[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by uruguru

First of all, the law is not clear on this because we are entering an era of what will basically be computer-generated content and computer-assisted content.

U.S. copyright is very clear on the human authorship requirement. Your own quote from an article states plainly the human authorship requirement. Below is the relevant excerpt from the Compendium of the U.S. Copyright Office Practices:

306 The Human Authorship Requirement

The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being. The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.

Originally Posted by uruguru

Nothing I've written using ChatGPT would be excluded from this. I am not giving it a simple prompt and then getting a completed story. There is a tremendous amount of back and forth as I use ChatGPT to consistent tailor and refine the story to my needs... i.e. the "creative input or intervention from a human author"

You are still typing in prompts and ChatGPT is what is producing the output. Doesn't matter how many times you refine the output with additional prompts, the AI software is what is creating the result, not you. The updated copyright guidelines issued in March 2023 cover this:

If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology — not the human user. Based on the Office’s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist — they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output

For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare’s style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.

AI-generated material can be used as the basis for a copyrightable work, if a human sufficiently transformed the AI original:

In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.

Originally Posted by uruguru

My wife is a professional illustrator and there is a lot of anxiety currently among professionals in her field about AI-generated artwork. Now that is a completely different animal because you can literally see marks from copyrighted artwork within AI generated artwork.

AI-generated artwork can't be copyrighted either. There was already the case of a graphic novel in which the story was written by a person but the artwork was AI-created. The Copyright Office granted copyright for the story but refused to grant copyright to the artwork because it was AI-generated.

Originally Posted by uruguru

People will be copyrighting ChatGPT-assisted text and there is no way anyone would ever know or could prove that ChatGPT was involved. It's not like it's lifting text from other copyrighted works.

Anyone registering their work with the U.S. Copyright Office is required to state if AI was used in the creation of that work, and the nature of that AI usage, since that is an important factor in assessing if copyright can be granted to that work. If the Copyright Office discovers that AI usage was not stated on the registration, the applicant risks having the copyright revoked, as noted in the updated guidelines:

Consistent with the Office’s policies described above, 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 to the work. As contemplated by the Copyright Act, such disclosures are ‘‘information regarded by the Register of Copyrights as bearing upon the preparation or identification of the work or the existence, ownership, or duration of the copyright.’’

Applicants who fail to update the public record after obtaining a registration for material generated by AI risk losing the benefits of the registration. If the Office becomes aware that information essential to its evaluation of registrability “has been omitted entirely from the application or is questionable,” it may take steps to cancel the registration. Separately, a court may disregard a registration in an infringement action pursuant to section 411(b) of the Copyright Act if it concludes that the applicant knowingly provided the Office with inaccurate information, and the accurate information would have resulted in the refusal of the registration.