US District Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled last Friday that AI-generated artwork cannot be copyrighted.
Since copyright protection is granted only to artwork created by humans, the ruling found that artwork created using AI cannot be copyrighted. The decision came from the US Copyright Office, which last Friday rejected an attempt by Stephen Thaler, creator of the Creativity Machine algorithm, to register copyright for artwork generated by his AI. Thaler tried various approaches to describe the images, but his copyright applications were repeatedly rejected.
After his final rejection the previous year, Thaler sued the Copyright Office, arguing that the decision was legally unsound. Judge Howell, however, reaffirmed that “copyright has never been granted to artwork produced without human involvement, and human authorship is a fundamental requirement for copyright.”
An AI-generated image that cannot be copyrighted: DEVRIMB
Still, the judge acknowledged that artists are increasingly using AI to help create artistic works, and that as a result, humanity may need to adapt copyright law to recognize AI-generated artwork in some form. The ruling also noted that since AI models are trained on existing works, whether an AI-created work can be copyrighted may depend on how much human input went into creating it.
The tension between artificial intelligence and copyright law extends further, as some AI companies have faced lawsuits for using copyrighted artwork to train their AI models — with the worst-case outcome potentially requiring them to destroy their language models.
In March, the Copyright Office also issued guidance stating that while most AI-generated artwork cannot be copyrighted, certain AI-assisted works may be protected to some extent — specifically, artwork where a human “selects or arranges” AI-assisted output, and where sufficient human effort and creative input went into the final work, may be eligible for copyright.