A U.S. federal appeals court today ruled that art created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be granted copyright protection.

A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was unanimous in saying there must be initial human authorship to be granted a copyright. The ruling upheld a decision by the U.S. Copyright Office, which denied computer scientist Stephen Thaler a copyright for the image, “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” (pictured).

In 2018, Thaler attempted to register a copyright, stating that the author of the work was “Creativity Machine,” a generative AI software that he himself had created. He left a note with the Copyright Office explaining that the work “was autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine” and that he was “seeking to register this computer-generated work as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine.”

Almost a year later, Thaler received a letter from a Copyright Office registration specialist who refused to register the claim, stating that the work “lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.” Thaler argued that the human authorship requirement was “unconstitutional and unsupported by either statute or case law.” The office doubled down on its contention after a re-evaluation, and Thaler sued in 2022.

Using AI in the process of creating art is fine in terms of seeking copyright, but the machine cannot be the sole author. The panel explained, “The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being — the person who created, operated, or use artificial intelligence — and not the machine itself.”

Thaler argued that the rules were outdated, arguing over the meaning of the word “author.” He told the court, “Nothing in the Copyright Act requires human creation.” He believed he was still the father of the work, telling NBC that the machine he had created “learned cumulatively, and I was the parent, and I was basically tutoring it.”

Ryan Abbott, Thaler’s lawyer, called the ruling the “first publicized rejection” by the Copyright Office of a work created by AI. He believes this creates confusion since it isn’t clear when art created by or partly by AI will be rebuffed by the office.

As it stands, anything a person creates with AI can’t be copyrighted, so it can be used freely by anyone else. For Thaler, this is a great pity. He told CNBC, “A machine creates a beautiful picture? There should be some protection for it.”

Image: Wiki