A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection.
“In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.”
Thaler was appealing this, and his appeal was denied.
The argument about a photograph being copyrightable, even if made by a machine, because a photographer has chosen pose, lighting, lens settings etc., becomes extremely elastic as AI outputs become more steerable: “put a lamp here, turn the light on, make it cosier” etc.
Is it actually the prompt-chain that is copyrightable?
It gets very confusing, very very fast.
Funny, because photography is actually the precedent on this. A monkey took a picture, it was not copyrightable.
I’d advise you to keep a record of your creative process here, because it may come down to how many prompts you used to steer it.