Artist receives first known US copyright registration for generative AI art

According to their public records search, a New York-based artist named Kris Kashtanova has received US copyright registration on their graphic novel that features artificial intelligence.

There is a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn that has been registered. The artwork for Zarya was created by Kashtanova. They announced the news from Tuesday.

I got Copyright from the Copyright Office of the USA on my Ai-generated graphic novel. I was open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page. It wasn’t altered in any other way. Just the way you saw it here.

I tried to make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI. I registered it as visual arts work. My certificate is in the mail and I got the number and a confirmation today that it was approved.

My friend lawyer gave me this idea and I decided to make a precedent.

The artwork was not created entirely by the artificial intelligence, but was assisted by it. The comic book story was written and the layout and artistic choices were made.

The history of generative art goes all the way back to the 1960s. This is the first time we know of that an artist has registered a copyright for their work, which was created by the recent round of image synthesis models.

Speculation about whether artificial intelligence can be copyrighted has been the subject of many articles over the past few months, and just yesterday, we wrote about the ban on artificial intelligence-generated artwork on the website of the company.

The US Copyright Office has not ruled against the use of copyrighted artwork. It didn't rule out the possibility of an artificial intelligence being the author rather than a human.

Zarya of the Dawn is available for free through the website of Artificial Intelligence Comic Books. We will update this story as more information becomes available.