US Copyright Office opens public comments on AI and content ownership

The technology has increasingly commanded the legal system's attention, and as such office began seeking public comments on Wednesday about some of AI's thorniest issues (via Ars Technica). "The crucial question appears to be whether the'work' is basically one of human authorship, with the computer merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine," the USCO wrote. Although the issue is far from resolved, several cases have hinted at where the boundaries may fall. On the other hand, a Federal judge recently rejected an attempt to register AI-generated art which had no human intervention other than its inciting text prompt. Sarah Silverman is among the high-profile plaintiffs suing OpenAI and Meta for allegedly training ChatGPT and LLaMA (respectively) on their written work -- in her case, her 2010 memoir The Bedwetter. OpenAI also faces a class-action lawsuit over using scraped web data to train its viral chatbot.