Author granted copyright over book with AI-generated text—with a twist | Ars Technica
▻https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/author-granted-copyright-over-book-with-ai-generated-text-with-a-twist
Last October, I received an email with a hell of an opening line: “I fired a nuke at the US Copyright Office this morning.”
The message was from Elisa Shupe, a 60-year-old retired US Army veteran who had just filed a copyright registration for a novel she’d recently self-published. She’d used OpenAI’s ChatGPT extensively while writing the book. Her application was an attempt to compel the US Copyright Office to overturn its policy on work made with AI, which generally requires would-be copyright holders to exclude machine-generated elements.
That initial shot didn’t detonate—a week later, the USCO rejected Shupe’s application—but she ultimately won out. The agency changed course earlier this month after Shupe appealed, granting her copyright registration for AI Machinations: Tangled Webs and Typed Words, a work of autofiction self-published on Amazon under the pen name Ellen Rae.
The novel draws from Shupe’s eventful life, including her advocacy for more inclusive gender recognition. Its registration provides a glimpse of how the USCO is grappling with artificial intelligence, especially as more people incorporate AI tools into creative work. It is among the first creative works to receive a copyright for the arrangement of AI-generated text.
“We’re seeing the Copyright Office struggling with where to draw the line,” intellectual property lawyer Erica Van Loon, a partner at Nixon Peabody, says. Shupe’s case highlights some of the nuances of that struggle—because the approval of her registration comes with a significant caveat.