A federal notice told applicants to disclaim AI-made material

The process wall

On 16 March 2023 the US Copyright Office published a statement of policy titled Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence, dated by the Register of Copyrights ten days earlier and printed in the Federal Register the same week. The wall it responds to sits at the intake desk, not the drawing board: examiners had been receiving applications that named an AI system as author, or that quietly folded machine output into a claim without saying so. The guidance is a process document. It tells a maker filling out the standard application exactly what box to tick and what sentence to write when part of a submitted work came out of a generative system.

What the documents show

The guidance restates a rule the Office traces to an 1884 Supreme Court photography case and to its own Compendium: a work must owe its origin to a human being. It then gives an operating test for prompts. Because current systems interpret a text instruction and determine composition, wording or sound on their own, a prompt functions like an instruction to a commissioned artist rather than direct authorship, so material produced from a prompt alone must be disclaimed as AI-generated material excluded from the claim. It cites the Office's own 21 February 2023 decision on the comic Zarya of the Dawn as the worked example of a hybrid submission, and separately warns that a registration that omits AI content can later be corrected by supplementary registration or challenged in infringement litigation under section 411(b) of the Copyright Act.

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism the guidance names is the same one later cases apply: control over expressive choices, not the use of technology as such. Editing a photograph in software, or running a sound through a guitar pedal, leaves the human as author because the person still forms the work's traditional elements; a system that decides colour, wording or structure from a prompt does not leave that authorship with the prompter. The limitation is procedural as much as substantive: a maker who fails to disclaim AI content risks not correcting the record and, separately, risks a court disregarding the registration entirely if the omission was knowing.

What survives

What survives is a specific, human-authored contribution, named in the application's Author Created field, and a route to keep the record accurate if a maker gets the split wrong the first time through a supplementary registration. Editorially, this is a drafting discipline rather than paperwork: describing selection, arrangement and edits precisely on the form later distinguishes a protectable compilation from bare machine output.

• Compare a real registration's Author Created and Material Excluded fields against the guidance's own model language.
• Check whether a work combining AI output with human text was registered before or after 16 March 2023.
• Ask what a supplementary registration would need to say to correct an earlier, undisclosed AI contribution.

A one-page policy statement rarely reaches into a maker's daily paperwork this directly, but this one now sits behind every application that mixes a generative tool with a human hand.