The US Copyright Office issued AI guidance this week that declared no laws need to be clarified when it comes to protecting authorship rights of humans producing AI-assisted works.
"Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change," the Copyright Office said.
"Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change," the Copyright Office said.
But the Copyright Office insisted that the AI copyright debate was settled in 1965 after commercial computer technology started advancing quickly and "difficult questions of authorship" were first raised. That was the first time officials had to ponder how much involvement human creators had in works created using computers. (...)
The office further clarified that doesn't mean that works assisted by AI can never be copyrighted.
"Where AI merely assists an author in the creative process, its use does not change the copyrightability of the output," the Copyright Office said.
Following Kaminstein's advice, officials plan to continue reviewing AI disclosures and weighing, on a case-by-case basis, what parts of each work are AI-authored and which parts are human-authored. Any human-authored expressive element can be copyrighted, the office said, but any aspect of the work deemed to have been generated purely by AI cannot.
Prompting alone isn’t authorship, Copyright Office says
After doing some testing on whether the same exact prompt can generate widely varied outputs, even from the same AI tool, the Copyright Office further concluded that "prompts do not alone provide sufficient control" over outputs to allow creators to copyright purely AI-generated works based on highly intelligent or creative prompting. (...)
"The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectable ideas," the guidance said. "While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output." (...)
New guidance likely a big yawn for AI companies
For AI companies, the copyright guidance may mean very little. According to AI company Hugging Face's comments to the Copyright Office, no changes in the law were needed to ensure the US continued leading in AI innovation, because "very little to no innovation in generative AI is driven by the hope of obtaining copyright protection for model outputs." (...)
For AI companies, the copyright guidance may mean very little. According to AI company Hugging Face's comments to the Copyright Office, no changes in the law were needed to ensure the US continued leading in AI innovation, because "very little to no innovation in generative AI is driven by the hope of obtaining copyright protection for model outputs." (...)
Although the Copyright Office suggested that this week's report might be the most highly anticipated, Jernite said that Hugging Face is eager to see the next report, which officials said would focus on "the legal implications of training AI models on copyrighted works, including licensing considerations and the allocation of any potential liability."
"As a platform that supports broader participation in AI, we see more value in distributing its benefits than in concentrating all control with a few large model providers," Jernite said. "We’re looking forward to the next part of the Copyright Office’s Report, particularly on training data, licensing, and liability, key questions especially for some types of output, like code."
by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Copilot; Copyright Office
[ed. So, upshot (as I understand it): there has to be some significant (whatever that means) human involvement in the production of a work to receive copyright protection (not sure if that applies to all or parts of the end product). Designing a special prompt is not considered significant human involvement.]
