This is a plain account of the U.S. Copyright Office's published position. Copyright protects human authorship. Purely generated material is not protected. Applicants have to disclose what the tool produced. Under current generally available systems, a prompt alone is not enough control. The useful question for artists and collectors is what to write down — the human-authored parts, the arrangement, the modifications — so a later owner can see the split.
This is not legal advice, not a walkthrough of a registration form, and not a culture-war post. Glitxz does not add a house policy, a product, or an opinion beyond pointing at the Office's own documents.
the U.S. Copyright Office's March 2023 registration guidance on works that contain AI-generated material (effective the same date): "If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it." "Applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author's contributions to the work."
The same 2023 guidance: a work may still be registered where a human "select[s] or arrange[s] AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way," or modifies material originally generated by AI "to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection"; in those cases "copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work." Ordinary tools remain compatible with authorship when the human "actually formed" the traditional elements. The Office's example is a visual artist editing an image in Photoshop.
U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability, January 2025: "Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control." "Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements."
What the 2023 guidance actually says
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.'" Human authorship is the test. Disclose AI-generated content. Registration, if any, covers only the human-authored aspects. A tool that assists — the Office's Photoshop example — is not the same as a system that produces the traditional elements of authorship.
The Office launched its Copyright and Artificial Intelligence initiative in early 2023. Its public hub states that "Part 2 was published on January 29, 2025, and addresses the copyrightability of outputs created using generative AI."
What Part 2, January 2025, adds
The report of the Register of Copyrights treats existing law as sufficient: questions of copyrightability and AI "can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change." "The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output." "Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material."
The limit is equally plain. Copyright does not extend to purely generated material, or to material without sufficient human control over the expressive elements. In the body, the Office "concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." Human authors may claim "the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs" — in the Office's words, not as a house policy.
This page does not invent Office holdings, case outcomes, or the law in other countries. It does not walk through a form.
What to write down
If a tool contributed expressive material, the useful record says so, in the same contemporaneous habit as a session note. Name the human-authored parts, the arrangement, and the modifications. A public journal as provenance is the documentation companion already in this section. What plotter art is and how it's made is the older rhyme: a person wrote a procedure, and a machine drew.
A situation like this
This is a worked example, not a lot and not a customer. A process record says only "made with a prompt," with no account of selection, arrangement, or later modification. A later owner is asked to treat the whole image as authored. The Office's 2025 sentence about prompts, on current generally available systems, is the reason that record is not yet doing its job.
Sources
- U.S. Copyright Office, "Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence," 88 FR 16190, 16 March 2023. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05321/copyright-registration-guidance-works-containing-material-generated-by-artificial-intelligence
- U.S. Copyright Office, "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence" hub. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
- U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability, a Report of the Register of Copyrights, January 2025. https://copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
Also in this section
- What plotter art is and how it's made — a person wrote a procedure; a machine drew.
- What is glitch art — say whether the break was kept, and in which format.
- A public journal as provenance — a contemporaneous record of what was done.
Applications to show unfinished work are open at Apply. First lots have not opened.
The useful next step is to write down the split, or to read the Office's Part 2 report itself. The mediums index collects these guides. If something on this page is wrong, write to us.
Author: Escherbridge. Last reviewed: 2026-11-10, America/Denver.