United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled that artificial intelligence-generated artworks cannot be copyrighted. The judge was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after Stephen Thaler denied copyright to an AI-generated image created with the Creativity Machine algorithm.
Thaler has made multiple attempts to copyright the image as a work for lease to the owner of the Creativity Machine. Thus, he showed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the owner of the work, but was repeatedly rejected.
After the office’s final refusal last year, Thaler filed suit, claiming the refusal was “arbitrary and unlawful”, but Judge Howell didn’t see it that way. Judge Howell said in his decision that copyright was never granted to a work “without a guiding human hand.”
This situation has also emerged in previous cases. In response, Judge Howell stated that the case, in which a woman compiled a book from notebooks filled with words she believed were dictated to her by a supernatural voice, was copyrighted.
But Judge Howell acknowledged that humanity is “approaching new frontiers in copyright” and that artists will use artificial intelligence as a tool to create new works. This, he said, would create “difficult problems with how much human input is required” to copyright AI-generated art, noting that AI models are often trained on pre-existing work.
Stephen Thaler plans to appeal the case. “We respectfully disagree with the court’s interpretation of the Copyright Act,” Thaler’s lawyer told Bloomberg Law, citing a statement from the US Copyright Office stating that he believes the court’s decision was correct.
No one knows how things will turn out when it comes to US copyright law and artificial intelligence, but lawsuits are on the rise. For example, Sarah Silverman and two other authors filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta earlier this year, while another lawsuit filed by programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick alleges that data collection by Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI amounts to software piracy.
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