Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence

The Copyright Office sets out what an applicant must do when a book, dataset, figure, or piece of software contains AI-generated material, including naming only human authors, describing the human contribution in the Author Created field, and disclaiming any more-than-trivial AI-generated portion under Limitation of the Claim. Reading it will let you complete a registration application correctly the first time and recognise when a pending or already-registered work has to be corrected through a supplementary registration. It also settles the question research offices are asked constantly, which is whether an AI tool or its vendor can ever be listed as an author.

Task

Ethics & compliance

Time

20 min

Level

intermediate

Cost

Free — Nothing to pay. A free account at most.

Tools

None in particular

Published

2023-03

Voice

US Copyright Office — Whether AI-assisted work — student, faculty, or research output — is copyrightable, a question every university now has to answer.