Impact of Generative AI on Copyright and Creativity: A Legal Analysis with Special Reference to India

Generative artificial intelligence has moved copyright debates beyond ordinary copying and distribution into questions of training data, machine-authored outputs, market substitution and the future of human creativity. This paper examines how Indian copyright law can respond to AI systems that ingest protected works and generate text, images, music, code and audiovisual material. It argues that India should neither treat every act of machine learning as infringement nor treat every use of protected works for training as automatically lawful. The Copyright Act, 1957, Indian originality doctrine and fair dealing principles provide a foundation, but they require AI-specific application. The paper proposes a human-centred and marketsensitive framework based on disclosure of AI use, protection only for human creative contribution, liability for substantially similar outputs, calibrated licensing for commercial training datasets, preservation of research exceptions, and coordination with personality-rights and platform-governance rules.