The rapidly growing market for artificial intelligence got a boost on Wednesday from the U.S. Copyright Office.

In a notice scheduled to publish in the Federal Register on Thursday, the office clarified its willingness to consider copyright protection for works containing AI-generated material along with how it will make those determinations.

The office determines copyright protection for works including literature, music, motion pictures, other audiovisual works, derivative works, and compilations.

“In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of ‘mechanical reproduction’ or instead of an author’s ‘own original mental conception,' to which the author gave visible form,” the notice explained. It goes on to say that some works may qualify for partial protection, limited to the work's human-generated elements.

The move comes as courts across the country have drawn gray lines between copyrightable and non-copyrightable AI-assisted works. The lack of clarity has frustrated creators looking to protect their crafts.

“These are no longer hypothetical questions,” the agency said about the AI-based cases on its docket, “as the office is already receiving and examining applications for registration that claim copyright in AI-generated material.”

Those applications have spanned from visual works created solely by computer algorithms to graphic novels combining human-generated text and machine-produced images. Whether or not a work is copyrightable, the office said, will depend on how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work.

“If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the office will not register it,” the statement explained. “In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim.”