The Future of Education

In the information society of today, all sectors are exploring the possibilities to implement technological innovations to improve their processes. The education is no exception. The present paper aims to analyze from copyright perspective the legal and ethical challenges when implementing artificial intelligence (AI) – one of the most trending technologies – in the education. Among the problems that shall be explored in the analysis are (i) whether any authorship could arise over content generated by AI in the light of the modern European copyright laws, considering the fact that most of the legal systems require as a prerequisite for copyright protection the presence of originality, understood as a creative activity result of free and creative choices of the author to produce a work that reflects their personality¹ which is inherent to humans only; (ii) whether it is possible to name AI as co-author or quote it as a scientific source; (iii) how certain anti-plagiarism systems applied in Bulgaria detect also potential texts generated by AI²; (iv) what guidance has the Bulgarian Ministry of Education issued for issuance of AI in the educational system³; (v) under what circumstances can research organizations and cultural heritage institutions rely on the text and data mining exception⁴ under the EUCD Directive⁵ (Article 3) – to train AI for the purposes of scientific research, as text and data mining is an important tool for the development of AI applications⁶. Although focusing on part of the said issues from Bulgarian perspective, the paper can have practical implications and serve as a basis for future research in all EU countries, as some of the problems are based on a common EU legal framework.