The U.S. Copyright Office has weighed in on who owns AI-generated work in the era of ChatGPT.This week, the federal agency published new guidance about AI and copyright law, saying it is open to granting ownership to AI-generated work on a “case-by-case” basis. “The Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of ‘mechanical reproduction’ or instead of an author’s ‘own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form,'” said Shira Perlmutter, director of the Copyright Office.
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How ChatGPT and AI are affecting the literary world
Essentially, copyrighted work will depend on how the person uses AI to generate content. As we’ve seen with ChatGPT and Bing Chat, you can prompt it to write a poem in the style of William Shakespeare or a song about chicken wings a la Jimmy Buffett. But because generative AI produces “complex written, visual,