A graphic novel kept its words but lost its AI images

The picture

On 21 February 2023 the U.S. Copyright Office wrote to Kris Kashtanova's attorney concerning Registration # VAu001480196, the graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn. Kashtanova had registered the eighteen-page comic in September 2022 without disclosing that its images were generated by Midjourney. After public statements drew the Office's attention, it opened a cancellation inquiry under 37 C.F.R. section 201.7(c)(4) and, following correspondence describing how Midjourney was used, wrote the letter this entry documents: cancelling the original certificate and reissuing a narrower one, effective the same date as the original, 15 September 2022.

What the documents show

The letter states the operative finding in one sentence: the text and 'the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work's written and visual elements' are Kashtanova's protected authorship, while 'the images in the Work that were generated by the Midjourney technology are not the product of human authorship.' The new registration explicitly excludes 'artwork generated by artificial intelligence.' The Office's own AI registration-decisions page lists this letter alongside its March 2023 policy guidance, confirming the same date and case number and situating it as the Office's first detailed application of that guidance to a real registered work. Neither source supports describing the whole work as denied protection; both are explicit the cancellation was partial.

What it is allowed to decide

The letter is a registration record, not a previs artifact, but it defines the class-6 boundary previs desks now work against: raw generative output cannot itself be a registered work, while a human's documented selection, arrangement and editing of that output can be. It establishes Provenance squarely, since the decision turns on tracing which elements a human made versus which a machine generated. It does not touch Dimensional, Optical or Physical authority, and the letter itself notes the Office could not determine, from Kashtanova's account, how much of one image's Photoshop editing was substantive human authorship, an unresolved Auditability gap in the underlying record.

The disclosure label

A previs asset built the way Zarya's images were would carry a label reading: contains undisclosed AI-generated material; class 0-2 inspiration through creative approval only until AI content is separated and disclosed; Provenance not held for the AI-generated elements, Auditability not held for edits of unclear origin; dated 16 September 2026 and properly asserted by the production's copyright counsel before any registration is filed.

• Which specific elements of this artifact were AI-generated, and is that disclosed in any registration or contract covering it?
• Can the human editing steps applied to AI output be reconstructed and evidenced individually?
• Would this artifact's protected status change if it moved from previs into a distributed, monetised asset?

Zarya of the Dawn is not a previs case, but it is the clearest documented instance of the human-authorship rule applied line by line to a mixed AI and human work, which is exactly the mixture a modern previs pipeline produces.