AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge

Thaler had attempted several times to copyright the image “as a work for hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” which would have listed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the owner of the artwork, but was repeatedly rejected. .

After the Bureau’s final denial last year, Thaler sued the Bureau, claiming its denial was “arbitrary, capricious…and not in accordance with the law,” but Judge Howell didn’t see it that way. In her decision, Justice Howell wrote that copyright was never granted to works that “lacked a human hand to guide them,” adding that “human authorship is a basic requirement of copyright.”

That has been confirmed in previous cases cited by the judge, such as that of a monkey selfie. In contrast, Justice Howell noted a case in which a woman compiled a book from notebooks that she had filled with “words that she believed were dictated to her” by a supernatural “voice” that deserved copyright.

However, Justice Howell acknowledged that humanity is “approaching new frontiers in copyright”, where artists will use AI as a tool to create new works. He wrote that this would raise “challenging questions about how much human input is necessary” to copyright AI-created art, noting that AI models are often trained on pre-existing work.

Stephen Thaler plans to appeal the case. His attorney, Ryan Abbot of Brown Neri Smith & Khan LLP, said: “We respectfully disagree with the court’s interpretation of copyright law.” according bloomberg law, which also reported a statement from the US Copyright Office saying it believed the court’s decision was correct.

No one really knows how things will play out around US copyright law and artificial intelligence, but the court cases have been piling up. Sarah Silverman and two other authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta earlier this year over their model data mining practices, for example, while another lawsuit by programmer and attorney Matthew Butterick alleges that data mining by from Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI amounts to software piracy. .