The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away a case involving a computer scientist from Missouri who was denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator.
Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery.
The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Thaler’s appeal.
My understanding is that he did do the work of creating the AI. This isn’t just someone using ChatGPT.
In this case, it’s not that he’s trying to claim copyright for himself based on coming up with a prompt. He’s spent years applying for patents and copyrights with the AI listed as the creator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS
In other words, it’s not that he as the human operating the “AI” is trying to claim copyright in his own name, it’s that he’s trying to set a precedent where the “AI” can hold copyright in its own name.
He’s trying to pretend that his glorified pile of statistics is sentient, and get it legally recognized as such. 🤡
Exactly.
Most of the comments in this thread are accusing him of trying to take credit for the work of a machine that’s just imitating other work. It’s the FuckAI echo chamber and people who didn’t actually read the article.
In this case, it’s more like he’s claiming to have created a genuinely creative being that deserves rights previously reserved for humans (like copyrights and patents).
It’s a completely different (and IMO, much weirder) story than people are assuming.
He can copyright his software then? That’s like saying that if I create a computer game where the computer also plays, I own the copyright to every single game played by the computer. It’s just dumb. They stole the artwork that it was trained on, so move along thief.
Is there any literature that actually says DABUS exists? Everything I see online is talking about the spectacle of Stephen Thaler claiming it made something - and trying to patent it in several different countries across multiple continents - not how (or if) DABUS exists or functions.
DABUS stands for “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience,” which sounds… suspicious.
Yeah… Checking his website at https://imagination-engines.com/founder.htm, he certainly seems like an “interesting” character.
Well this is quite the rabbit hole.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200219183352/http://initsimage.org/
Eternal life 🥳
AI is legally the same as a printing press. It’s not the guy that designs and runs the press that owns what comes out of it. And what goes into the AI is large volumes of other people’s work, turned into confetti and glued together into something not quite new.
It sounds like he has way too much money and time on his hands.