Artificial Intelligence: ChatGPT and Beyond: AI: Copyright

If you create something using an AI such as ChatGPT, who holds the copyright?

The U. S. Copyright Office put out a paper in the Federal Register (2023, March 16) stating that only works created by humans can be registered for copyright.  If you use AI to create some of the work, the Copyright Office requires you to provide an estimate of the percentage of the work that is produced by AI when registering for copyright.   How much human intervention is necessary if AI is used to help generate a work?  That will probably be worked out via court cases over time! 

Update:   The U. S .Copyright Office published a new report January 2025: 

US Copyright Office (2025, January).: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2: Copyrightability  and Full report. Summary from page ii below;  

• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI generated content.

Also check the terms of use for the AI you use: Example: OpenAI Terms of Use  include the statement that "you may not represent that out put from services was human-generated when it was not."  See also Content co-authored with the OpenAI API. 

Another example: See Bing chatbot's  Terms of Use for their statement on Ownership of Content, etc. 

BEYOND COPYRIGHT:  Be careful about over-sharing when you use AI tools.  Putting PII - Personal Identifiable Information - into an AI - whether it is your own personal information or someone else's!   Your PII might  become part of the training material for the AI and might accidently be released to others. See University of Arizona. University Libraries.  How can I protect my privacy when using ChatGPT? 

Marcus, G., & Southen, R. (2024, January 6).  Generative AI has a visual plagiarism program:  Experiments with Midjourney and DALL-E 3 show a copyright minefield.  IEEE Spectrum. What are the possibilities that an AI will produce recognizable elements of a copyrighted work?