TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Ethics & Provenance · AGE 18—22 · POSITIONAL · HELD
Who is the author
You are the author of the decisions, and the disclosure is the evidence.
The dilemma
A competition entry. The massing came from forty generated options, one of which you chose and reworked. The plan is yours. The renders are generated from your model. The text was drafted by a chatbot and cut by you. Whose work is this, and what do you write on the entry form?
The choices
Claim it all as yours and say nothing about the machine. Credit "AI" as a co-author, as if a tool could carry responsibility. Or state the chain — what was generated, what was chosen, what was changed, and by whom — and claim authorship of the decisions.
The consequence
The first route is a false claim that will not survive a good question. The second hands your authorship to something that cannot answer for it — and the law will not recognise a machine as an author: in India the statute names a person, in the US only human contributions are protected. The third route is the only one that is both honest and defensible. You are the author of the decisions, and the disclosure is the evidence.
The case
Two students, same prompt, same tool, same forty options. One picks the prettiest and submits. The other rejects thirty-eight, merges two, redraws the section by hand, and can say why each rejection happened. The second student is an author. The first is a selector. Both used AI.
Our position
The Lab locates creative authorship in judgment. It lives in the brief, in the choices you kept and refused, in the red pen, and in the chain of decisions you can show. Attribution and honest disclosure come after that chain exists; they cannot replace it. This is the Lab's definition of creative authorship. It is not a rule of copyright law, of academic credit, or of professional responsibility — each of those has its own test, and the card tells you where to find them.
Why we hold it
Every earlier change of tools left the signature with the person who made the decisions. CAD did not author drawings; BIM does not author buildings. A generator multiplies options; it does not decide. The person who decides, and who answers when the decision fails, is the author.
The strongest objection
"Author" is doing four jobs in this card, and they can belong to different people. Copyright authorship: in India, s.2(d)(vi) names "the person who causes the work to be created" for a computer-generated work, untested for generative AI; in the US, only human contributions are protected. Professional responsibility: the registered architect answers for the team's work, whoever made the judgment. Academic credit: the university sets its own rule on what counts as yours. Creative agency: a junior may exercise the decisive judgment while the firm holds the rights. "Judgment" cannot be checked after the fact — anyone can narrate decisions they did not make — and it cannot settle a conflict between the four. The formula gives one answer to four different questions.
What would make us revise it
Courts, competitions or the Council settling on a different test for creative authorship — a percentage of machine contribution, say, or a registered-process standard — that practice actually adopts. Then this card would teach that test alongside ours, and say which one governs where. Reviewed every edition.
Prove it
For one of your AI-assisted works, answer "who is the author?" four times — in copyright, in professional responsibility, in academic credit, in creative judgment — and write the one-line disclosure you would attach to it in a competition entry.
Take it to crit
Ask the student what in this work is theirs. A strong, specific answer shows mastery. A vague answer is the finding.
How it works
Start with the Indian provision. Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act 1957, inserted by the 1994 amendment, names the author of a computer-generated work as "the person who causes the work to be created". Whether a generative model's output counts as "computer-generated" under that clause is untested in Indian courts as of this edition; nobody should cite it as settled either way. The US Copyright Office's 2025 report on copyrightability says human-authored contributions can be protected there and purely generated material cannot. So "who is the author" has at least four answers: the legal one, the professional one (the Using AI does not lower the standard card on this map), the academic one (your institution's rule), and the creative one — which is the only one this card decides, and it decides it as the Lab's. The Disclosure in competitions card is the practical half of this one.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.