Comment by foltik

Not necessarily. The referenced guidance [0] says: "...copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are 'independent of' and do 'not affect' the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself." If you read the paragraph or two above that one, it really seems like products of agentic coding cannot be copyrighted, as there wouldn't be significant authorship involved.

[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/page-16193

Very glad someone actually read the decision and understood it, despite how much reporting on this has been poor. This was not a case about "can AI-generated art be copyrighted?", despite all the reporting misleading people. (Including me, until somebody finally pointed me at the actual decision — https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=24e0581c-2c28... — and I could read it for myself). The judge literally quoted that case where a monkey picked up a photographer's camera and triggered it, saying that only humans can hold copyright: not animals, and not tools. And he also specifically said that he was not addressing "how much input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an ‘author’ of a generated work".

So it's not the case, contrary to what many people (including me!) have said before, that the decision was "works produced by AI tools cannot be copyrighted". Rather, it's "you cannot assert that the AI tool itself is the author, you must assert that a human is the author". And the amount of work put into the prompt will definitely matter.

In other words, if you just prompt “draw a picture of a cat” then it’s possible you didn’t put enough work into the image to count as the author. But if you have a specific picture in mind that you want to create, and you prompt “draw a picture of a two-year-old cat with orange fur and orange eyes, in a sitting position, looking out of the window of a train. The interior of the train is lit with dim orange lighting. Outside, it is night and there is a full moon visible through the train window,” and then you refine that prompt until the AI produces an image close enough to what you had in your mind’s eye, then that image is clearly your own creation: the AI tool was just the tool you used to take the idea in your head and turn it into an image that other people could look at. Whether you use a paintbrush, a digital-art creation tool like Krita, or a digital-art creation tool like Midjourney, as long as you came up with the concept and did the necessary work to make the tool produce the image, then you're the author and you can assert copyright. (Note that this paragraph is my own opinion, not the judge's ruling, but I think it's a pretty defensible opinion: "draw a picture of a cat" might not be specific enough to assert that you created the resulting image, but "draw this very specific picture that I have in mind" is specific enough).

Photography is a copyrightable art, but don't say that most of the work is actually done by a machine. Or even by the engineer who built the machine. You could argue that the photographer just presses a button and, perhaps, airbrushes it later in photoshop, and yet that's art.

A common technique in paint print shops is to print the piece on canvas, then “add” color to it in globs of acrylic that match, making it stand off from the canvas. A very quick a clever trick to recreate multiples of a piece.