“Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.”

AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge::United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell found that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, putting to rest a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office over its refusal to copyright an AI-generated image.

  • @[email protected]English
    23•1 year ago

    The ruling says the AI itself can’t hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.

    • @dreadedsemiEnglish
      16•1 year ago

      So we’ll hear this case been wrongly cited forever. AI art is often human guided and sometimes involve editing and adjusting. Rarely ever I get something good the first prompt. But I bet people will say lol no copyright.

      • @EmptySlimeEnglish
        6•1 year ago

        Eh I think it would have been worse if this guy won. To my knowledge he was trying to get the AI to be considered the author and then himself to be the owner of the copyright via the “work for hire” clause. As I understand it that would have been catastrophic. It would have likely meant that anything users prompt from these generators would automatically be the copyright of the people running the AI.

        The process you describe could likely still be protected under this ruling since there’s human involvement in the selection of output to use and the altering of it afterward to fit whatever creative vision the person had. If this had won a person doing that it seems would at best be making a derivative work and still not be able to protect it.

        • NatanaelEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          If they had won then copyright trolls like prenda law would have flooded the internet with AI crap and sued everybody that ever make anything resembling any of their outputs, claiming copyright infringement.

          This ruling strongly throttles the ability of copyright trolls to use ML that way because the defendant can much more easily argue they are producing far too many works (and with to many ML-ish obvious errors) to be human made, thus no copyright protection and then you don’t even have to prove you didn’t copy it anymore (but of course you should still try to argue both when you’re the defendant).

          Sidenote - derivative works can be protected separately if the addition itself holds creative height. Your copyright only covers your own addition.

          • @EmptySlimeEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            Yeah you’re right about the derivative works thing. I glossed over it mostly because that seemed pretty much useless to me in the realm of visual art. But I suppose there are a few scenarios where that ability to get protection is meaningful.

            Either way, I can’t see a way that this would have been good for anyone if this guy got what he wanted.

    • @legostepperEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      Please correct me if I am misunderstanding something here, then: Doesn’t the ruling here state that the human using the AI tried to apply for a copyright listing himself as the copyright holder and the AI as the author that worked on a commission for him, which is what was denied? Or are you saying that the reason it was denied is because he listed the AI as the author?

      • @[email protected]English
        11•1 year ago

        Here’s the relevant part from a different article:

        Thaler, who listed himself as the owner of the copyright under the work-for-hire doctrine, sued in a lawsuit contesting the denial and the office’s human authorship requirement. He argued that AI should be acknowledged “as an author where it otherwise meets authorship criteria,” with any ownership vesting in the machine’s owner. His complaint argued that the office’s refusal was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of agency actions. The question presented in the suit was whether a work generated solely by a computer falls under the protection of copyright law.