Kent Keirsey, CEO of Invoke, an AI creation platform, submitted a copyright application for his AI-generated art entitled “A Single Piece of American Cheese.”  The work is completely created by artificial intelligence (AI).  Given this and the Copyright Office's rule that only works created by humans are registrable, the application was initially rejected.

Then, Keirsey submitted additional evidence to the Copyright Office, including a time lapsed video showing the work's creation to prove that he is an author of the work.  Keirsey explains that he used a process called inpainting which allowed him to select areas of the AI-generated image and generate new AI elements in that portion with a new prompt. Repeating this process 35 times resulted in the final collage image.

Keirsey and his team likens this process to making a collage out of old photographs. The photographs may not be protectable under U.S. copyright law by the collage artist, but the resulting collage as a whole is. Keirsey's resulting copyright registration is limited to the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the AI created elements. This is a similar result to the Zarya of the Dawn comic book case where the author was awarded a copyright in the text she wrote and the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the AI-generated artwork. 

This decision by the Copyright Office is in line with its past decisions, but this case is particularly interesting as to the type of evidence the applicant supplied to prove his contributions to the AI-generated work. When preparing to file a copyright application that includes AI-generated elements, evidence like that supplied here may be helpful in securing the registration.