My Current Understanding of the Copyright Law

This is the copyright law as I currently understand it. There are two basic principles at stake when it comes to the use of AI in writing: 

  1. Only material that was created by a human can be copyrighted. 
  2. You can't copyright an idea, only the expression of an idea. 
Both principles taken alone sound reasonable in traditional contexts. There was a case where a monkey took a photo, and the photo could not be copyrighted because a human didn't produce it. And courts certainly put AI in the same category as an animal, so a purely AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted. 

But works that show meaningful human creative input can still be protected. Zarya of the Dawn is an interesting case, as a graphic novel. The author could copyright her own text for the novel, and she could copyright the specific arrangement of her images and text in the novel. But the images themselves could not be copyrighted, because they were generated by Midjourney. 

That's alright when you've written the text yourself, as is typical of a graphic novel. I've written some comic strips that I used Grok to generate images for. So, I could copyright my text and the arrangement of the panels but not the images, which is fine by me, since I can't take any credit for those. 

But what if the ideas for the story are all yours and you've gotten an AI to generate the text for them? Then you're shit out of luck, because you can't copyright an idea, only the expression of that idea. So, it doesn't matter if the AI didn't contribute a single idea to your final result. Because if the AI generated the expression of that idea, anybody can copy it with impunity. 

It can get even stranger. You could get the AI to give you all the ideas for a novel and then you could write the text for it yourself and get that copyrighted! You might not have any creativity whatsoever but just be magnificent in expressing yourself. So, the AI can give you some derivative slop ideas, but because the words are your own, you're protected!

I dunno. This reminds me of my study of philosophy, which is notorious for taking intuitive premises and drawing an unintuitive conclusion from them. In this case, the concepts don't seem to fit cleanly onto various scenarios involving AI and authorship. 

It makes me think of movies, where they say, "Screenplay by Person P1" but "Story by Person P2". You can get residuals for the "story" with the right contractual agreement and/or WGA credit determination. It just seems strange that it should be this hard to get protection for a novel you've prompt-engineered. It won't matter if you copyright your prompts when anybody can copy their output with impunity. 

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