Comment by rainsil
2 months ago
According to the US Copyright Office, fully AI-generated works aren’t eligible for copyright because they don’t have human authors. They’re in the public domain by default.
See: https://library.osu.edu/site/copyright/2026/02/06/artificial...
What constitutes "fully AI-generated" when you're in an edit loop between an agent and a human?
It seems like it's an active area of legal thought (IANAL though).
Recent relevant discussion about this in the chardet repo between the chardet maintainer who relicensed the chardet code and Richard Fontana, a well regarded lawyer US IP lawyer who's worked for Red Hat (now IBM) for decades:
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334#issuecomment-4...
My take away from the conversation there is that being in an edit loop, where the files are AI generated through your control rather than directly editing the files yourself, means the files are then "AI authored" for copyright protection purposes rather than yourself.
But I double stress, I'm not a lawyer so may have misunderstood things radically.
I think that may not be answerable until a case concerning it has been heard and ruled on. A lawyer may have a better answer for you, but if I had to bet then I'd put $100 on it being something like 'it depends'.
It's interesting how AI can be its own worst enemy in this legal system. The very thing it's excellent at is not protected. In practice, there seems to be a strong opportunity to disintermediate brands by acting as a layer of abstraction above the seller and manufacturer. An AI instruction likely cares less about brand or sharing customer information with the seller; it's just more friction and tokens spent.
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