AI and authorship have clashed for decades, not just since ChatGPT

Historian W. Patrick McCray traces machine-written text anxieties from the 1950s to today's generative AI era.

Published

Apr 27, 2026

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Human Authors Can Copyright AI-Assisted Writing - YouTube

Overview

• W. Patrick McCray argues in an MIT Press essay that fears about machines replacing human authors long predate ChatGPT, stretching back to the 1950s.
• The U.S. Supreme Court recently let stand a ruling that only humans can hold copyright, though AI-assisted works by human authors remain protectable.
• Observers warn of a "textpocalypse" in which machine-generated content floods the internet with synthetic text that feeds back into future AI training data.