AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge::United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell found that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, putting to rest a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office over its refusal to copyright an AI-generated image.
Kinda, the thing is they are transferring the standard used for stuff like photography where they require a certain creative height which is required to be supplied by a human to apply copyright.
They used the same example of cameras which I’ve used myself - it’s not the act of pressing the button to produce a picture which gives you copyright over the result, it’s instead the act of expression by choosing a motive which gives you copyright.
Similarly with ML tools, if you used a mere list of facts as inputs (lists of facts are not copyright protected, so eg. recipes are therefore not protected) then your output doesn’t contain human expressed creative height, you effectively just rolled a dice a few times when running the ML model.
Now if nobody notices then you can probably claim copyright and get away with it, similarly to accidentally taking a great photo when you didn’t intend to press the button. But somebody else might try running a few prompts in the same ML model and argue your work looks like it was derived from it with a much too simple prompt to get copyright protection.
If you want copyright protection for your own ML processed works, make sure your prompts are actually creative, similarly to what it takes for a poem to be considered enough for copyright protection.