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.
I wonder what percentage has to be created by a human to be eligible for copyright. For example, if someone generates an AI image and then changes a few pixels, is that human-created? What if they over-paint 30% of the image? 50%? What if someone creates something in Photoshop from scratch, but they use Photoshop’s in-built AI driven tools to enhance it?
Either anything that uses AI in any capacity is uncopyrightable, or there has to be a line somewhere, so… Where is it?
If the final product isnt the raw output from my understanding. The current laws are there mostly to stop the whole thing from turning into copyright mills.
Instead of considering if the whole work is now copyrightable, consider parts of the work made by generative AI are not and the human parts are (if they reach the minimum line of creativity). Sure there’s other helpful tools that do some of the work but unless they’re substituting the creativity then they need not apply.
It goes both ways. If the artist has to do 30% of the work, what about collages? Do we have to count the square millimeters of each cut and paste item to ensure they are above the threshold?
What if it’s a collage of AI generated art pieces? Technically the artist did the same amount of work as someone making a collage of human-created things.
Easiest should be all digital art is not copyrightable as it was created with software that did most of the work and the “artist” could not have produced it without that software. But that would invalidate almost all Hollywood movies from the last 30 years lol.
I mean, you could make the same argument for paint brushes for traditional art. Or pencils. There’s a really big difference between someone using a tablet and an Undo hotkey to draw something digitally vs. someone making something with AI. One of those clearly requires a ton of skill; one does not require any.
I said easiest, I didn’t say that’s the way it should be.
This is a really weird idea of what making digital art actually involves. Drawing on a screen with a stylus isn’t somehow not art made by a person because it’s digital instead of on paper. Even if you use a mouse to make pixel art or modify 3D models, that’s still human artistic decision making involved. Non-AI digital artwork doesn’t involve just pressing a button and getting art.