CONCEPT
The US Copyright Office's AI Position
The Romantic framework's institutional defense — works generated by AI without human creative control are ineligible for copyright — which is internally coherent and increasingly untenable.
The U.S. Copyright Office's current position is that works generated by AI without human creative control are ineligible for copyright registration. The reasoning follows Fichte's logic: copyright protects the expression of an individual human mind; AI does not possess an individual human mind; therefore AI-generated expression is not copyrightable. The reasoning is internally consistent. It is also increasingly untenable, because the boundary between AI-generated and AI-assisted work is not a line but a gradient, and the gradient is becoming more continuous with every advance in AI capability. The Office's attempts to draw the line — through disclosure requirements, determinations of human creative control, and case-by-case review — manifest the institutional strain of applying a Romantic framework to post-Romantic conditions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The position was articulated most clearly in the Office's 2023 Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence and the subsequent Zarya of the Dawn decision, which granted copyright to