Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual ⁠art ‌was ineligible for copyright.

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.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    131·
    6 hours ago

    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 property hold 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.)