“Under the US Copyright Office's 2023 registration guidance, material generated entirely by an AI system from a text prompt is not the product of human authorship and cannot be registered, while a human's own selection or arrangement of that material can be.”
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Read in full, the 16 March 2023 statement of policy (88 FR 16190) settles both halves; the first check read a copy cut off in Section II. Where an AI technology "determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship" and must be disclaimed in an application. The same section then says a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that the work as a whole is original, and that copyright then protects only the human-authored aspects. The Copyright Office's own copy at copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf carries the same text. One condition the claim leaves out: the selection or arrangement has to be sufficiently creative, and the AI-generated material inside it stays unprotected.
This verdict was revised on , against federalregister.gov. It was published as ? Figure unverified. The reasoning it was published with is below, unedited.
As first published
Source 2 (Thaler v. Perlmutter) and Source 1's discussion of the 'Recent Entrance to Paradise' refusal confirm that a work generated entirely by an AI system without human involvement lacks the human authorship required for copyright, matching the first half of the claim. However, the retrieved text of Source 1 is truncated partway through Section II (cutting off mid-sentence at the Supreme Court authorship case) and never reaches any statement about a human's 'selection or arrangement' of AI material being registrable, so that second half of the claim is not settled by the provided sources.
The span it rests on
human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim
Copied character for character from govinfo.gov and matched against the fetched page before this verdict was written.
Read in full, the 16 March 2023 statement of policy (88 FR 16190) settles both halves; the first check read a copy cut off in Section II. Where an AI technology "determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship" and must be disclaimed in an application. The same section then says a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that the work as a whole is original, and that copyright then protects only the human-authored aspects. The Copyright Office's own copy at copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf carries the same text. One condition the claim leaves out: the selection or arrangement has to be sufficiently creative, and the AI-generated material inside it stays unprotected.
“a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way”