April 1 (Reuters) - Last year, Kris Kashtanova typed instructions for a graphic novel into a new artificial-intelligence program and touched off a high-stakes debate over who created the artwork: a human or an algorithm. "Zendaya leaving gates of Central Park," Kashtanova entered into Midjourney, an AI program similar to ChatGPT that produces dazzling illustrations from written prompts. From these inputs and hundreds more emerged "Zarya of the Dawn," an 18-page story about a character resembling the actress Zendaya who roams a deserted Manhattan hundreds of years in the future. The images in "Zarya," the office said, were "not the product of human authorship." Now, with the help of a high-powered legal team, the artist is testing the limits of the law once again.

Kashtanova, who uses a gender-neutral honorific and pronouns, used a series of written prompts to guide the AI software Midjourney to create the images in the book, which describes the voyage of a young person through several futuristic worlds and was the subject of an article in The Wall Street Journal last month.

LitigationcategoryU.S. judge permits lawsuit claiming NBA Top Shot NFTs are securities, article with image TechnologycategoryMeta loses bid to toss $175 mln verdict in streaming patent case, article with image LitigationcategoryU.S. judge permits lawsuit claiming NBA Top Shot NFTs are securities, article with image Midjourney is an AI-based system that generates images based on text prompts entered by users. Kashtanova wrote the text of "Zarya of the Dawn," and Midjourney created the book's images based on prompts. But it said Kashtanova was not the "master mind" behind the images themselves.

AI art

The registration, effective September 15, applies to a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn. Kashtanova created the artwork for Zarya using Midjourney, a commercial image synthesis service. I was open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page. It wasn't altered in any other way. Just the way you saw it here.