Copyright Office suggests AI copyright debate was settled in 1965

The headline is either sloppy or intentionally misleading: the Copyright Office is saying that the law surrounding whether AI generated works can be copyrighted was settled in 1965 (the answer being &quot;yes if AI assisted a human creative process, no if not, and we have to decide on a case by case basis if there was enough human input to qualify&quot;). This has been their stance all along, but now they&#x27;ve provided a bit more guidance on what counts as human input, which is helpful.<p>What this article doesn&#x27;t talk about at all is the far more controversial AI copyright debate, the one most people will think of given the headline: whether training a model is fair use. That&#x27;s the one everyone is actually concerned about, and they&#x27;re definitely not claiming it was settled already.

<i>&gt; &quot;Where a human inputs their own copyrightable work and that work is perceptible in the output, they will be the author of at least that portion of the output,&quot; the guidelines said.</i><p>This policy is sensible. Most AI generated works should be uncopyrightable, except where a substantial human contribution is in the output.<p>Simply describing a picture and letting AI generate it shouldn&#x27;t be enough for the same reason that dictating what you want to a painter isn&#x27;t enough to earn you copyright over the resulting painting.<p>I would be wary about integrating too much AI output into works one wants to enforce copyright over without some level of documentation. The nightmare scenario is having your copyright stripped away because of evidence one used AI extensively.

It says they were not able to reproduce an image with the same prompt. So they just didn&#x27;t know about seeds?

Why is a binary (compiled machine code) protected by copyright, but the raw output of an AI model is not?

US copyright applications are not examined, in the sense that patents are. Issued patents are presumptively valid. Registered copyrights are not. Whether a copyright application is valid has to be determined by a court.

I&#x27;m pretty confident the copyright office was massively overthinking it in 1965 and knocked it out of the park far beyond the watered down and ignorant arguments we hear today. It&#x27;s sad really.

I think the main two questions everyone need clarified are:<p>1. Can I get sued by a 3rd party when using AI generated work in my project?<p>2. Can I sue a 3rd party when they use my AI generated work in their project?

When uploading books to kindle direct publishing you have to state that you own the copyright and publishing right.<p>So any book or story on Amazon that was generated substantially via prompting should now have to be removed based on this guidance from the copyright office.