A U.S. federal court ruled that AI-generated art is not eligible for copyright protection due to lack of ‘human involvement’.
In March of this year, the United States Copyright Office made the decision that AI-generated art is not eligible to be copyrighted. The announcement came after a barrage of requests for AI artworks to be copyrights (some of which the office granted early on, only to be revoked later). In June, the office rejected a copyright application by Stephen Thaler. Thaler is a founder of Imagination Engines, a company that deals with artificial neural network technology. Stephen Thaler was applying to get a copyright on one of the AI-generated artworks created by Creativity Machine, an AI tool he built. After the application was rejected, Thaler sued the copyright office.
Hearing the case on Friday was Judge Berly A. Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Washington D.C. In her closing remarks, Howell agreed with the rationale given by the US Copyright Office, which had written: “Thaler must either provide evidence that the Work is the product of human authorship or convince the Office to depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence. He has done neither”.
Judge Howell admitted that the advent of AI-generated art has put many complex questions forward that would challenge established notions about art, including copyright. However, she also affirmed that Thaler’s case was “not nearly so complex” because he had already confessed to having no involvement in creating the artwork.
The case might prove to be a landmark in the ongoing debate around AI-generated art. Earlier court rulings helped establish that AI art does not violate existing copyrights on works created by other artists.