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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Dare I ask: who owns the IP to all the generated content? User? Google? Some complex arrangement governed by a 20-page ToS?

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AFAIK and this may have changed, but at least in the US, AI-generated content is not copyrightable so it's effectively public-domain.

That's incorrect. Start at "legal framework" on kage 7: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

The short version is the copyright office says it is possible works by creative human authors using AI tools are partially copyrightable in many cases.

It's not that any content created by AI is not copyrightable, it's that work created solely by AI without human input is probably not copyrightable.

See also [1] mentioned in the framework linked by sibling comment, AI copyright is essentially a logical extension of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

I think in reality its very much still undecided law in most ways that practically matter and a lot of decisions will still be made based on the pay rates of the lawyers for the different parties involved.

As a simple example, assume a specific LLM-based tool (like Google's own, or someone else's) happens to generate a social media mascot for you that looks a lot like the modern rendition of Mickey Mouse.

Let's see how long that creation flies as public domain because it came out of an AI (that almost certainly consumed a giant amount of content produced by Disney as part of its training).

Such content is already available. As an experiment I entered “zombie elsa” into google and I found some very disturbing youtube videos, e.g.: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M5urB3u4aRk .

If you want a specific tool, here is Elsa with a cigarette generated using Midjourney and more: https://journeyaiart.com/tag/Elsa .

This is what I've been pondering, people are using Claude etc. to produce software. Do they think about this copyright issue at all? Basically whatever they produce with Claude should be not copyrightable.

But what happens if they MIX some of their own code with AI-generated code, is that combination then their copyright? With such combined output it would be very difficult to determine which part was created by human, which by AI, and which by AI but slightly modified by human.

In the domain of graphics the AI could put in some markers which tells the graphic is AI-generated, but with code that is probabaly not possible, code is code and can always be edited by humans.

A separate question is that if I use Claude to generate some code but then stamp the output with my copyright notice, am I doing something illegal?

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