The registrar asks applicants to name and exclude the AI parts

The process wall

A maker who finishes a piece with some AI-generated material still has to fill out a registration form, and the form has fields for exactly this problem. The U.S. Copyright Office's March 2023 guidance states that applicants have “a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author's contributions.” The mechanism is two fields on the Standard Application: an “Author Created” field describing what the human contributed, and a “Material Excluded” field naming the AI-generated portions that are not being claimed.

What the documents show

The guidance is not abstract about what happens when an applicant skips this step. Its endnotes cite the Office's own cancellation decision on Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book whose 2022 application listed only a human author and did not mention that its images were made with Midjourney. After the Office learned of this, it reviewed the deposit and concluded that the applicant was the author of the work's text and of “the selection, coordination, and arrangement” of the images and text, but that the Midjourney-generated images themselves were not human-authored. The Office cancelled the original certificate and reissued a narrower one. The guidance and the decision agree on the same boundary: selection and arrangement can be authored; the pixels a model fills in cannot.

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism the Office repeatedly names is control over expression, not control over subject matter. Where a prompt only tells a system what to depict, the guidance says the system still decides “the rhyming pattern, the words in each line,” or the equivalent visual choices, so that material is not disclaimed by good intentions or a detailed prompt — it has to be named and excluded on the form. Where a human selects, arranges, or substantially modifies AI output, that layer of decision is what the registration protects, independent of the unprotected material sitting beside it.

What survives

This is an editorial checklist built from the guidance and the decision, not a substitute for legal advice. Worth keeping for any submitted work: a record of which elements were AI-generated and which were human-made, described briefly enough to fill an “Author Created” and a “Material Excluded” field; a note on any human selection, arrangement, or modification that could itself meet the creativity threshold; and, if a work has already been registered without this disclosure, awareness that the guidance describes a supplementary registration route to correct it rather than starting over.

• Locate the “Author Created” and “Material Excluded” fields on the Standard Application before finishing a piece with generated parts.
• Ask which specific elements were AI-generated and whether a human selection or arrangement was applied on top of them.
• Check the Office's AI initiative page for whether a pending application needs correcting under the guidance.

The paperwork asks a narrower question than it looks: not whether AI was involved, but which specific decisions were a human's, described precisely enough for the Office to draw the line the guidance already drew in Zarya of the Dawn.