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> The outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situation

> 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 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.

mcmcmc 8mo ago
> 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 8mo ago
  > spits out derivatives of the actual masters A brief history of art in general.
  - camillomiller 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Ajakks 8mo ago
      As someone who has actually studied art - right back at you. All the most famous paintings are done like a hundred times - certain scenes were done by ALL Masters, as like a rite of passage or proof of arrival - pretty much the whole time between the OG Masters and modern art. "Who is your favorite Sebastian?" Is a legit question, for example.
      - camillomiller 8mo ago
        And? Have we all already lost any ability for actual consequential thinking? Each one of those Sebastian is the living proof of a human experience, each with its subtleties, each unique. That is why you ask that question. How on Earth can you compare that to a series of shitty pictures done in a few seconds by a stochastic machine?
  - array_key_first 8mo ago
    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.
- charcircuit 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      The original comment is asking from a legal perspective in a very specific example, not an emotional one.
      - Ajakks 8mo ago
        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.
- vessenes 8mo ago
  Wait till you learn about comparator mirrors. And renaissance artist studios.
- Ajakks 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      > 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.
elil17 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  > 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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      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 8mo ago
        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.
camillomiller 8mo ago
>> 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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    Stop treating humans like machines. Stop normalizing this dehumanizing nonsense.
    - rickydroll 8mo ago
      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 8mo ago
        Man it’s hard. This transhumanistic bullshit has fried many good brains
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
tgv 8mo ago
> 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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
  > 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 8mo ago
    The prompt itself may be copyrighted.
    - freejazz 8mo ago
      What matter is whether or not its a masterpiece?
      - tgv 8mo ago
        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.
throwaway613746 8mo ago
[dead]
jeej 8mo ago
> 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.
toss1 8mo ago
>>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.
ottah 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
> 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_ 8mo ago
  AI grifters, new 'prompt copywriting' billable service opportunity just dropped.

mcmcmc 8mo ago

> 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 8mo ago
> spits out derivatives of the actual masters A brief history of art in general.
- camillomiller 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Ajakks 8mo ago
    As someone who has actually studied art - right back at you. All the most famous paintings are done like a hundred times - certain scenes were done by ALL Masters, as like a rite of passage or proof of arrival - pretty much the whole time between the OG Masters and modern art. "Who is your favorite Sebastian?" Is a legit question, for example.
    - camillomiller 8mo ago
      And? Have we all already lost any ability for actual consequential thinking? Each one of those Sebastian is the living proof of a human experience, each with its subtleties, each unique. That is why you ask that question. How on Earth can you compare that to a series of shitty pictures done in a few seconds by a stochastic machine?
- array_key_first 8mo ago
  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.
charcircuit 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    The original comment is asking from a legal perspective in a very specific example, not an emotional one.
    - Ajakks 8mo ago
      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.
vessenes 8mo ago
Wait till you learn about comparator mirrors. And renaissance artist studios.
Ajakks 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    > 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.

elil17 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
> 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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      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.

camillomiller 8mo ago

>> 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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  Stop treating humans like machines. Stop normalizing this dehumanizing nonsense.
  - rickydroll 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      Man it’s hard. This transhumanistic bullshit has fried many good brains

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

tgv 8mo ago

> 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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
> 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 8mo ago
  The prompt itself may be copyrighted.
  - freejazz 8mo ago
    What matter is whether or not its a masterpiece?
    - tgv 8mo ago
      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.

throwaway613746 8mo ago

[dead]

jeej 8mo ago

> 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.

toss1 8mo ago

>>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.

ottah 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

> 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_ 8mo ago
AI grifters, new 'prompt copywriting' billable service opportunity just dropped.