Autonomous graphics generated by artificial intelligence cannot be protected by copyright, says the judge

Federal judge ruled that works of art created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted because “human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim.”

The decision, handed down by Justice Beryl Howell, follows the efforts of computer scientist Stephen Thaler to obtain the copyright to an image he believed was created by an artificial intelligence model identified as the Creativity Machine. Thaler claimed that as the owner of Creativity Machine he was entitled to the copyright. The Copyright Office rejected the request on the grounds that human work was required to secure copyright, prompting Thaler to file a lawsuit.

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Howell ultimately upheld the Copyright Office’s decision, citing long-standing precedent regarding human authorship. “The act of human creation—and how best to encourage human individuals to engage in that creation and thereby promote science and the applied arts—has therefore been central to American copyright law from its very beginning,” Howell wrote. “Non-human actors do not need the incentive of the promise of exclusive rights under U.S. law, so copyright law was not designed to reach them.”

In a statement shared Rolling Stone Thaller’s lawyer, Ryan Abbott, said: ‘We disagree with the District Court’s decision. In our view, copyright law clearly states that the beneficiary of the right is the American public and derives social benefits from encouraging the creation and distribution of works, regardless of the manner in which the works are made. We plan to file an appeal.”

Howell’s opinion was indeed a nod to the drastically changing copyright landscape in the era of artificial intelligence. She even accepted Thaller’s argument about the malleability of copyright law in the context of technological change. Howell, however, again noted that human authorship remains key, distinguishing works created by artificial intelligence from, say, photographs created by machines.

“But at the heart of this adaptability is a consistent understanding that human creativity is paramount sine qua non at the core of copyright, even when human creativity is channeled through new tools or into new media,” she wrote, adding: “Copyright law, however, has never gone so far as to protect works resulting from new forms of technology operating without any human guidance , as the plaintiff insists at this point. Human authorship is a fundamental requirement of copyright law.”

Howell also noted that “we are approaching new frontiers of copyright as artists incorporate artificial intelligence into their toolkit so that it can be used to create new visual and other artistic works.” This, she added, “will raise difficult questions about how much human input is needed to qualify a user of an AI system as the ‘author’ of a generated work, the scope of protection obtained over the resulting image, how to assess the originality of AI-generated works for which the systems may have been trained on unknown, pre-existing works on how to best use copyright to encourage AI-enabled creative works and more.”

But, Howell said, Thaller’s case “wasn’t that complicated.” This was because, as it turned out, his case largely came down not to big questions about technology, art and copyright, but to clerical semantics.

In his original application to the Copyright Office, Thaller stated that the artwork was “autonomously created by a machine” and that his copyright claim was based on his “possession of the machine”. Howell noted that Thaller later tried to suggest that he “played a controlling role in the creation of the work,” arguing that he “provided instructions and directed his AI to create the work” and that the AI ​​”acts solely under (his) direction.”

While such arguments could potentially lead to a more complex case and decision, Thaller pointed out that “these statements are directly inconsistent with the administrative record,” implying Thaller’s own copyright conclusion. Moreover, as Howell noted, Thaller “never attempted to amend” his copyright claim on this basis.

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