocacy and teaching of copyright law and policy, explained that one of the major philosophical foundations of copyright originates from English philosopher John Locke’s labour theory, wherein individuals acquire property rights over the products created through their own labour, skill, and intellectual effort. Sterling added that copyright law also developed through personality-based theories associated with philosopher Immanuel Kant, where creative works are viewed as extensions of the author’s personality and identity.

AI-generated works destabilise this traditional understanding of “author-work” relationship, according to Paul Goold, because copyright law historically depends upon expressive content being traceable to identifiable human intellectual activity. Goold further argues that modern AI increasingly exposes the conceptual weakness of artificially assigning authorship where meaningful human creativity may not genuinely exist.

Additionally, generative AI creates structural instability within copyright law because machines are now capable of semantic and stylistic imitation at levels previously associated only with human creativity. The concern is therefore no longer limited to copying. AI systems increasingly imitate style, tone, structure, and expressive identity itself.

A recent investigation by fact-checking organisation Dismislab found that two widely used AI models—Gemini and Grok—generated modified NID images using samples and prompts without flagging any concerns about sensitive personal data. In Bangladesh’s current copyright framework, which is still fundamentally designed to assume human authorship and that still struggles to accommodate autonomous AI-generated content, such examples of AI reproducing highly realistic documents should raise concern. In a 2025 paper on the copyright paradigms in the age of AI, the authors observed that concepts such as originality and authorship become increasingly uncertain when expressive works are generated through systems capable of operating with minimal human intellectual contribution.

Therefore, artificial intelligence now requires the law to confront an uncomfortable question: if expressive works can increasingly be generated without meaningful human creativity, what exactly is copyright law protecting anymore?

What Bangladesh needs is not an overly complicated or technologically rigid copyright regime for AI-generated works. Instead, it requires a practical and human-centred framework capable of preserving the connection between copyright and genuine human creativity. Instead of requiring courts or authorities to scientifically determine whether every work is human-created or AI-generated, the law could gradually require creators, publishers, commercial users, or applicants for copyright registration to disclose whether generative AI tools were substantially used in producing the work. The legal focus should then shift towards assessing whether meaningful human intellectual contribution remained dominant in the final output.

Such an approach would also preserve flexibility, as AI technology continues evolving rapidly. Courts could then assess disputes case-by-case by examining factors such as level of human creativity, selection, arrangement, editing, judgment, and intellectual control over the final work rather than attempting to determine whether AI was used at all.

At the same time, Bangladesh should avoid granting full traditional copyright protection to purely autonomous AI-generated outputs where meaningful human creativity is effectively absent. Doing so may gradually weaken the philosophical foundations of copyright law itself by protecting machine-generated production in the same way as human intellectual creativity. Instead, Bangladesh may eventually consider a limited sui generis framework for certain autonomous AI-generated outputs. The term “ sui generis ” simply means “of its own kind” or a special legal category created outside ordinary copyright law. In intellectual property law, sui generis protection is sometimes used where existing legal categories cannot comfortably address new technological or commercial realities.

Artificial intelligence is forcing copyright law to be reconsidered in terms of the meaning of creativity, originality, and authorship. Bangladesh now has an important opportunity to develop a balanced legal framework that encourages innovation while still preserving the human foundations upon which copyright law has historically depended.