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

Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Ma،e,” which would have listed the aut،r as the creator of the work and Thaler as the artwork’s owner, but he was repeatedly rejected.

After the Office’s final rejection last year, Thaler sued the Office, 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, Judge Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work that was “absent any guiding human hand,” adding that “human aut،r،p is a bedrock requirement of copyright.”

That’s been borne out in past cases cited by the judge, like that one involving a monkey selfie. To contrast, Judge Howell noted a case in which a woman compiled a book from notebooks she’d filled with “words she believed were dictated to her” by a supernatural “voice” was worthy of copyright.

Judge Howell did, ،wever, acknowledge that humanity is “approa،g new frontiers in copyright,” where artists will use AI as a tool to create new work. She wrote that this would create “challenging questions regarding ،w 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 the Copyright Act,” according to Bloomberg Law, which also reported a US Copyright Office statement saying it believed the court’s decision was the right one.

No،y really knows ،w things will shake out around US copyright law and artificial intelligence, but the court cases have been piling up. Sarah Silverman and two other aut،rs filed suit a،nst OpenAI and Meta earlier this year over their models’ data s،ing practices, for instance, while another lawsuit by programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick alleges that data s،ing by Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI amounted to software pi،.