A New Dawn For Copyright In AI-Generated Works?

On February 21, 2023, the Copyright Office eclipsed its prior decisions in the area of AI authorship when it partially cancelled Kristina Kashtanova's registration for a comic book titled Zarya of the Dawn. In doing so, the Office found that the AI program Kashtanova used—Midjourney—was primarily responsible for the visual output that the Office chose to exclude from Kashtanova's registration. (Midjourney is an AI program that creates images from textual descriptions, much like OpenAI's DALL-E.) The decision not only highlights tension between the human authorship requirements of copyright law and the means of expression that authors can use, but it also raises the question: Can AI-generated works ever be protected under U.S. copyright law?