Generative Artificial Intelligence

The links to instructions for crediting generative AI were correct at the time of creation but may have been updated since then. 
Crediting generative AI does not absolve people from responsibility for using generative AI when its use is forbidden or from verifying the accuracy and appropriateness of generative AI outputs for the situation. 

When it comes to copyright and artificial intelligence (AI), there are still many open and evolving questions. Because copyright is a matter of federal law, authoritative information on current law comes from federal government sources like the Copyright Office.

The Copyright Office has affirmed the principle that human authorship is required for a work to be eligible for copyright protection. As a result, the Copyright Office has concluded that in order for a work containing AI-generated materials to be eligible:

1. the work must involve some form of human contribution, and
2. the human contribution must meet the threshold for being considered a work of authorship, meaning a human contributed a sufficient amount of creative expression to the work or had a sufficient amount of control over the expressive elements in the work.

"Creative expression" refers to the particular way an author chooses to express an idea, and "expressive elements" refers to all of the possible creative choices an author can make when producing a work. Copyright does not protect ideas, only creative expression of ideas. This means that if a human uses AI technology to create a work based on an idea but the AI determines the expressive elements in the resulting work, the work will not be eligible for copyright protection.

To give an example, the Copyright Office (in their Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability, linked below) has concluded that when it comes to generative AI tools that allow users to enter written prompts, "given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output" (p. 18). If a human is not the author of the output, then the output is not eligible for copyright protection. The three quotes below help illustrate how the Copyright Office evaluated human control versus AI control over expressive elements with prompt-based generative AI tools:

• "Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output" (p. 18).
• "The gaps between prompts and resulting outputs demonstrate that the user lacks control over the conversion of their ideas into fixed expression, and the system is largely responsible for determining the expressive elements in the output. In other words, prompts may reflect a user’s mental conception or idea, but they do not control the way that idea is expressed" (p. 19).
• "The fact that identical prompts can generate multiple different outputs further indicates a lack of human control" (p. 20).

In addition to addressing the use of prompts, the report linked below also addresses:

• The use of AI technology to assist in the creation of works versus use of AI as a stand-in for human creativity
• Situations where human-authored expressive inputs can be perceived in AI-generated outputs (for example, when an author uses their own hand-drawn illustration as an input, in addition to a prompt)
• Human modifications or arrangements of AI-generated outputs

Additional Resources