😺 New AI copyright rules

PLUS: Two "Magic prompts" we use every day...

Welcome, humans.

Today we’ll spare you another main story on DeepSeek, the little AI that could… crash the markets, dominate the AI news cycle, inspire competition in China, inspire fear in Meta, inspire rage in OpenAI, and give Microsoft the ultimate revenge.

You read that last part right—even as OpenAI and Microsoft actively investigate if DeepSeek trained its model off OpenAI’s stolen data, Microsoft made DeepSeek’s top model (R1) available on the Azure AI Foundry (Microsoft’s AI cloud service).

TBH, that’s just savvy marketing—R1’s a popular model, why wouldn’t Azure run it? But we also can’t help feel it’s a subtle dig at Sam breaking away for Project Stargate. Man, it really is a data center eat data center world out there…

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

The US copyright office ruled prompts aren’t copyrightable.
Microsoft earned $13B from AI, spent $22.6B on infrastructure.
Meta pledged massive AI investment and Llama upgrades.
DeepSeek leaked 1M user records.

Advertise in The Neuron here.

The US Copyright Office just settled a big AI question…

The US Copyright Office just released part two of its decision on copyrighting AI-generated work. While it's not the big training decision, it still has some major implications for using AI in Hollywood and companies protecting their AI IP (ironic, we know).

After reviewing 10,000+ comments and nearly a year of research, their verdict = AI CAN help create copyrightable work… but you've gotta do more than just type prompts.

According to the Copyright Office, AI today is basically a fancy suggestion box:

You can tell it what you want, but you can't control how it interprets your request.
Even if you spend hours crafting the perfect prompt, the AI might still give you something totally different than what you asked for (cough Midjourney cough).
Therefore, prompts alone are not copyrightable—it would be like claiming copyright on “write me a story about pirates” just because you asked for it.

Here’s what this means in practice:

NOT copyrightable:
- Raw ChatGPT output (i.e, “write me a pirate story.”)
- Generating a video clip with tools like Runway/Pika.
POTENTIALLY copyrightable:
- Heavily editing an AI pirate story with your creativity.
- Including AI elements in your larger original work (about pirates).
PROBABLY copyrightable:
- Films using AI special effects can be copyrightable as a whole.
- Editing multiple AI clips into a new work (like an AI pirate short film).

Think of AI like an intern—it can help, but you still need to make the creative decisions yourself (i.e., manually) to get the credit. For more, here’s the full report.

Pop quiz: awhile back we had Claude write an entire screenplay based on the leaked emails between Altman and Musk leading up to their current lawsuit. BTW, the sequel to that is gonna be EPIC with Project Stargate now in the mix…

Can we actually copyright this under these rules?

All we did was:

Upload leaked emails.
Prompt Claude to plan and write a screenplay (a lot).

Answer: Nope! To make it copyrightable, we'd need to substantially edit dialogue, rework scenes, add character development, and blend it with our original writing.

Like we said up top, this decision doesn’t settle the big AI training copyright question (legality, licensing, liability)—that’s coming in Part 3… sometime.

As we’ve written before, that all hinges on whether or not training constitutes transformative works under “fair use”—and it could need Supreme Court intervention.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Have you seen these five magic prompt tips from Conor Grennan? Apparently he has a whole framework to back these up, but we thought they were worth sharing on their own. Our favorite is split, where you ask GPT to debate the answer it gave you.

A common problem with AI is that chatbots often tell us what we want to hear; split is a genius hack to combat that problem and make sure you’re getting as robust an answer as possible.

Another one that works well for us: “answer that again, but be as critical / scrutinizing / analytical as possible.”

As for the others: mimic is essential (use it to capture your writing voice), while bionic, conjure, and time travel can be good in creative situations, but not when you need factual accuracy.

Treats To Try.

PC Servers and Parts sells refurbished enterprise servers and workstations, so if you want to run your own AI, use it to get powerful used machines with massive specs (like, 768GB RAM) at shockingly low prices—since enterprise hardware drops in value so quickly (found from this thread).
Pitch Avatar turns your presentations into interactive video demos that run themselves.
EpicTopia builds you personalized action plans and tracks your progress across work, life, and personal goals (app store only rn).
Omakase.ai creates a personal shopping assistant for any online store with just your website URL—free to try; it takes awhile to load, but it works!
TheNewBlack is a virtual try on tool that lets you describe a dress or upload a sketch + get back a complete design, including front/back views & model photo.
Bulletpen transforms your rambling speech into polished, well-structured writing by letting you talk naturally while it handles the formatting—demo.
TabBoo scares you away from distracting websites by adding random jump-scares to addicting sites—here’s a demo; it’s not that scary, we promise!

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

Around the Horn.

Meta, Microsoft, and Dutch AI chip equipment manufacturer ASML all reported earnings yesterday—ASML seemingly crushed on strong demand for its machines, and both Meta + Microsoft surpassed expectations, but dipped slightly on disappointing forward guidance.
- Microsoft says it’s now generating $13B a year in AI revenue—and it’s capital expenditure for this quarter was a record high of $22.6B.
- Meta says it will invest potentially “hundreds of billions of dollars” in AI over the long term to win in AI, and the next Llama model will have multimodal (vision, voice) and agent capabilities.
Apple is expected to report lukewarm earnings due to its own AI efforts that have been delayed and less than impressive to consumers.
SoftBank could invest between $15B-$25B in OpenAI—that’s in addition to the money it pledged separately to Stargate.
DeepSeek had yet another security issue—this time, an open database of 1M user records such as system logs, prompt submissions, and API keys (closed).

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Thursday Trivia

One is a real image, and one is AI. Which is which? (vote below!).

Which is AI?

The answer is below, but place your vote to see how your guess compares to everyone else (no cheating now!)

Here are the results from last week’s trivia (A was AI):

6 humans, 4 robots…

Here’s what you said:

Some thought the shorts were a giveaway: “I hope B is AI, otherwise dude needs to get shorter shorts or longer pants.” “I hope those jorts aren't real.”
Some thought the thumbs were a giveaway: “look at those thumbs on B, wow!!!!” “Really long thumbs.”
But R.S saw through this mirage: “Thumbs in b look like thumbs while A doesn't show hands at all.”