Controversy erupted last year over the copyrighting of images generated by AI; and judging from the popularity of apps such as DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, the dispute is not likely to go away anytime soon. Briefly, in August 2022 the US Copyright Office, in response to an appeal of a 2019 ruling rejecting a request submitted by one Steven Thaler who had invented an AI imaging app he named Creativity Machine, handed down a decision holding that AI generated images cannot be copyrighted because no human agency is involved in their creation. Thaler has now taken his case to court and has filed suit with the US District Court for Washington DC in which he basically argues that the Copyright Office's decision should be overturned because it is based on outdated precedents and that copyright law "does not restrict copyright to human-made works, nor does any case law."
The question in my mind is whether the creation of AI generated images does not in fact involve at least some form of human agency since it is obviously a human who initially prompts the AI in order to obtain from it the desired image. In this respect, it should be noted that Thaler in his initial filing listed Creativity Machine as the creator of the work and listed himself only as the claimant. I'm not sure I agree with this since it seems somewhat akin to listing my camera as the creator of my work when I go to register photographs. The bottom line to me is that unless it has achieved singularity - and neither Thaler nor anyone else is going that far - an AI app can no more generate images entirely on its own any more than one of my Nikons can take photos without my first having pressed the shutter button.
In any event, it will be interesting to see how the court case eventually plays out.
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