Over the last few years, the evolution of generative AI has led to the emergence of AI tools that allow users to create written content, including creative pieces like stories, poems, and scripts, as well as factual summaries, articles, and even code using artificial intelligence. AI can also be used to produce realistic images of objects, people, or scenes that don't exist in reality, as well as original or modified audio, music, and videos. Some generative AI tools have been trained on large datasets of images and text, enabling them to translate textual prompts from users into new visual, audio, or written content. The content created using these tools can be downloaded, but they are not published or reproducible in the AI platform.
Current copyright law only recognizes humans as creators. One of the legal rights associated with copyright is the right to be acknowledged as the creator of a work. While the U.S. Copyright Office’s official position on matters that pertain to the copyrightability of content crafted in partnership with AI is that questions about the copyrightability of AI-generated output can be resolved pursuant to existing law, the Office also states that appraisals of whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs merit copyright protection must be decided on a case-by-case basis. To provide additional information on the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidelines about the copyrightability of outputs generated by AI systems., publications from the Office on this topic are linked below.
Aside from the question of copyrightability, it is also important to understand that output created by generative AI tools is not guaranteed to be accurate or free from legal liability. It is well documented that generative AI sometimes creates “hallucinations,” which are outputs that are presented as true but are in fact inaccurate, nonsensical, or fabricated. Additionally, textual or visual outputs created by generative AI might subject a user to liability such as copyright infringement. This becomes more likely when you are using, for instance, large chunks of code from generative AI tools or are asking a generative AI tool to create an image of a well known entity like Garfield or Charlie Brown.
As a general rule, a work can only be protected by copyright in the United States if there is a human author who exercised ‘sufficient creative control’ over the final product. As explained in the AI Registration Guidance:
Most legal scholars agree that inputting simple prompts is insufficient to make a user the author of the AI-generated output. Considering this, it is possible that content generated by AI may not be eligible for copyright protection if a human author does not select, coordinate, and arrange AI-generated material in a creative and substantive way.
Unfortunately, the amount of human input needed for copyright protection is currently ill defined. The St. Kate’s Library will update this guide as additional information about the copyrightability of AI-generated images and text becomes available. For additional information on the U.S. Copyright Office’s position on the copyrightability of AI-generated content, please see the following resources:
Interested in how to properly cite AI-generated images? Please refer to the AI Imagery and Citation section of our Images guide.
Currently, copyright protection is not granted to works created by AI.
Some AI image and text generation tools have been trained on material mined from web pages without the consent or knowledge of the web page owners.
Several lawsuits claim that the use of artists’ or writers' content, without permissions, to train generative AI is an infringement of copyright.
With no decision reached, there is no definitive answer on whether the training of AI models is considered an infringement of copyright. However, several experts have pointed to previous fair use cases to justify a fair use argument for the use of various training data for AI image generation tools.
©2024 St. Catherine University Library, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
