AI-generated digital artwork may not be copyright protected

Generative models capable of automatically producing paragraphs of text or digital art are becoming increasingly accessible. People are using them to write fantasy novels, marketing copy, and to create memes and magazine covers. Content automatically created by software is poised to flood the internet for better or worse as AI technology is commercialized. Take Cosmopolitan's recent and "world's first artificially intelligent magazine cover," for instance: the image of a giant astronaut walking on the surface of a planet against a dark sky splattered with what looks like stars and gas as produced by OpenAI's DALL-E 2 model. Karen Cheng, a creative director, described trying various text prompts to guide DALL-E 2 in producing the perfect picture.