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.
Ah, this is Thaler v. Perlmutter.
I seem to have picked up a reputation in these parts as being “pro-AI”, so I’m not sure how my view will be interpreted, but Thaler is basically a loon. This case is not really over whether AI art can be copyrighted. It’s about whether AI itself can hold copyright. ie, Thaler isn’t arguing “I hold the copyright to this piece of art.” He’s arguing “my AI holds the copyright to this piece of art.”
Since AI is not a legal person - it’s neither human nor a corporation - this is basically an open and shut case. There is no entity capable of holding copyright in this case.
Since Thaler himself is explicitly disclaiming that he holds the copyright, that means the work in question has no copyright holder. Which puts it into the public domain. This specific piece in this specific circumstance, not all AI-generated pieces.
It’s a commonly misinterpreted case.
That seems like an unacceptable loophole. I shouldn’t be able to create derivative media and have it be legal and public domain. The unlicensed training itself is a rights violation, and and media produced from it should equally be a violation.
ITT: people misunderstanding the issue being ruled on (or rather, not being ruled on by letting the lower court decision stand).
If he had applied for copyright over the image generated using “AI” as a tool, it (edit: probably2) would have been granted, with him listed as the human author. But that’s not what he wanted. He’s apparently Hell-bent on trying to get the work registered in the name of the “AI” system itself as the author, to so that he can claim that the government recognized the “AI” as a sentient being that can
own propertyhold a copyright1 on its own behalf.This is not the broad ruling against AI slop copyrightability that people think it is. It’s a ruling against “AI” personhood.
(1 Copyright isn’t a property right, BTW)
(2 He explicitly claimed he gave no creative contribution and that the work was created completely autonomously, and the court’s ruling included excluding that from being copyrightable. It is if he hadn’t done that – if he had claimed he had directed it via prompts or whatever – that I think they would have granted the copyright to him as the human author. It turns out that he changed his mind and did make that argument on appeal, but the court explicitly ignored and did not rule on it because it wasn’t raised in his initial complaint.)
This is wildly wrong in so many ways.
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Copyright is an intellectual property right, firmly grounded in property law doctrine–you are probably thinking of trademark, which is rooted in consumer protection law, or likeness rights which have their roots in privacy law.
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The copyrightability of AI generated content gets to where the nexus of creativity happens. Effectively, image generators (modern ones–i actually don’t think DABUS is a diffusion model) are operated like a commissioned work. The user gives detailed instruction on par with what you might see in a commissioned work, and the creative event occurs when the “contractor” interprets that into the work. The copyright may be assigned or it may be licensed, in any case, the initial copyright holder is the contractor–or in our case, the model. Now, it is well established that only humans can have sua sponte property rights, including intellectual property right. Those can be assigned, licensed, etc., but they must first inher to a human and so an AI system literally has no copyright to assign, were it even able to engage in a contractual agreement to transfer said rights. As a result, no, there is no copyright in AI generated content and without a significant change in law there is unlikely to ever be any.
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If he had sought to register the copyright under purely his own name, he would have been committing a fraud on the copyright office. This wasn’t explicitly established at the time of his suit, but it has been very explicitly the case now for over a year. When registering copyright you must declare any AI-generated components. Failure, or refusal, to do so constitutes a fraud on the office and such fraud is sanctionable up to revoking the copyright in the work in its entirety, even if the AI-gen component was only partial. This is really important to note with software copyright and the kind of litigation we’re likely to see wrt piracy in the future (i.e., defendant claims plaintiffs did not declare vibe coded components and thus committed a fraud on the office and should be sanctioned with full revocation of the right as a signal to other would-be claimants).
Copyright is an intellectual property right, firmly grounded in property law doctrine–you are probably thinking of trademark, which is rooted in consumer protection law, or likeness rights which have their roots in privacy law.
First of all, “Intellectual property[sic]” is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word “property” in that term is biased loaded language.
Second, copyright cannot be a property right because ideas cannot be property. In fact, ideas are essentially the opposite of property, as Thomas Jefferson once pointed out:
it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me.
What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It’s a license, not a right.
- A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right. In contrast, a copyright is an artificial construct invented as a power of Congress, and granted with the express purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” not because the creator of the work somehow deserved it.
- Ownership of a piece of property exists in perpetuity until it is sold and cannot be taken from the owner without “just compensation.” In contrast, copyright exists explicitly “for limited times” and then it expires and the work reverts to the Public Domain.
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Seems reasonable. This case is substantially similar to previous cases that were taken up by the supreme court - in particular a finding over whether a selfie generated by a monkey was copyrightable - and the lower court decisions are in line with the previous precedents set by the supreme court. So they’re effectively just saying “Our opinion hasn’t changed.”
How can you copyright something you didn’t make?
In the same way Disney owns the copyright of what their workers made.
With enough money, I guarantee anybody could have their copyright stolen from right under their noses.
The fuck you talking about? You can’t copyright the output of an AI.
That’s not what this case was about.
Law or something
If you want to call yourself an artist, do the work yourself, Stephen.
You limpdick, no talent ass clown.
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.
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.
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.
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 🥳
It sounds like he has way too much money and time on his hands.
This is not remotely what the case was actually about.
Supreme Court Tells AI Enthusiast To Get Wrecked
Why would anyone think that they could copyright something that they didn’t make?
Maybe you can trademark the prompt or whatever, but in the end of the day, you didn’t make shit, so why would you own the copyright?
In the immortal words of everyone ever, pick up a fucking pencil.
That’s not what this case was about. Thaler wasn’t trying to copyright the image himself.
Gonna be fun times in courts as anyone can claim something was generated by AI even if an artist claims they created it.
I wonder if this will end up limited to art or can be expanded to other copyrighted works.
It’s not generally difficult at all for an artist to prove that they are the original creator of a certain piece. My photography for example is available for anyone for free and in high resolution but I’m the only one with the full resolution pictures and RAW files. So much data is lost when a picture is compressed into .jpg format.
Seems impossible to me but I’m not an artist - I write code as a hobby and see no way to definitively prove I wrote any code that an AI could also produce. Is there any aspect of art creation that an AI cannot replicate?
You don’t have drafts or anything that can show the history of development? I write as a hobby and I have tons of drafts that show the development of my stories over time. If somebody tried to claim my works were AI, I could easily dispute that.
What if the drafts were created using AI too?
Code is often in a source control system of some sort, which tracks changes to the code (who changed it, when it was changed, and a description of what was changed). It’s similar to having a lot of drafts.
I don’t think that could prove that a human wrote it, though.
I think in cases like this, the author could prove they created the code/story/art/whatever by having a deep understanding of the material. That’s how Michael Jackson defended against lawsuits saying he copied someone else’s song - he described his songwriting process and could hum/beatbox every instrument in the track.
How you gonna fake years worth of hand written notes, dated drafts, and revision history?
I don’t know how to write code myself, but intuitively it seems a little different in this case.
When it comes to photography, I can show the original unedited RAW file with full resolution and full metadata and everyone else just has a lower-resolution JPG. The same thing applies to most digital art.
Can you, though? What if you didn’t save it?
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.
all digital art is not copyrightable as it was created with software that did most of the work
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.
