With advances in quality productive forces, new types of intellectual achievements, such as Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC), have emerged on a large scale. While this expansion broadens the boundaries of knowledge production, it also presents profound challenges to traditional judicial copyright rules. Increasing machine autonomy has gradually diminished the extent of human contribution in the process of creation, and machine-generated outputs challenge author-centrism, which places natural-person attribution at its core, thereby rendering the legal protection for AIGC copyright an increasingly pressing issue. In current judicial practice, the standards for assessing the originality of AIGC works diverge significantly. Some cases recognize personalized human choices, such as data input and parameter settings, as sufficient to establish copyright eligibility. Others, however, deny protection on the grounds of insufficient human participation. Consequently, disputes over rights ownership have become prominent, calling for theoretical and normative clarification. Under a subjectivist approach to originality, “human intellectual contribution” is the essential prerequisite for AIGC copyright eligibility. As a product of human-machine collaboration, AIGC inherently relies on human decisions in model design, prompt input, and output curation. Therefore, it has not deviated from the personalism foundations of copyright law, and artificial intelligence, in essence, continues to function as a tool employed by human creators. Accordingly, the development of an AIGC copyright protection framework should remain anchored in a “human-centric” approach. Respecting the principle of autonomy of will, the framework should emphasize the user’s central role in the generation process, and resolve conflicts in judicial adjudication by clarifying originality standards and delineating ownership rules. This institutional design not only meets the demand of new quality productive forces for encouraging innovation, but also strikes an appropriate balance between technological development and rights protection. It provides stable and predictable judicial guarantees for the healthy development of the AIGC industry and promotes value reconstruction and functional upgrading of copyright law in the digital civilization era.