AI-human art can be copyrighted... sometimes
AI art has exploded in the last few years...
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AI art has exploded in the last few years, invading social media feeds and even auction houses. But AI image generators emerged so fast that there are lots of unanswered questions. Aside from the debate on the ethics of using AI tools, many want to know, can AI art be copyrighted?
Until now, it has appeared not, although people have launched appeals after their AI art was rejected for copyright. The US Copyright Office (USCO) has now published a report in a bid to shed some light on where it stands. It offers some clarification, but it's not going to make anyone happy.
100% AI art can't be copyrighted
The headline conclusion in the Copyright Office's report is that output generated simply by using a text prompt in an AI image generator cannot be copyrighted. In line with previous decisions, it concludes: “Prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output."
The USCO dismisses the argument that using AI is similar to a human-to-human artistic commission (e.g., an artist directing assistants) because it considers that, at least with today's technology, AI does not provide a comparable level of control. It cites an example of how Google Gemini, when asked to generate an image of a cat smoking a pipe, ignored part of the prompt and added unwanted elements.
The report acknowledges that, in theory, we could see the development of AI systems that do give artists more control. That could potentially make them more comparable to an artists' mechanical tools. But that this is "not currently the case."
Human-AI art can be copyrighted... sometimes
But the USCO also recognises that "generating content with AI is often an initial or intermediate step" and that "human authorship may be added in the final product". It takes the opinion that if a human may select or "arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way", the result could be considered an original work.
It also says that when "AI merely assists an author in the creative process, its use does not change the copyrightability of the output." That would suggest that if you use minor generative AI, for example to remove a distraction in a photo, the image could still be fully copyrighted in its entirety.
That’s all for today, folks. See you in our next edition.