New US copyright rules to protect AI art with “human authorship”
For a while now, the subject of AI art has been generating a lot of controversy on the internet because of the fundamental philosophical problems it presents. Since it often directly incorporates elements from the works of other artists and only has the ability to project simulations of human emotions, many insist that AI is incapable of creating actual art.
The US Copyright Office has repeatedly insisted that “works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author” cannot be registered. However, new developments to the existing laws now protect AI art with “human authorship”.
The Office claimed that “a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.'”
According to the statement from the Copyright Office, the AI software can be compared to other visual tools such as Photoshop. The statement emphasised the importance of human intervention: “What matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work’s expression and ‘actually formed’ the traditional elements of authorship.”
This is the result of a new legal precedence that has been set after Kris Kashtanova’s comic book Zarya of the Dawn was granted copyright protection even though the images were created through Midjourney.
