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U.S. artists can now copyright their works using AI Pixabay

The U.S. artists can now leverage the power of AI to copyright their individual creations, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office-- a move that holds the door open for full-blown use of AI in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.

The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not a part of the executive branch, will now prioritize the scores of applications it receives every year to cover millions of unique works, a report on Library Journal stated.

This means that if a human's creative input is evident in the AI-generated output, or if they make creative changes to it, the work may qualify for copyright protection. However, simply providing prompts to an AI does not grant copyright rights, the U.S. Copyright Office stated.

The recent report from the U.S. Copyright Office explains that decisions about copyright for works created with artificial intelligence (AI) will be made individually, but there's a clear guideline: human creativity is essential for a work to qualify for copyright protection, the Associated Press reported.

"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.

The report follows a review that began in 2023 taking into account opinions from thousands of people ranging from AI developers to actors and country singers.

However, copyright office will not accept applications for works that are fully-machine generated and lacks human creativity. The report dismisses machine generated work as that can be done simply by giving a prompt to an AI chatbot.

"Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ... would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright," said the report.

However, the report failed to mention how they will the address the problem of copyrighted human works being pulled from the internet and ingested to train AI systems, often without permission or compensation, despite hundreds of cases still remain pending in U.S. courts about such copyright thefts.

The Copyright Office, however, said it is for the time being working to "turn to the training of AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and allocation of any liability."

Meanwhile, Association of Research Libraries welcomed the U.S. Copyright Office' report on copyrightability of AI-Generated outputs and looks forward to Part 3 of the report, which is expected later this year. The Part 3 of the report will explore whether training AI models on copyrighted works qualifies as fair use.