A human needs to have significant creative choices involved in the creation for a work to be copyrightable. Naruto v. Slater litigated this, where a "selfie" taken by a macaque was ruled to not be eligible for copyright.
U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 306 (3d ed. 2021)¹ is quite explicit:
> 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.
This has not yet been litigated to conclusion, but it seems likely to me that LLM-generated outputs are not subject to copyright.
U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 306 (3d ed. 2021)¹ is quite explicit:
> 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.
This has not yet been litigated to conclusion, but it seems likely to me that LLM-generated outputs are not subject to copyright.
¹https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...