Claiming Creativity: Colleen Hoffenbacker Featured in Lori Mazor’s Guide to Copyright and AI
Claiming Creativity: A Guide to Artists Seeking Copyright with AISeptember 25, 2024
Written by Lori Mazor | Author of TEMPERATURE: Creativity in the Age of AI
Featured Artist | Colleen Hoffenbacker
INTRODUCTION
“We now also have another interesting case study in the work of Colleen Hoffenbacker, the first painter to receive copyright for her work that incorporates generative AI into her creative process.”
Copyright and AI: A Shifting Landscape
On March 16, 2023, the U.S. Copyright Office issued formal guidelines clarifying that copyright protection applies only to works with human authorship. While fully AI-generated works remain ineligible, hybrid works may qualify if a human contributes significant original authorship — such as creatively arranging AI-generated elements.
This evolving framework was shaped by artists like Kristina Kashtanova, whose storytelling and image selection helped establish precedent. In October 2023, Colleen Hoffenbacker became the first painter to receive copyright for hand-painted works integrating generative AI — a landmark moment for artists working at the intersection of tradition and technology.
Colleen Hoffenbacker: Artistic Integration
Hoffenbacker’s work merges classical oil painting with generative tools, creating luminous floral compositions that explore the tension between organic form and digital abstraction. Her hybrid process treats AI not as a substitute, but as a collaborator — a tool for expanding visual nuance, symbolic depth, and layered transformation.
Her copyright approval affirms the role of human authorship in AI-assisted art, offering a model for artists seeking protection while embracing new technologies.
About the Artist
Colleen Hoffenbacker is a painter whose work channels the atmosphere of Dutch floral still lifes, reinterpreted through contemporary digital abstraction. Her hybrid method treats pigment and pixel as co-authors — each contributing to the final resonance of the work. She engages large language models as poetic catalysts, using them to seed visual ideas and botanical distortions that unfold into contemplative terrains. Drawing from Renaissance garden motifs and symbolic layering, her paintings oscillate between serenity and strange surrealness — intimate visual worlds where memory, mutation, and metaphor converge.
