> Not if you want to copyright the output That gets tricky: To the extent that an AI is just a tool — along the lines of a trained pair of hands executing a hu

> Not if you want to copyright the output That gets tricky: To the extent that an AI is just a tool — along the lines of a trained pair of hands executing a human prompter's specific, detailed instructions — the human prompter might qualify as an "author." From the U.S. Copyright Office in January 2025: "The Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that 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. "The Office confirms that the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability. "It also finds that the case has not been made for changes to existing law to provide additional protection for AI-generated outputs." https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).