The US Copyright Office today issued fresh guidance on copyrighting images derived from text prompts that have been entered into various AI imaging apps. Since I'm not an attorney and therefore not qualified to render a legal opinion, I will let readers peruse the document for themselves and make what they can of it. I for one find it extremely confusing. The Office first seems to be denying the possibility of copyrighting such works ("If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it.") That's clear enough, but the same document also holds that photographs are eligible for registration "so far as they are representative of original intellectual conceptions of the author" even though such images are obviously produced mechanically through the use of a camera. If that were not confusing enough, the Office then appears to hedge its bets entirely by stating, "In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim." To say then that copyrighting AI imagery is a grey area is a vast understatement. Those seeking copyright registration of AI-generated images will have to use their own judgment in making such submissions and see how the Office responds.
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