[delichon]

> The outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts. https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html

I think that this means that a single prompt alone does not convey copyright. But if you had spent many hours before the prompt fine tuning the model, or much effort after the prompt shaping the result with further prompts, it could be.

I disagree with this approach because I've seen how much creativity and effort some people can put into slowly evolving a single elaborate prompt. AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece.

[elil17]

I don't think this is the correct interpretation. I think they mean that if you make something without AI and then modify that with AI, that's covered. Likewise, if you start from an AI output and modify it, that's covered.

But the pure output of a generative model cannot be copyrighted, regardless of how complex the prompt is (note that the prompt itself could be copyrighted).

[thepasch]

> But the pure output of a generative model cannot be copyrighted, regardless of how complex the prompt is

If that’s how the court interpreted it, then the software industry is hosed, since that’d mean none of the generated code running in production right now is under any sort of copyright or otherwise protection, lol.

[circuit10]

I doubt that much software is entirely AI-generated with no human review or testing, it’s probably more like integrating some public domain snippets you found online into your code (which doesn’t invalidate copyright on the rest of it, or the way it’s put together) or having some files auto-generated by a script (like a C header containing a lookup table for a simple mathematical function, the table isn’t copyrightable itself maybe but the software as a whole still is)

[AnthonyMouse]

Never mind that.

If a deterministic machine transformation from a copyrightable prompt results in an uncopyrightable image, what do you think a compiler is doing to source code?

[compsciphd]

AI is not specifically not deterministic from the enduser's perspective. they throw randomness into it and hence why an exact prompt wont produce the same exact result.

a compiler on the other hand is generally pretty deterministic. The non determinism that we see in output is usually non determinism (such as generated dates) in the code that it consumes.

[AnthonyMouse]

If your argument is that compiler output is more deterministic than image generators, how does that help?

[freejazz]

> human review or testing

Review and testing do not confer a copyright the work reviewed or tested

[circuit10]

I guess I was thinking more when it involves rewriting large parts of it because they don't work

[freejazz]

That would be authorship, no?

[freejazz]

>If that’s how the court interpreted it, then the software industry is hosed, since that’d mean none of the generated code running in production right now is under any sort of copyright or otherwise protection, lol.

Correct, the jurisprudence there hasn't changed.

[JeremyNT]

I'm not sure this is really true, since copyright applies to distribution.

If you have a substantial amount of backend code (as with most SaaS projects) you're never actually distributing the code, and copyright is never at play. Computer generated artifacts are already in this boat and are protected by virtue of being trade secrets not by copyright.

This could maybe be true of shipping javascript to the browser, which presumably is not going to qualify as a trande secret, but I don't think that's where most companies derive value.

[dragonwriter]

The idea that copyright applies solely to distribution is a popular myth, but it has no support in the actual copyright law. The core exclusive rights in copyright are (in the US, 17 USC § 106):

---

(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and

(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

---

OTOH, distributing copies created in violation of copyright is a good way to cause legally-cognizable harms to the copyright holder that will increase the potential damage award when you are found liable for copyright infringement, and it also makes it much more likely that someone will notice the infringement in the first place. But its not where the law, on its own terms, begins to apply. Doing any of those without permission (unless it falls into one of the exceptions to copyright protection, like fair use) is a violation of copyright.

[freejazz]

>I'm not sure this is really true, since copyright applies to distribution.

Do you mean that a work has to be published prior to registration? What do you mean by "copyright applies to distribution"?

[JeremyNT]

The idea of copyright is to prohibit unauthorized use and reproduction, but none of this actually happens with a proprietary software SaaS backend. You don't actually give anybody the code - they connect to the service.

Access to the service is already governed by computer access laws, which don't depend on copyright. And if you never intentionally distributed your code outside of your org, you can call it a trade secret and nobody else has any legitimate right to access it - whether or not it is copyrightable.

There are other things that aren't copyrightable that are trade secrets already. This would be true of any kind of automated data collection for example. You couldn't copyright it but you can call it a trade secret.

And for any of that stuff, if you want to share it and limit distribution, you just have whoever wants access explicitly agree to be bound by contract law.

[freejazz]

>The idea of copyright is to prohibit unauthorized use and reproduction, but none of this actually happens with a proprietary software SaaS backend. You don't actually give anybody the code - they connect to the service.

The point isn't that you have to give it to people, but okay?

>Access to the service is already governed by computer access laws, which don't depend on copyright

Yeah, copyright doesn't control everything, and?

>There are other things that aren't copyrightable that are trade secrets already. This would be true of any kind of automated data collection for example. You couldn't copyright it but you can call it a trade secret.

Okay?

>And for any of that stuff, if you want to share it and limit distribution, you just have whoever wants access explicitly agree to be bound by contract law.

