South Africa, March 12 -- Most of us are familiar with generative AI, which creates outputs (like text, images and code) in response to prompts typically made by humans - think ChatGPT and Dall-E.

The step up from this is agentic AI. Agentic AI builds on generative AI and is more proactive and autonomous, using human-esque reasoning to achieve specific goals and create outputs with minimal human input - think AutoGPT or Copilot agents.

So, who owns these outputs?

South African copyright law is primarily governed by the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 (the Act). Despite the age of the Act and the rapid advancements of technology over time, the Act gives us a degree of legal certainty regarding the ownership of AI outputs.

This is because the ...