If the term "prompt engineer" made you roll your eyes, "prompt artist" could blind you for life. The U.S. Copyright Office agrees: it has determined that the output of AI is not protected by copyright unless there is sufficient human control over the expressive elements. Specifially, the text or images generated by a chatbot don't become the intellectual property of the prompter.
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. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user's desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.
The report affirms that AI-generated content that lacks human involvement does not qualify for copyright protection, that human contribution to the creative process may make the work eligible for copyright, but that prompts are not human contribution.
To summarize: asking for it doesn't mean you made it.
• 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.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI-generated content
Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2: Copyrightability (PDF) [copyright.gov ]