Your point being? You're just rambling assumptions about copyright and other things, which don't even track the actual law.

[cadamsdotcom]

“I can stop on an ant, and I can stomp on a flower, so look out, elephants”

[quickthrowman]

What constitutes a modification? Here’s a reverse Sorities Paradox situation.

Let’s say I use an AI prompt to generate an image with 24-bit color, and then I manually change the RGB value of a single pixel from (255,255,255) to (254,255,255).

Does that constitute a modification and would then allow the image to be copyrighted? If not, where is the line?

[vunderba]

This is how I understood the original decision a while back - that there had to be some additional element of human involvement post-"gen", though to what extent is still a bit unclear to me.

What's the threshold? Can the person just slap an LUT on an SDXL image in Photoshop and call it a day?

[tgv]

> A prompt can be a masterpiece.

So the true Renaissance artists are the Medicis and the RC church?

> how much creativity and effort

So art is art prompting, or is it creativity and effort? If some toddler spends two hours on a drawing, it's a masterpiece?

> AI can be used as another kind of brush.

A simile does not a truth make.

[Ajakks]

Its interesting you mention a toddler drawing for 2 hours - I can say with certainty that toddler drawing will demonstrate more creativity than this argument and, every iteration of it, I see every single day. Smh

Actual creators understand what creativity is and what creation is - not all creation even is creative, as its really more of a process, than it is a singular output, and there are monotonous, time consuming, meticulously frustrating parts of the process of creation.

If you want to limit yourself to creation without the quality of life enhancements, that exist in this time and space - you do you.

Don't proselytize tho - you are not doing what you think you are.

[freejazz]

> If some toddler spends two hours on a drawing, it's a masterpiece?

A work doesn't have to be a masterpiece to obtain a copyright so what difference does it make? The point of copyright isn't to subjectively critique art.

[tgv]

The prompt itself may be copyrighted.

[freejazz]

What matter is whether or not its a masterpiece?

[tgv]

The output is mechanically derived from the prompt. There's zero artistry or creativity involved, and despite all the posturing, those are more or less hard requirements for copyright. The prompt may meet the criteria and be copyrighted.

[ottah]

The outputs of a camera can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an photographic image, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the image, but not the mere pointing of a lens and adjustment of setting.

[array_key_first]

> a prompt can be a masterpiece.

Then copywrite the prompt, that's always been allowed. Should be just as good if that's the true masterpiece.

Or, as I think we all know, it's not. It's merely a commission, the product is the output. Not the prompt.

[_DeadFred_]

AI grifters, new 'prompt copywriting' billable service opportunity just dropped.

[toss1]

>>A prompt can be a masterpiece.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

You have an extremely low bar for calling something a masterpiece.

A prompt can be clever, insightful, unique, and even uniquely productive.

But it is nowhere near the level of decades-deep skill and creative inspiration required to create art anything worthy of the label "masterpiece".

>>AI can be used as another kind of brush

Perhaps that is a valid analogy, but we do not give copyrights to brushes, no matter how much cost or effort was required to make the brush. The brush is not the only tool required to make the art. To continue the analogy, the artist must also select and mount the canvas, mix and color each shade of paint, build up the base layers, and on and on and on...

It doesn't matter if your "brush" is a five hundred billion dollar machine and you spend six months whispering to it to find just the right incantation to generate your file of pixels — SCOTUS is right, you have not make art to which you can claim a copyright.

And the starving student artist in their garage mixing their paints and using the dollar-store brush did make art worthy of a copyright claim.

[camillomiller]

>> I disagree with this approach because I've seen how much creativity and effort some people can put into slowly evolving a single elaborate prompt. AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece.

Absolute nonsense. A work of art is made of semantic stratification, experience, thought process. A prompt lacks all that. AI art can be a tool, but this sentence is a good reminder that on average it’s worth shit all.

[rickydroll]

Don't forget that the human artist spends hours training on art that predates them, and, in my opinion, that training predisposes the artist to unconsciously replicate elements of art they've trained on previously.

[camillomiller]

Stop treating humans like machines. Stop normalizing this dehumanizing nonsense.

[rickydroll]

Am I treating humans like machines or machines like they're human?

LLMs were created in our image. Hallucination, confabulation, sycophancy, psychopathy, learning, reasoning, and blackmail are all behaviours in LLMs that were first found in humans. All these behaviors are present in human writing and imagery captured in a training set. So to me, there's no surprise that LLMs exhibit these behaviors.

Do I think LLMs are sentient or sapient? I'm in the probably not camp. We don't have a good test for either, but they do illustrate the resistance to acknowledging any other being or creation as having the same capabilities as Homo sapiens.

[camillomiller]

Man it’s hard. This transhumanistic bullshit has fried many good brains

[jeej]

> AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece.

