The US Copyright Office rules that a comic book made using AI art is ineligible for copyright protection, revoking its copyright granted in September 2022
Context & Ripple Effects
This revocation closes a loop the Office opened in February 2022, when it rejected copyright for an AI-made image on the grounds that it lacked "human authorship" (that early rejection set the doctrine). The September 2022 registration of an AI-illustrated comic book was the outlier — and this ruling pulls it back in line.
What follows confirms the reversal wasn't a one-off: the Office later told a graphic novelist its Midjourney-generated images shouldn't have been registered either, and by August 2023 a district court judge had upheld the Office's finding in court, calling human authorship a bedrock requirement.
First-order effects
- The comic's creator loses exclusive rights over the AI-generated artwork, leaving those images free for anyone to copy while any human-authored text and arrangement remain protected.
- Registrants of similar hybrid works now face retroactive risk: a granted certificate is no longer proof of protection if AI-generated material turns out to dominate the claim.
Second-order effects
- Artists and publishers working with tools like Midjourney must segregate human contributions from machine output in their applications, or risk losing the whole claim — pushing disclosure of AI use into routine copyright practice.
- Studios and platforms licensing AI-assisted art face a valuation problem: assets that can't be copyrighted can't be exclusively licensed, weakening the commercial case for fully AI-generated imagery.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — reinforced by the court's 2023 ruling and the Office's later denial of protection for an AI image even after Photoshop editing and many prompt revisions (the competition-image denial) — substantial human modification becomes the practical threshold for protectable AI-era work.
- Copyright doctrine hardens around human authorship as the gatekeeper, forcing AI-art businesses to build workflows around human contribution rather than pure generation.
The trend: US copyright law is consolidating around human authorship as the non-negotiable requirement for protecting AI-generated work, with the Copyright Office's line holding up in court.