Comment to the United States Copyright Office re: Notice of Inquiry on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Questions 18 and 21 (Authorship of Works Created with the Assistance of Generative AI)

This Comment to the United States Copyright Office discusses the proper interpretation and attribution of authorship over works created with the assistance of generative AI tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion. In Copyright law, authorship requires a work to be "created," meaning it must be conceived of in the mind of the author and caused to be rendered into tangible expression by a creative act of the author. The U.S. Copyright Office has reached an erroneous position that generative AI tools are in fact the author of the works created with the assistance of these tools, and in so doing supplants the humans involved in the actual creative process. The Copyright Office denies authorship and thereby refuses to register the copyright over works even where the human author has carefully iterated and refined the work through multiple interventions (prompts) with the AI tool. Generative AI tools are not (yet) sentient, they do not conceive of works on their own, and they do not act autonomously or automatically to create works. The AI should not be considered an author when they are merely a tool employed by the true author, the end user of the AI tool.