ABSTRACT
Osamo Tezuka, considered to be the “Father of Manga,” was a prolific artist who died in 1989. In 2020, the manga novel, “Phaedo,” was released in Japan; it was generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that learned Tezuka’s artistic style by analyzing his copyrighted works. In 2019, Anthony Bourached and George H. Cann, two London-based machine learning researchers, applied a technique called Neural Style Transfer to reconstruct a painting that had been partially completed by Picasso, before he reused the canvas to paint “The Old Guitarist.” AI has the ability to resurrect artists, to give fans another chance to experience their favorite stars, and to enable a wide range of intergenerational collaborations. But it also raises questions about attribution, ownership, and legacy. Who is the “author” of such work? How much control should deceased artists have over their image? And who precisely has the final word on an artist’s legacy? This chapter will lay out the unique legal challenges posed by AI-generated posthumous art, particularly at the intersection of intellectual property with the laws of succession and will demonstrate how deliberate estate planning can help clarify and centralize decision-making around posthumous uses of IP, as well as facilitate better-informed stewardship over an artist’s legacy.
