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Joined 22 days ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2026

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  • According to the U.S. Copyright Office, it absolutely can, but it depends on how much control the user exerts on the final product.

    If a single prompt was used and they copy pasted the entire thing, then yes, as you have said, it is not copyrightable.

    However, if multiple prompts were used and the end result is compiled/arranged with enough direction by the end user, then it can be copyrighted by compilation.

    Generating content with AI is often an initial or intermediate step, and human authorship may be added in the final product. As explained in the AI Registration Guidance, “a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’”¹²⁶ A human may also “modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.”¹²⁷

    As several commenters noted, human authors should be able to claim copyright if they select, coordinate, and arrange AI-generated material in a creative way.¹²⁸ This would provide protection for the output as a whole (although not the AI-generated material alone).¹²⁹ A relatively common scenario in registration applications is the combination of human-authored text with AI-generated images. In one early case, for instance, the Office found that the selection and arrangement of AI-generated images with human-authored text in a comic book were protectable as a compilation.

    https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf








  • For “AI editing”, I don’t have much of a problem if a model was trained to tweak the settings in something like Darktable to achieve a good baseline to start with. However, for contributing to research like this, I draw the line when models start generating their own pixels and overwriting the original image.

    Hopefully iNaturalist and other similar groups start to look at the metadata of submitted images to help warn/educate end users about this problem. That would at least help with the AI literacy issue. Those metadata tags are already being placed there by the most popularly used tools.