The United States Copyright Office recently produced a policy statement indicating that certain works of art generated using artificial intelligence are now eligible for copyright registration on a case-by-case basis. It should go well!
Effective March 16, the Copyright Office’s policy statement indicates that copyright applicants are permitted to submit AI-assisted works (in literature and visual arts) for protection in under copyright law, and that works will be evaluated to prove their “human authorship”. The Bureau drew a comparison between AI art and photography, citing the Supreme Court’s 1884 decision to extend copyright protection to photographs against the will of Congress in Burrow-Giles Lithography Co. vs. Sarony.
The Supreme Court has ruled that a photograph is not just a mechanical process, but a work of authorship based on the photographer’s decisions in preserving the subject’s backdrop and clothing.
In the field of generative works, the Office asks applicants whether the AI elements included are the result of “mechanical reproduction” or “an author’s own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave a visible form. (Walter Benjamin:💅) To mark the difference, the policy distinguishes between human artists developing AI work strictly by submitting prompts as instructions, and human artists selecting and re-imagining generations of AI in a “sufficiently creative way “. However, the policy states that in the latter case, only the “human-written” elements of the work would be copyrighted, independent of AI contributions.
The Office cites the example of a 2018 work autonomously generated by an unattended computer algorithm that was submitted for copyright protection and finally rejected as it was developed “without any creative input from a human actor”. On the other hand, a graphic novel with text written by a human and images generated by Midjourney was granted copyright protection as a whole, but individual images were omitted from approval as they were not considered works of human authorship.
In order to get submissions approved for copyright registration, the office says “applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work” and must provide an explanation. describing human-made elements that have been contributed versus AI. -assisted elements.
In the eyes of the Copyright Office, the human hand has the upper hand for now, which should come as a relief to practicing artists concerned about AI’s encroachment on commissions and the freelance market.
