This important decision marks a new precedent for the industry and represents a major advancement in the legal recognition of AI-assisted creativity.

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Under current guidance from the Copyright Office, images generated from conventional text prompts are not eligible for copyright protection because they lack human authorship, a prerequisite for copyrights.  Recognizing the need for professional creatives to secure copyright protection for their works, we set out to test the boundaries of protectability for works created with the assistance of AI.  We created a piece using the Invoke platform to demonstrate how visual works created using platform features may be eligible for copyright protection.

Specifically, we focused on the application of Invoke’s inpainting features to iterate upon an AI-generated image, coordinating and arranging where to inpaint and then selecting from among multiple inpainted images to create a composite work: A Single Piece of American Cheese.

We then filed an application with the U.S. Copyright Office to register the piece. Consistent with the Copyright Office’s guidance on protectability of AI-generated images, we claimed rights in the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the inpainted components of the composite image, but not the individual AI-generated inpainted segments. 

Despite previous failed attempts by artists to secure copyright using other AI image generation tools, Invoke was able to secure copyright protection by proactively combining human creativity with AI-assisted image generation, and by documenting the creative techniques that Keirsey used inside the Invoke platform, many of which are not possible in simple text-to-image generators.

We recorded every decision, direction and use of Invoke’s features, demonstrating how he transformed an initial prompt-based work into an original work guided by human creativity. We were able to use this record to demonstrate to the Copyright Office that A Single Piece of American Cheese is a work of human authorship.

We published a full report on the legal precedents around copyright & generative AI and shared how we obtained copyright with a full demonstration of the workflows and tools we used here.