The US Copyright Office ruled a week ago that works made with Artificial Intelligence (AI), whether pictorial, literary, etc., will not accrue copyright, which will only continue limited to those created by human beings. Although it seems like a piece of legislation from a science fiction story, the Office has been forced to proceed in this way due to the proliferation of this type of work produced by this type of intelligence. “These technologies, often described as ‘generative AI,’ raise questions about whether the material they produce is protected by copyright,” the Office statement says, “whether works consisting of both human-authored material and AI-generated material can be registered, and what information applicants wishing to register them must provide to the Office. It is no longer about hypothetical questions.”
According to a report by the specialized magazine ArtInf, since companies such as OpenAI and StabilityAI began to launch text and image generators for AI in late 2022 and early this year, copyright applications for works thus produced have increased sharply. .
Last year, recalls ArtInf, author Kris Kashtanova claimed to be the first person to have been granted copyright for a work created with AI when her application to register her comic “Zarya of the Dawn” was approved. through AI. The Copyright Office reviewed her decision and requested additional information when it was discovered that the images had been created with the popular Midjourney AI generator. He then annulled her original certification and issued a new one, in which he only protected the texts of the comic, created by her, but not the AI images.
The principle that copyright only protects human creations will be decisive in future rulings. When evaluating a work submitted for registration, copyright officials will have to judge whether the original choices made in a work were produced by a human mind or mechanically. A human being can select or arrange the material generated by the AI in a creative way so that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original author’s work”, which already predicts a future of strong legal controversies.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
