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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

It's obvious that a computer program cannot have copyright because computer programs are not persons in any currently existing jurisdiction.

Whether a person can claim copyright of the output of a computer program is generally understood as depending on whether there was sufficient creative effort from said person, and it doesn't really matter whether the program is Photoshop or ChatGPT.

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Just thinking out loud... why can't an algorithm be an artificial person in the legal sense that a corporation is? Why not legally incorporate the AI as a corporation so it can operate in the real world: have accounts, create and hold copyrights...

Corporations are required to have human directors with full operational authority over the corporation's actions. This allows a court to summon them and compel them to do or not do things in the physical world. There's no reason a corporation can't choose to have an AI operate their accounts, but this won't affect the copyright status, and if the directors try to claim they can't override the AI's control of the accounts they'll find themselves in jail for contempt the first time the corporation faces a lawsuit.

Because the law doesn't say it can. It's that simple.

So if creative effort was put into writing the prompt, then whoever wrote the prompt should have the copyright to the output produced by ChatGPT?

Sure, but the prompt wasn't the only input… there was considerable effort put into the training data as well :)

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