Yes[1]. Copyright applies to human creations, not machine generated output.
It's possible to use AI output in human created content, and it can be copyrightable, and substantiative, transformative human-creative alteration of AI output is also copyrightable.
> This analysis will be “necessarily case-by-
case” because it will “depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and
how it was used to create the final work.”
This seems the opposite of the cut and dry "cannot be copyrighted" stance I was replying to.
Yes it does depend on the circumstances. You are free to waste your own time to try this at the copyright office, but in my opinion, this project's 100% LLM output where the human element is just writing prompts and steering the LLM is the same circumstance as my linked case where the human prompted Midjourney 624 times before producing the image the human deemed acceptable. The copyright office has this to say:
> As the Office described in its March guidance, “when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the ‘traditional elements of authorship’ are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.”
