According to the US Copyright Office, works containing AI-generated content can only be given copyright protection if the ‘elements of authorship in the work’ are performed by a human and not a machine. The office also said that this was essentially a ‘case-by-case enquiry’, which would focus on how the particular AI tool operated and how it was used to create the final product.

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In a statement released earlier this week, the Copyright Office said, “In the case of works containing AI-generated content, the Office will consider whether the AI ​​contribution is the result of ‘mechanical reproduction’ or the author’s own ‘original mental ‘ instead of. The notion, for which [the author] visualized”

However, the US Copyright Office also warned that currently available generative AI technologies do not give users creative control over how their systems interpret prompts and generate content. Instead, the office argued, these signals act like instructions to a ‘commissioned artist’, where the machine determines how to implement those instructions in its output.

This is not the first time that the US Copyright Office has raised issues of copyright protection in AI-generated content. In a ruling released last month, the office said that the Midjourney AI-generated images in Kris Kashtanova’s comic book ‘Zaria of the Dawn’ cannot be protected under copyright law. However, it also noted that the human-authored text of a graphic novel as well as its unique elements constitute a copyrightable work.

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The new guidance by the US Copyright Office comes at a time when generative AI-based technologies such as the viral chatbot ChatGPT or text-to-image generation platforms such as DAL-e and Midjouni have become increasingly popular.

San-Francisco based startup OpenAI released its newly developed next generation language model GPT-4. The company claims that the multimodal language model has the ability to demonstrate ‘human-level performance across a variety of professional and academic benchmarks’.

Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) is a deep learning technique that uses artificial neural networks to produce human-like writing.