THE WORK OF CREATIVITY IN THE AGE OF GENERATIVE REPRODUCTION: AN EXAMINATION OF PUBLIC COMMENTS SUBMITTED TO THE U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE INFORMING ITS STUDY ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

<p dir="ltr">Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GAI) technology have caused anxiety in creative communities. To determine what these new developments mean for creative labor, a qualitative content analysis of the public comments submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office informing its Study on Artificial Intelligence was conducted. A sample of 101 comments from individuals and 30 from organizations was analyzed for the manner in which they invoked creativity, how they deployed rhetorical frames, and other salient characteristics. Individual comments vastly outnumbered organizational comments, but organizational comments were often vastly more substantial and extensive. Individual comments tended to be short, passionate, and nonspecific. Organizations tended to reference specific case law in comprehensive responses to the questions of the Office. This deficit in comment quality emerges from a differential information environment, fundamentally speaking to the cross purposes of the respective commenter groups and having potential adverse consequences for democracy and cultural production.</p>