Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI
> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it.> For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output.> For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style.> But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text.> When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship.> As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.This is the crux of the argument for me.