On 2/17/26 18:47, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:
On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 7:51 AM Matt Borland via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Co...
tl;dr:
AI-generated output isn't copyrightable. Prompts are ideas, not expression. Using AI as a tool doesn't affect your copyright. Modifying AI output can create copyrightable elements, but only the human parts. No new legislation needed. The interesting part they buried: identical prompts produce different outputs. That alone settles it. You can't be the "author" of expression you don't control. The rest is 41 pages of agreeing with this while being polite about it. Clearly the person who gives the prompt has no copyright claim. On the other hand, I can trivially write an "AI" program that regurgitates its exact training data, even if its internal model looks nothing like the training data. If I "train" this "AI" on the Star Wars movie, does this means I can use it to create a copyright-free copy of Star Wars?
(Such an "AI" already exists. It is called gzip.) -- Rainer Deyke - rainerd@eldwood.com