The US Copyright Office rejects a request to grant a copyright to a work of art created by an AI, as the image didn't include an element of “human authorship”
Adi Robertson / The Verge : Source: US Copyright Office .
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2022 rejection is the origin point of the US Copyright Office's line on machine-made art: the applicant's image failed the 'human authorship' test outright. The office then codified the standard in March 2023 guidance tying protection for AI-assisted works to whether the output reflects the author's 'own mental conception' own mental conception.
What makes the story worth tracking is that the position stuck: a district court judge later upheld the finding as a bedrock requirement upheld by a district court, and the office extended it to an award-winning competition image even after hundreds of prompt revisions and Photoshop edits denied despite revisions and edits.
First-order effects
- The applicant receives no copyright registration, leaving the artwork effectively in the US public domain from birth — no exclusivity, no licensing basis.
- The Copyright Office converts a one-off denial into a citable precedent that future registrants must argue against.
Second-order effects
- Applicants respond by testing the boundary rather than accepting it — the later competition-image case shows that heavy prompt iteration and post-production in Photoshop still failed to clear the bar, narrowing what counts as sufficient human contribution.
- Publishers and platforms building on generative art face a protection gap at home, pushing rights strategy toward markets or mechanisms outside US copyright.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US copyright splits into two regimes: AI-assisted works where a human's conception is demonstrable remain protectable, while fully machine-generated outputs default to the public domain — a structural divide the office itself drew in its guidance and courts have so far endorsed.
- The divergence invites pressure on Congress to legislate a definition of authorship for generative tools, since registration denials and single court rulings are doing the standard-setting in the meantime.
The trend: US copyright is hardening around human authorship as the bright line for AI-generated works, with the Copyright Office setting the rule and courts ratifying it.