Federal Court Rules Against Copyrighting AI Images

 

In a summary judgment ruling, which basically means the case - Thaler v. Perlmutter - never went to trial, the US District Court for Washington, DC has sided with the US Copyright Office in finding that works created by artificial intelligence are not entitled to copyright protection since they have no human author.  Though I am not an attorney and therefore am not qualified to render a legal opinion, it does seem to me that the decision is not as sweeping as it might first appear.  In the Discussion section of its opinion the Court states:

"Undoubtedly, we are approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put AI in their toolbox to be used in the generation of new visual and other artistic works. The increased attenuation of human creativity from the actual generation of the final work will prompt challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an 'author' of a generated work, the scope of the protection obtained over the resultant image, how to assess the originality of AI-generated works where the systems may have been trained on unknown pre-existing works, how copyright might best be used to incentivize creative works involving AI, and more."

Here the Court seems to be leaving the door open to further discussion and different rulings.  The Plaintiff's argument, at least as I read it, was that the AI imaging app he invented should be considered the "author" of the work in question because it autonomously created said work with no human input.  Whether or not the app did manage this, it is certainly not the manner in which most AI images are generated.  Midjourney and Stable Diffusion most certainly do not autonomously spit out images without direction but rather respond to prompts input in text or image form by human users.  Beyond that, the resulting images generated by those apps are very often edited in other third-party apps such as Photoshop, thus providing further evidence of human involvement in the authoring process.

In other words, I believe the Court's decision in this case was based on very narrow grounds and that subsequent cases in which human involvement is clearly demonstrated may eventually cause the Copyright Office to grant protection in such circumstances to the human creators who directed the generation and editing of the AI images in question.