AI Comic Art Dispute Leaves Copyright Protections Open-Ended

The US Copyright Office’s grant of a limited copyright registration for an artificial intelligence-assisted graphic novel cracked open the door for more attempts to protect works that blur the line between human and machine creativity.

Kris Kashtanova, artist and creator of “Zarya of the Dawn,” earlier this week won registration for the comic’s text and the work as a whole, but not the individual images generated by a Midjourney text-to-image AI program.

Midjourney users aren’t “authors” for copyright purposes because the technology generates images in an unpredictable way, the agency said in a Feb. 21 letter to Kashtanova. However, it ...