Comment by thewebguyd
6 hours ago
Minor correction, but in the US it's not anything that's 100% by AI, it's LLM output itself is not copyrightable. Human elements injected into LLM output are.
Raw LLM output lacks human authorship, and it was ruled cannot be registered for copyright protection. Raw LLM output is automatically public domain (which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).
Only the parts of a work that are human authored can be registered for copyright. If a work was created with AI assistance, the parts that were purely AI generated cannot be registered.
The US copyright office also ruled that prompt engineering does not count as human authorship.
So all those people using Suno to generate AI slop music and flooding the streaming services, their output is almost certainly public domain.
>(which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).
I don't see how it's any more weird than reddit/stackoverflow/linkedin trying to clamp down on AI scrapers, even though they don't own the copyright to the UGC that they're preventing the bots from accessing.
The difference is in licensing. Those platforms are protecting (or rather, monetizing) a database of human authored assets which those humans have given them a license to exploit.
Anthropic (and others) are trying to protect a stream of uncopyrightable, public-domain machine outputs.
I don't see how that's relevant. They have a license to redistribute my comments, but that's the extent of their legal rights with respect to my work. They're not my agent or my publisher. Moreover I don't have any say in the matter. If I'm pro AI scraping, I can't tell them "yeah it's fine to scrape my comment, don't put up any captcha walls". Finally, what if I dedicate my comments to the public domain? Does that mean they're in the wrong to put up scraping walls?
6 replies →
That's honestly so dumb, if I use a non AI computerized tool to generate orders of notes or orders of characters, I own the output. AI is just that. It's a fancy computer program that cost billions to build.
This is giving weird independent moral grounding to AI as more than a computer that has never existed before. And what kind of AI does it count for ? Does it also count for image classifiers? For image quality improvers? etc
The USCO's decision hinges on whether or not a human has predictive, mechanical control over the final output. The ruling applies to Generative AI, the USCO made a separate distinction for assistive AI, which image classifiers would fall under.
> “Authors have long used such tools to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their expressive authorship. … what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work's expression and actually formed the traditional elements of authorship.”
The USCO doesn't care what type of algorithm is used, it cares who determined the traditional elements of authorship. If a human dictates the expression, and then uses a computer to clean, translate, or refine it, it is copyrightable. If a human just provides an idea and a generative algorithm creates the specific expression, the output is public domain. One is using spellcheck, the other is telling the computer "Write me a novel" and letting the computer generate it.