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The US Copyright Office disagrees. No work produced by a mechanical process, which includes LLMs, can be protected by copyright.

by dwa35924 hours ago|

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>>That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain

They can't produce anything on their own. They have to be prompted which is initiated by humans at this point, so the patents can be owned by the initiator(human) not the tool.

by grim_io4 hours ago|

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Exactly, like any AI tool ever.

Someone wrote some instructions. No agent harness ever simply decided to pursue its own interests.

by recursive4 hours ago|

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How will you know when that happens? Or are you defining interests so narrowly that it's definitionally impossible?

by grim_io3 hours ago|

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If you are arguing that there is consciousness that's emerging from LLM's, I have to disagree on that.

We will know when we see it. I don't see it right now.

by recursive2 hours ago|

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No. I'm not saying anything about consciousness.

Does a gradient descent algorithm pursue its interest of minimizing error? Does a home automation assistant pursue its interests when it sets my thermostat? I'm not super interested in the definition of "consciousness" or "interests". However, a thermostat setpoint has effects that are visible in the real world. That's a thing that happened, regardless whether you consider it to have happened in "the pursuit of an interest".

I'm saying that LLMs are affecting the world. And sometimes those effects might be difficult or impossible to trace back to a particular prompt written by a particular human. Chatbot input and output doesn't have to be in the form of text i/o. You can put them in a for loop. Remember OpenClaw?

> We will know when we see it. I don't see it right now.

There might exist an incentive to make it hard to see.

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That isn’t what the courts have decided. They just decided it has to be a human on the patent application name. You can use whatever tool you want to get there, but if you patent a thing, it has to be a human in the name.

by cmiles84 hours ago|

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I think we’re saying the same thing. If you’re using AI as a tool to support human creative content that’s one thing. But what courts are pushing back on is trying to patent/protect content where the core creator was AI. That’s what most people mean when they say “AI slop.” There courts are consistently saying you can’t protect this.

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No. The court is saying you cannot assign IP rights to an AI, as this guy was trying to do. They are not saying it cannot be protected (as /r/antiai folk are always claiming). That’s another thing.

by cmiles84 hours ago|

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If you can’t protect it as copyright (which the US and others have separately said) then how are you “protecting” it? It’s not IP.

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That isn’t precisely what was decided in those cases, either (even though this gets repeated constantly on the internet as if it was). Again, the fundamental point of this case (and some similar cases) is just that you cannot assign IP to an AI. It has to be assigned to a person.

by dcrazy4 hours ago|

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The ruling does not say whether or not the invention would be patentable had the appellant put his own name on the application.

by otterley52 minutes ago|

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If a person lists himself as the author but an LLM produces the work, they’re defrauding the government, which is a crime.

by _flux4 hours ago|

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You can't assign the copyright to Emacs either, yet it can be used to produce software.

by natebc4 hours ago|

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> Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

I haven't been able to square this belief (This is what i believe too.) with what I perceive as so, so many people making projects, putting them on github and slapping an MIT/GPL license on them.

If IP rights can't be applied to generated code then how are they able to apply a such a license to them?

I've asked this before and the response was along the lines of people thinking their multiple prompting amounted to human creative process and therefore it was covered but ... how? Any lawyers around that can ELI5 it for us? Maybe links to a lawyer somewhere who did?

by rolph4 hours ago|

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a person publishing as if a AI is the creator is publishing under a pseudonym.

AI has all the IP rights of a pen, pencil, chalk, or crayon.

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Because the “AI slop is uncopyrightable” people are misunderstanding court rulings like this. It’s not that AI output can’t by protected by IP, it’s that AI is not a person and so you can’t assign IP rights to it. You CAN assign IP rights to the human who did it (if they can show it’s non-trivial, like a haiku or photographer).

by natebc3 hours ago|

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

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This is the bit in the copyright offices' report that i'm trying to square:

>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.

by Robotbeat3 hours ago|

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In January 2025. It’s also not a court decision, effectively an executive branch directive.

by otterley50 minutes ago|

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The Copyright Office hasn’t changed its analysis, and courts will likely defer to it when they’re asked to settle a dispute about it.

by LoganDark4 hours ago|