Thanks for the link. Love learning / discussing this kind of stuff.
I personally see the quick adoption of the technology from big coporations as an inevitable evil that cant be put back in the can. If anything its going to become a regular tool for many people’s workflows. Especially in the corporate / fast art / content hungry world we live in.
I think a lot of people are interpreting the AI art issue under the same one as photography. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony is quoted in a lot of these discussions.
Also people would be leaning hard into the line in the doc you provided (pg 21) 313.2 Work that lacks human authorship that reads
“The office will not register works produced by a machine or merely a mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.”
The argument would be that the art from generative AI does require human input, human interruption, and a human selection process. The law also makes it possible to copyright under the compelation and collections sections in the doc you provided. (Page 16-19 / 312.2 - 313)
It could be argued that the compelation of AI art is copyrightable - making the marketplace icons/texture bundlers with some legal footing.
The issue is that no one knows for certain. Since there are too many holes surrounding AI art in copyright law today one can not outrightly claim that all AI art is not copyrightable.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. The fact that theres a graphic novel made entirely of midjourney prompted images that was copyrighted tells me theres already a path for copyrighting AI art that involves copyighting compelation, collection, and derivative works. Like any legal grey area it will be a symantics game for applicants, really.