Sorry, but... cringe. If we are calling prompts "masterpieces" now - letting alone the image generated by it - maybe we don't deserve art at all.

[mcmcmc]

> AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece

What a joke. No, AI is not a brush, it is a slop machine that spits out derivatives of the actual masters. If you go back and forth with a human artist about a commission where you keep nitpicking and wanting adjustments, does that make you the artist? No, it makes you the “ideas guy”

[betaby]

> spits out derivatives of the actual masters

A brief history of art in general.

[array_key_first]

Sure, but at at least it's created by humans.

I have an allegiance to humans. I have no allegiance to a computer program. That would be pathetic.

[Ajakks]

You clearly only get sloppy from the machine -> hence your entire understanding, you did some googling, found others with the same experience and you took up this position.

Meanwhile, random person, gets the exact same AI that you used to create literal DaVinci'esque, visibly masterpiece inspired - maybe not "masterpiece" but "masterpiece adjacent" - thats apparently, its not perfect art, but it could have been created in a workshop...

You can't do that. Rather, you cant nake the AI do that.

What is the difference between you and the random person with artworks in the style of the old masters? What do we call that gap?

Isn't that gap normally stuff like talent, ability, skill, knowledge?

All arguments made in this vein are just people whining about their personal lack of ability, as if its a machines fault.

[mcmcmc]

Thanks for the ad hominem. Subjective artistic value aside, do you not dispute that prompting AI to create an artistic image is functionally the same as outsourcing to another human? You input instructions and a commission fee; you get back a piece of artistic expression. You did not create the art, someone else did. And for AI output, the machine cannot claim a copyright on that original image.

If you outsource the image creation, then throw it on a t-shirt design, or modify it, or do whatever, you can copyright the modified work that you Han a hand in creating, but you still are not the creator of the original.

[freejazz]

> do you not dispute that prompting AI to create an artistic image is functionally the same as outsourcing to another human?

From who's perspective? Fundamentally, in one situation a human is creating something and in the other situation, no human creates anything.

You generally cannot copyright derivative works as if they are your own, fyi.

[charcircuit]

Let's say the AI prompt is "Make it black and white". Why does taking a photo and making it gray scale in photoshop result in a copyrightable piece of art, but using an AI model makes the resulting output slop? They seem equivalent to me.

[blackcatsec]

I'll distill it down into something you might understand a bit easier. On social media, such as Instagram, or Tiktok, you'll find a bit of a meme going around that shows the difference between an influencer video of a vacation destination and then a follow-up video from someone with their iPhone, often showing overcrowding of tourists, brown water where there was blue; with these videos often with a poor-sounding Recorder being played over them (I forget the song that it's attempting to play).

The difference between the "real" video and the "influencer" video is the artistry from the artist(s) involved. (And yes, top influencers often have a person or a team of people involved)

[jazzyjackson]

Is the Jurassic Park theme btw

[blackcatsec]

Thanks! That's one of them :) I had to look it up as it was bothering me. The other is "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire.

[tgv]

It's not about image modifications, it's about creation. Furthermore, half a similarity on a small aspect doesn't undermine the argument.

[blackcatsec]

Because you're unable to understand art, honestly. Photography isn't just "taking a photo and making a grayscale image in Photoshop"; but rather a combination of a couple of different artistic expression styles that involve understanding how to use the tools you have (a camera, the lens, film or a sensor, and lighting) to capture an expression of an event. Technically speaking, a photo of a mountain isn't just a "photo of a mountain" that you would maybe throw into AI slop--but an actual, legitimate photo of a mountain and how it's captured and presented (no matter the post processing done) is an actual artistic expression of the capture of that mountain. Because absolutely nothing, nothing at all will capture actually standing there looking at the mountain. A photo is the best approximation, and sometimes doesn't even have to be, depending on what the artist wants to express with the image.

In short, your inability to understand photography doesn't justify the use of AI slop to prompt "give me a grayscale image of a mountain" and assume that it's the same thing as a human being taking an actual photo. They're not even close to the same thing.

[minimaxir]

The original comment is asking from a legal perspective in a very specific example, not an emotional one.

[Ajakks]

They are describing the artistic qualities that something must posess to be actual artwork - which is relevant to copyrighting artworks, and is also that had been discussed, by Artists and Creators - the entire time

They did not write an emotional comment, they were trying to teach you, bc they ascertained that you don't understand art.

They were right.

[charcircuit]

>use of AI slop to prompt "give me a grayscale image of a mountain"

That is not the prompt I included in my post. The prompt I gave was for taking an the same photo you would be putting into photoshop and using AI to apply grayscale.

[vessenes]

Wait till you learn about comparator mirrors. And renaissance artist studios.