"I'm going to take this as a win for now," Shupe says, even though she knows that "in some ways, it's a compromise." She maintains that the way she uses ChatGPT more closely resembles a collaboration than an automated output, and that she should be able to copyright the actual text of the book.
Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University, calls what the USCO granted Shupe "thin copyright"-protection against full-fledged duplication of materials that doesn't stop someone from rearranging the paragraphs into a different story. "This is the same kind of copyright you would get in an anthology of poetry that you didn't write," Sag says.
Erica Van Loon agrees. "It's hard to imagine something more narrow," she says.
Shupe is part of a larger movement to make copyright law friendlier to AI and the people who use it. The Copyright Office has shown openness to registering works with AI elements, even though authorship is considered a human endeavor.