I don’t think anyone really knows the answer yet. UK law has much looser standards for copyrightability than US law - UK law accepts the “sweat of the brow” doctrine - mere human effort is enough to create copyright, even if it lacks any significant creative element-under UK law, a transcriptionist transcribing an audio recording creates a new copyright in the transcription separate from the copyright in the audio itself; US law does not consider a mere verbatim transcription to be sufficiently original to create a new copyright. But, will UK judges extend “sweat of the brow” to include AI sweat as well as human sweat? My gut feel is probably “yes”, but I’m not aware of any case law on the topic yet. A complicating factor is there are a lot of wealthy vested interests who are going to be pushing for the law in this area to evolve in a way which suits them - both in the courts and in Parliament - so the law might not evolve in the way you’d expect if judges were just left to logically extend existing precedents.
Even in the US, I think the situation is complex. If I prompt an LLM to edit a copyrighted human-written text, the LLM output is going to be copyrighted, because even if the LLM’s changes aren’t copyrightable, the underlying text is. And what happens if an LLM proposes edits, and then a human uses their own judgement to decide which LLM edits to accept and which not to? That act of human judgement might provide grounds for copyrightability which weren’t present in the raw LLM output.
Even in the US, I think the situation is complex. If I prompt an LLM to edit a copyrighted human-written text, the LLM output is going to be copyrighted, because even if the LLM’s changes aren’t copyrightable, the underlying text is. And what happens if an LLM proposes edits, and then a human uses their own judgement to decide which LLM edits to accept and which not to? That act of human judgement might provide grounds for copyrightability which weren’t present in the raw LLM output.