US agency rules artists can copyright pieces that are made with AI assistance

The United States Copyright Office on Wednesday decided that artists can copyright some work that is created with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as long as human creativity is also involved. 

The report comes as the office receives about half a million copyright applications per year, and has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated, according to the Associated Press.

The office said it would still determine whether something is copyrightable on a case-by-case basis, but that it would make the decisions by examining the amount of human input and creativity used in each piece.

“Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by-case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to warrant copyright protection,” the report reads. “The use of a machine as a tool does not negate copyright protection, but the resulting work is copyrightable only if it contains sufficient human-authored expressive elements."

The report said that fully AI-generated images cannot be copyrighted, nor can people copyright images or artwork they requested from chatboxes or AI image generators, such as edits on or the merge of preexisting images.

“Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ... would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright,” Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who runs the U.S. Copyright office, said in a statement.

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.