Young Writers Society

After years of somnolence, it seems like machine intelligence accelerated by leaps and bounds in just the past few months. Of course, that's because there was a lot of incremental progress being made outside of the public eye, but the impact of it has been pretty sudden.

With that in mind, this was a decision handed down by the US Copyright Office recently:

AI-created images lose U.S. copyrights in test for new technology

Feb 22 (Reuters) - Images in a graphic novel that were created using the artificial-intelligence system Midjourney should not have been granted copyright protection, the U.S. Copyright Office said in a letter seen by Reuters.

"Zarya of the Dawn" author Kris Kashtanova is entitled to a copyright for the parts of the book Kashtanova wrote and arranged, but not for the images produced by Midjourney, the office said in its letter, dated Tuesday.

The decision is one of the first by a U.S. court or agency on the scope of copyright protection for works created with AI, and comes amid the meteoric rise of generative AI software like Midjourney, Dall-E and ChatGPT.

The Copyright Office said in its letter that it would reissue its registration for "Zarya of the Dawn" to omit images that "are not the product of human authorship" and therefore cannot be copyrighted.

This was expected, but still something to keep in mind when using AI to help craft your own works. A few things to note though:

- Anything you add on and requires more than a bare minimum of work can still be copyrighted. For example, my Frank the Rooster cover art was created using Dall-E. That image is not copyrighted, but the image with my title and name on it is copyrighted (copyright is always automatic in the US and most other countries too)

- This is not a final decision. I don't know if the author will appeal the decision, but she absolutely has the right to do so. Unfortunately though, if she pursues her case through the court system, then it may take years to exhaust the appeals process and come to a final decision.

- How you arrange the AI generated artwork can also be copyrighted. The classic example of this is a collage. If you generate a bunch of pieces, then arrange them together in a collage, then that collage is copyrighted even though the pieces themselves aren't.

If this topic interests you, check out:
Will human authors be necessary in 20 years? by @lliyah