Artificial Intelligence

• Copyright is a basic constitutional right afforded to all citizens. The constitution states that the government shall provide "for limited times authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8
• The right provided is essentially a bundle of permissions allowing the owner the ability to control who can sell, copy, distribute, translate, edit, and perform your works.

Copyright & Intellectual Property LibGuide (CSUN Library's Guide on Copyright & Intellectual Property)

*AI generated materials do not currently receive copyright protections in the United States.  

*Use may be determined by the terms of use or terms and conditions of the GAI tool.

*If the terms of use do not address further uses of material generated by the GAI tool, then you are free to use the material.

*Some environments and publication arenas require full attribution for images and text that have been generated with AI.

• Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment

  Microsoft Copyright Copilot Commitment clearly establishes that there are no restrictions of GAI created materials.

Currently, copyright protection is not granted to works created by AI. 

• US Copyright Office and Artificial Intelligence

  "The Copyright Office has launched an initiative to examine the copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, including the scope of copyright in works generated using AI tools and the use of copyrighted materials in AI training. "

• Copyright Registration Guidance

  Guidance for registering Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence by the U.S. Copyright Office

• USPTO’s Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions.

  “This guidance explains that while AI-assisted inventions are not categorically unpatentable, the inventorship analysis should focus on human contributions, as patents function to incentivize and reward human ingenuity.”

If you select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work.

Example: Zarya of the Dawn (comic book with AI-generated images plus writing and arrangement by human author)

The U.S. Copyright Office determined that the selection and arrangement of the images IS copyrightable, but not the images themselves (made with generative AI).

Some AI image and text generation tools have been trained on material scraped from web pages without the consent or knowledge of the web page owners.

Several law suits claim that the use of artists’ or writers' content, without permissions, to train generative AI is an infringement of copyright.

Decisions reached in three of these cases have not been conclusive, with outcomes depending largely on the unique facts of each case. See A Tale of Three Cases: How Fair Use is Playing Out in  AI Copyright

For more discussion see: