Copyrighting an AI-assisted work where you did some of it
You can protect the parts you made. The parts the machine made come along for free, in both senses.
Not legal advice. Sally roasts behaviour and use-cases in general, never your specific situation, and nothing here replaces a real lawyer. The cases are real; what you do about them is between you and someone licensed to tell you.
Registering a work that mixes your own writing or arrangement with AI-generated elements, and assuming the whole thing is protected.
Zarya of the Dawn (U.S. Copyright Office)
USCO registration decision, Feb. 2023 · US (Copyright Office)
Kristina Kashtanova registered a graphic novel with Midjourney-generated images.
The office reissued the registration to cover only the human-authored text and the selection and arrangement. The AI images themselves received no protection.
When someone registered a graphic novel containing AI-generated images, the copyright office let the protection stand only for the human-authored text and the selection and arrangement. The AI images themselves got nothing. Providing prompts to a generator was held not to actually form the resulting images in the authorship sense.
So the work is protectable in pieces. Your writing, your curation, your layout, those are yours. The raw generated assets in the middle are not, and you should not represent that they are.
“You get to own the captions and the order you put things in. The actual pictures are public domain the second the model exhales them.”
- 01Be precise about which elements are human-authored. Those are the protectable ones.
- 02Disclose AI use when you register. Hiding it can cost you the whole registration.
- 03Add genuine human authorship through selection, arrangement, and editing if you want a stronger claim.
Not legal advice. General commentary on a use-case, not your situation. Talk to a real lawyer before you act.