Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell has ruled that works fully created by artificial intelligence (AI) are not eligible for copyright protection. This decision aligns with the view of the U.S. Copyright Office and comes at a time when there are concerns about whether AI can replace human creators.

This ruling, was a response to the request of Stephen Thaler, CEO of the company Imagination Engines specialized in the study and development of artificial neural networks; who in 2018, requested the credit for his AI called ‘The Creativity Machine’, as the author of a work called A Recent Entrance to Paradise. Despite all Thaler’s efforts, the U.S. Copyright Office denied his proposal, arguing that “the nexus between the human mind and creative expression is a fundamental element in claiming protection.”

In response, Thaler self-proclaimed ownership of the rights to this particular work, reasoning that “the AI works for him”. However, Judge Howell ruled last Thursday, that human authorship is vital under copyright law, citing precedents that established legal protection only for human authors and emphasizing that the reason behind copyright law is to inspire people to create.

Likewise, Howell acknowledged that “humanity is reaching new frontiers in terms of copyright, where artists will use AI as a tool to create new works.” She also detailed that this would raise challenging questions about how much human input is necessary to copyright AI-created artworks, noting that AI models are often trained based on pre-existing works.

Notably, Judge Howell’s ruling is the first to set a limit on the legal protection of AI-generated artwork, which has exploded in popularity with the rise of products such as OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT and DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

In turn, Stephen Thaler is planning to appeal the ruling. In that regard, his lawyer stated, “We respectfully disagree with the court’s interpretation of the Copyright Act.”

As can be seen, there is still no certainty about how things will play out with respect to U.S. copyright law and AI, but court cases have been piling up. For example, earlier this year, Sarah Silverman and two other authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta due to their models’ data collection practices, while another lawsuit filed by programmer and attorney Matthew Butterick alleged that data collection by Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI is comparable to software piracy.