Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs The woman has three eyes, spaghetti noodle-like hair and a slice of yellow, melted cheese dripping down her head. Her body is a mosaic, with primary-colored shards of glass similar to something you might see in a church’s stained glass window. I’ve seen a lot of AI images in my time as an AI reporter, and this one certainly has that je ne sais quoi AI look about it. The image is called “A Single Piece of American Cheese,” and it was conjured up by Kent Keirsey, CEO of Invoke, an AI creation platform. While it seems like just another AI image at first glance, it’s significant for another reason. The image was created entirely with generative AI — and Invoke just got a copyright for it. If you’re surprised by that, you’re not alone. I was too. Here’s why: This new era of AI-generated images has stirred significant concerns about creativity and originality and the role of humans in the creation of art. It’s also become a battleground over ownership and protecting the rights of the artists and illustrators who make the art that then gets used by the companies behind AI image generators.I talked with Keirsey and others involved in “A Single Piece of American Cheese” and the copyright award and how that all came together. It’s a fascinating look behind the scenes at the questions and conundrums of art and AI. Invoke A Single Piece of American Cheese: An origin story
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Keirsey first generated an AI image with Invoke. Then, he used a process called “inpainting,” which allowed him to highlight specific regions of the image and generate new AI elements in that area with a new prompt. He added roughly 35 of these AI edits to the original AI image, ultimately resulting in the final image. Keirsey’s hands-on role in the creation process was key to his application for copyright. Invoke first applied for a copyright for “A Single Piece of American Cheese” in August 2024 and was denied because the U.S. Copyright Office said it “lack[ed] the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim,” according to correspondence between Invoke’s legal team and the office reviewed by CNET. Invoke followed up with more evidence, including a timelapse video of the image’s creation and an explanation of how Keirsey was involved in the creation process. The Copyright Office gave its stamp of approval on Jan. 30. The office granted approval and said it determined the image “contains a sufficient amount of human original authorship in the selection, arrangement, and coordination of the AI-generated material that may be regarded as copyrightable.” The key words in there are “selection,” “coordination” and “arrangement.” In the certificate of registration, also viewed by CNET, the office said that the AI-generated components were excluded from the copyright claim. It was Keirsey’s collaging of all these elements that resulted in creating something new enough, something expressing sufficient human creativity, that was eligible for copyright. And in this case, the Copyright Office granted the claim. Composite images and copyrights The Copyright Office has been navigating the legal and ethical complexities of protection in the age of AI since it launched its AI initiative in March 2023. Since then, hundreds of creators have registered and received copyrights for works containing AI. Pursuant to guidance from the federal agency, creators have to disclose any AI usage in their work. Those AI elements are considered pre-existing material and aren’t covered by the copyright. Instead, it’s the new things people are adding — their original imagery, text and so on — that are covered. In Keirsey’s case, the composite image, made by his deliberate manipulation of each piece, is what’s protected. In other words, the individual parts of the image aren’t copyrighted, but the sum of those parts is, thanks to Keirsey’s direction. “I give the example of making a collage out of old photos. So there, imagine you find a box of photos that are 100 years old. They’re out of copyright, nobody owns them, and then you make a two-dimensional collage out of these old photos. [That] collage that would probably be protectable under the Copyright Act, because even though the individual photos aren’t protected, what you’ve done with them is creative and warrants protection,” said Judd Lauter, special counsel at Cooley LLP, who worked on the copyright application for Invoke, in an interview. This logic falls in line with the latest guidance the Copyright Office, published just last month, on the copyrightability of AI images. The report said that images edited or enhanced with generative AI could be eligible for copyright, like movies that use AI de-aging tech or photos retouched with generative editing. The prompts that create AI images aren’t copyrightable since it’s the generators that interpret and create the images, potentially limitlessly. “We did not get copyright on each individual shard, or each individual element, because that’s AI-generated. But what we did get a copyright on is the whole of that composition.”
Kent Keirsey, CEO, Invoke
The Copyright Office maintained in that guidance that images entirely created by AI without sufficient human editing, however, still can’t be copyrighted since there’s not enough human contribution (or authorship) in the process. So if you typed a prompt into Dall-E 3 and copied and pasted whatever image popped up into an application for copyright, you would likely be denied. What’s interesting is that every element of Keirsey’s “A Single Piece of American Cheese” is AI-generated — there isn’t a human-generated base photograph or design underneath it all. In a statement to CNET, the Copyright Office said its policy is not to comment on specific registrations or claimants. The image has a kind of “absurdity,” as Keirsey calls it, that he said was inspired by and reflects his experience trying to get copyrights on AI images. “The woman is made of this kind of fractured stained glass, and that is, in essence, what we got copyright on. We did not get copyright on each individual shard, or each individual element, because that’s AI-generated. But what we did get a copyright on is the whole of that composition — the shards of glass, if [they] were melted together by American cheese,” said Keirsey in an interview. Copyright in the age of AI Human authorship, meaning the work in question was created by a real-life human, is one of the most fundamental requirements for copyright. But in the age of AI art, there are a lot of debates and questions about just how involved actual humans are in the creative process. Keirsey and his legal team argued that Invoke’s inpainting tool and other features gave him enough creative control over the work to warrant a copyright. It’s important to note that the very basis of AI generative content relies on training based on existing content, primarily created by people. Over the past few years, content creators, publishers and artists have been extremely concerned about how their work is used in this training process. Groups like The New York Times and bands of artists are in the midst of heated legal battles over the legality of such usage. Other folks, like content catalog and media owners, have negotiated with AI companies to license their content for training in multimillion-dollar deals. Invoke uses open-source foundational models (including Stable Diffusion 1.5), doesn’t train on its users’ work and its users own the work they create on the platform. Invoke’s success in copyright protection certainly offers hope for creators looking to copyright their AI-edited work, but there’s no guarantee that every piece will meet the threshold of sufficient human authorship, as deemed the Copyright Office. What is significant about this news is that it establishes a guidepost for other creators, Lauter said. “What we’ve demonstrated here is that we’ve defined a threshold. I think creators are going to continue to test what those boundaries are, both in terms of how human creativity is applied and embodied within content created with the assistance of AI, and also how much creativity is going to be needed to reach that threshold. And the way we figure it out is through example,” said Lauter. While Keirsey has no immediate plans for “A Single Piece of American Cheese” now that it’s copyrighted, he sees it as an important milestone. The legal, ethical and bigger philosophical questions around AI images and copyright will continue. But there’s still a place for human creativity with AI, Keirsey said. “I think our relationship with technology is changing, and it’s going to be different,” said Keirsey. “It’s important for people to realize that humans aren’t going away. Just as with all technology, we’re finding a new way to relate to it, and the creativity that we have matters just as much as it did five years ago, before we had all of this stuff.”
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