If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office’s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare’s style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.
That seems very clear to me. Generative AI output is not human authored, and therefore not copyrighted.
The policy I use also makes very clear the definition of AI generated material:
I’m not exactly sure how you can possibly think there is an equivalence between a tool like a spelling and grammar checker and a generative AI, but there’s a reason the copyright office will register works that have been authored using spelling and grammar checkers, but not works that have been authored using LLMs.
Just read the next two paragraphs. Don’t just stop because you got to something that you like. The equivalence I draw is clear. You don’t like it, and that’s okay. But one would have to clarify exactly what the ban entails, and that wouldn’t be as clear as you might think. LLM’s only, transformers specifically, what about graph generation, other ML models? Is it just ML? If so, is that because a matrix lattice was used to get from input to output? Could other deterministic math functions trigger the same ban? What is a spell checker used RNG to select best replacement from a list of correct options? What if a compiler introduces an assembled output with an optimization not of the authors writing?
Do you see why they say “The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work. This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry”?
And that still affects copywriteability, not license compliance.
Do you want to explain to me what, in those two paragraphs, means that the use of spell checkers and LLMs is equivalent with regard to copyrightability? It seems like those paragraphs make it clear that the use of spell checkers is not the same as LLMs.
The policy I use bans “generative AI model” output. Generative AI is a pretty well defined term:
If you have trouble determining whether something is a generative AI model, you can usually just look up how it is described in the promotional materials or on Wikipedia.
Type: Large language model, Generative pre-trained transformer
I never said it violates GPL to include public domain code. I’m not sure where you got that from. What I said is that public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL. You can try, but it’s not enforceable. As in, you can release it under that license, but I can still do whatever I want with it, license be damned, because it’s public domain.
public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL
Disney created films based on old fairy tales. Disney has a copyright on those films even though they include elements from the public domain because the films also include the artists’ original expression. The linux kernel (probably) contains public domain AI-generated code alongside original work from its many contributors. If you wanted to get the entire project into the public domain, you’d have to get permission from nearly all its contributors or wait for their copyright term to expire. The small snippets of code which were AI-generated are public domain. The bulk of the project isn’t, and the project as a whole isn’t.
As much as I dislike AI, I can’t say I understand forbidding AI-generated contributions on the grounds that the submitted code is public domain. I suppose somebody can come along and “steal” the public domain snippets, but I suspect it’s difficult to definitively tell apart the human-written code from AI-generated and strip out the human-written bits. If they do, what’s the issue? It wasn’t yours to begin with and you can still keep it in your project. Moreover, now that the magical plagiarism machines exist, who’s going to be lifting code in this way, anyway?
I mean, yeah, you can make the argument that owning the copyrights to all of the code in your project isn’t important. I don’t agree, but that’s certainly a valid stance. Apparently the Linux maintainers are on your side. That makes me sad. Copyright ownership of the things I produce is very important to me.
That seems very clear to me. Generative AI output is not human authored, and therefore not copyrighted.
The policy I use also makes very clear the definition of AI generated material:
https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/#Definitions
I’m not exactly sure how you can possibly think there is an equivalence between a tool like a spelling and grammar checker and a generative AI, but there’s a reason the copyright office will register works that have been authored using spelling and grammar checkers, but not works that have been authored using LLMs.
Just read the next two paragraphs. Don’t just stop because you got to something that you like. The equivalence I draw is clear. You don’t like it, and that’s okay. But one would have to clarify exactly what the ban entails, and that wouldn’t be as clear as you might think. LLM’s only, transformers specifically, what about graph generation, other ML models? Is it just ML? If so, is that because a matrix lattice was used to get from input to output? Could other deterministic math functions trigger the same ban? What is a spell checker used RNG to select best replacement from a list of correct options? What if a compiler introduces an assembled output with an optimization not of the authors writing?
Do you see why they say “The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work. This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry”?
And that still affects copywriteability, not license compliance.
Do you want to explain to me what, in those two paragraphs, means that the use of spell checkers and LLMs is equivalent with regard to copyrightability? It seems like those paragraphs make it clear that the use of spell checkers is not the same as LLMs.
The policy I use bans “generative AI model” output. Generative AI is a pretty well defined term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_AI
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generative AI
If you have trouble determining whether something is a generative AI model, you can usually just look up how it is described in the promotional materials or on Wikipedia.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_(language_model)
I never said it violates GPL to include public domain code. I’m not sure where you got that from. What I said is that public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL. You can try, but it’s not enforceable. As in, you can release it under that license, but I can still do whatever I want with it, license be damned, because it’s public domain.
I did that with this vibe coded project:
https://github.com/hperrin/gnata
I just took it and rereleased it as pubic domain, because that’s what it is anyway.
Disney created films based on old fairy tales. Disney has a copyright on those films even though they include elements from the public domain because the films also include the artists’ original expression. The linux kernel (probably) contains public domain AI-generated code alongside original work from its many contributors. If you wanted to get the entire project into the public domain, you’d have to get permission from nearly all its contributors or wait for their copyright term to expire. The small snippets of code which were AI-generated are public domain. The bulk of the project isn’t, and the project as a whole isn’t.
As much as I dislike AI, I can’t say I understand forbidding AI-generated contributions on the grounds that the submitted code is public domain. I suppose somebody can come along and “steal” the public domain snippets, but I suspect it’s difficult to definitively tell apart the human-written code from AI-generated and strip out the human-written bits. If they do, what’s the issue? It wasn’t yours to begin with and you can still keep it in your project. Moreover, now that the magical plagiarism machines exist, who’s going to be lifting code in this way, anyway?
I mean, yeah, you can make the argument that owning the copyrights to all of the code in your project isn’t important. I don’t agree, but that’s certainly a valid stance. Apparently the Linux maintainers are on your side. That makes me sad. Copyright ownership of the things I produce is very important to me.