Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nationโs copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the officeโs approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the โcentrality of human creativityโ in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
โWhere that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection,โ said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artistโs handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with โcreative arrangements or modificationsโ could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesnโt give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. โExtending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine โฆ would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright,โ Perlmutter said.
Not addressed in the report is the debate over copyrighted human works that are being pulled from the internet and other sources and ingested to train AI systems, often without permission or compensation. Visual artists, authors, news organizations and others have sued AI companies for copyright theft in cases that are still working through U.S. courts.
The copyright office doesnโt weigh in on those legal cases but says it is working on another report that โwill turn to the training of AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and allocation of any liability.โ