Comment by cmiles8
5 hours ago
This is consistent with rulings in other courts globally around IP rights. IP protects content created by humans. Your AI slop is effectively public domain.
5 hours ago
This is consistent with rulings in other courts globally around IP rights. IP protects content created by humans. Your AI slop is effectively public domain.
That's not how I understand it.
AI is a tool, like your keyboard or your code editor.
Those can't own patents. That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain, it just means the attribution has to belong to a human.
The US Copyright Office disagrees. No work produced by a mechanical process, which includes LLMs, can be protected by copyright.
>>That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain
They can't produce anything on their own. They have to be prompted which is initiated by humans at this point, so the patents can be owned by the initiator(human) not the tool.
Exactly, like any AI tool ever.
Someone wrote some instructions. No agent harness ever simply decided to pursue its own interests.
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That isn’t what the courts have decided. They just decided it has to be a human on the patent application name. You can use whatever tool you want to get there, but if you patent a thing, it has to be a human in the name.
I think we’re saying the same thing. If you’re using AI as a tool to support human creative content that’s one thing. But what courts are pushing back on is trying to patent/protect content where the core creator was AI. That’s what most people mean when they say “AI slop.” There courts are consistently saying you can’t protect this.
No. The court is saying you cannot assign IP rights to an AI, as this guy was trying to do. They are not saying it cannot be protected (as /r/antiai folk are always claiming). That’s another thing.
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> Your AI slop is effectively public domain.
I haven't been able to square this belief (This is what i believe too.) with what I perceive as so, so many people making projects, putting them on github and slapping an MIT/GPL license on them.
If IP rights can't be applied to generated code then how are they able to apply a such a license to them?
I've asked this before and the response was along the lines of people thinking their multiple prompting amounted to human creative process and therefore it was covered but ... how? Any lawyers around that can ELI5 it for us? Maybe links to a lawyer somewhere who did?
a person publishing as if a AI is the creator is publishing under a pseudonym.
AI has all the IP rights of a pen, pencil, chalk, or crayon.
Because the “AI slop is uncopyrightable” people are misunderstanding court rulings like this. It’s not that AI output can’t by protected by IP, it’s that AI is not a person and so you can’t assign IP rights to it. You CAN assign IP rights to the human who did it (if they can show it’s non-trivial, like a haiku or photographer).
This is the bit in the copyright offices' report that i'm trying to square:
>The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
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It heavily depends on human involvement. AI is merely a tool.
Your ai slop is effectively something you own, because you wrote the prompt.
If sufficiently creative enough to qualify. Which applies to copyright regardless of the tools you use.