Georgetown Law
Technology Review

The increasing prevalence of generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) has introduced new legal and administrative complexities, particularly in copyright law. To address these challenges, the U.S. Copyright Office implemented a disclosure and disclaimer requirement for works containing AI-generated material. However, the approach of this requirement, rooted in the authorship doctrine, leaves more to be desired. It fails to account for the historically interwoven role of automation in facilitating human creativity. A more reliable and robust solution lies in embracing the originality doctrine, the very cornerstone of copyrightability analysis. Originality ensures that works reflect a minimal level of human intellectual conception and creativity prior to their registrability. By contrast, the authorship doctrine focuses on human involvement and control, creating an ineffective evaluation framework that fails to appreciate the relationship between creators and AI tools. Consequently, the current disclosure requirement is both overbroad—sweeping in works where AI is merely a tool for fixation—and underinclusive—ignoring circumstances where AI-generated material serves as the primary source of creative inspiration. A shift toward an originality-driven framework would better distinguish between works that truly merit protection and those that do not. Copyright law should embrace its foundational doctrines and recognize that creativity has always involved the interplay between human ingenuity and evolving technologies. There is nothing unoriginal about staying original.