Users are flocking to new generative artificial intelligence to enhance their creative work, with artists turning to programs like Midjourney and Dall-E to represent an idea from just a text prompt. It’s even leading to talk of a new skill: “prompt engineering,” or finding the right collection of words and phrases to get what you want from an A.I. program.
But a new ruling from the U.S. Copyright Office suggests that coming up with the right prompt isn’t enough to be considered creative work. On Tuesday, the office ruled for the first time against granting protection for artwork produced using an A.I. tool, reports Reuters.
The copyright office was reviewing a graphic novel called Zarya of the Dawn, authored by Kris Kashtanova and featuring images produced using Midjourney. The office wrote in a Tuesday letter that Kashtanova would receive copyright protection for the parts they wrote, selected and arranged, but not for the A.I.-generated images in the novel since it was “not the product of human authorship.” Kashtanova was not considered the “inventive or master mind” of the graphics.
In the case of non-human authorship, “copyright does not protect the alleged creation,” the Copyright Office’s letter said. The office will now issue a new registration for Kashtanova’s graphic novel with its images omitted, as the initial submission for copyright did not disclose the use of A.I.
Kashtanova claimed that the copyright should apply to their artwork too, as each artist would render a different text prompt yielding different images. But the office held that prompts are akin to suggestions rather than orders and that spending “time and effort” with an A.I. art generator does not result in authorship or ownership.
