The U.S. Copyright Office just released new guidelines on AI-generated works.

 

I put AI (ChatGPT o1) to work to make the report easier for everyone to understand.

Here is the prompt I supplied and AI's response:

Please summarize the following and do it in a way that a lay person can understand it's meaning. Thanks 

https://copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf?utm_source=www.therundown.ai&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=ai-gets-new-copyright-clarity&_bhlid=0e69e1bb2e60471dae355c036666ed454ac377ae

"Thought about copyright and artificial intelligence for 13 seconds

Summary in Plain Language:

This report from the U.S. Copyright Office focuses on how U.S. copyright law applies to works created with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Essentially, it asks and answers: “Who—or what—can get a copyright when AI is involved in creating something?” Here are the key points, explained for non-lawyers:

Copyright Protects Human Creativity:

U.S. copyright law is meant to protect the artistic or literary works that people create. In other words, there needs to be a human author behind the work for it to qualify for copyright protection.

Purely AI-Generated Works Are Not Protected:

If a piece of text, image, music, or other creative output is entirely generated by a machine, with no meaningful human input, then it cannot be copyrighted. Copyright law requires human involvement in the creative process.

Human Contributions Count:

If a person uses AI as just a tool—for example, they give the AI prompts, choose elements from AI-generated options, or substantially revise the AI’s output—then that person’s original contributions can be copyrighted. However, the portions made exclusively by AI are not protected by copyright.

Registration Requirements:

If you try to register a work with the Copyright Office (for example, a book, artwork, or song), and it has AI-generated parts, you have to disclose that. You must identify which parts of the work are human-made and which are AI-made so that the Office can decide what gets protected.

Policy and Ongoing Discussions:

Because AI technology is advancing quickly, the Copyright Office is continuing to monitor and discuss these issues. They want to make sure rules stay clear, fair, and up to date as people use AI more and more to create new works.

In short, the main idea is that U.S. copyright protects the human creativity that goes into making a work, not the automatic output of a computer program. If you’re using AI to create something, you must be clear about what you, as a human author, contributed—those parts can be copyrighted. The purely machine-made parts, however, stay outside the scope of copyright protection."

So I can apply for a copyright for the prompt I created but not for the response AI produced.