The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away a case involving a computer scientist from Missouri who was denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator.
Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery.
The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Thaler’s appeal.
It’s not generally difficult at all for an artist to prove that they are the original creator of a certain piece. My photography for example is available for anyone for free and in high resolution but I’m the only one with the full resolution pictures and RAW files. So much data is lost when a picture is compressed into .jpg format.
Seems impossible to me but I’m not an artist - I write code as a hobby and see no way to definitively prove I wrote any code that an AI could also produce. Is there any aspect of art creation that an AI cannot replicate?
I don’t know how to write code myself, but intuitively it seems a little different in this case.
When it comes to photography, I can show the original unedited RAW file with full resolution and full metadata and everyone else just has a lower-resolution JPG. The same thing applies to most digital art.
Can you, though? What if you didn’t save it?
This is how you get a reputation as being a troll, FaceDeer
Says the guy who follows me around and dredges through months of my Reddit history looking for vaguely relevant comments to try to play “gotcha” with.
You could just block me, you know.
Oh, you’ve gotten the XLE special treatment as well. Welcome to the club.
I was wondering what I’d done to warrant this attention. It’s kind of puzzling - I’m not keeping my Reddit account “secret”, I link to it and mention my interests in my profile bio. But XLE has been acting like he was a sleuth cracking a case.
You don’t have drafts or anything that can show the history of development? I write as a hobby and I have tons of drafts that show the development of my stories over time. If somebody tried to claim my works were AI, I could easily dispute that.
What if the drafts were created using AI too?
Code is often in a source control system of some sort, which tracks changes to the code (who changed it, when it was changed, and a description of what was changed). It’s similar to having a lot of drafts.
I don’t think that could prove that a human wrote it, though.
I think in cases like this, the author could prove they created the code/story/art/whatever by having a deep understanding of the material. That’s how Michael Jackson defended against lawsuits saying he copied someone else’s song - he described his songwriting process and could hum/beatbox every instrument in the track.
How you gonna fake years worth of hand written notes, dated drafts, and revision history?
If the training data for “drafts” and “hand written notes” exists then one can train an AI on it, and generate it the same way. Do some artists share such things?
Idk what you’re talking about. How’s an AI going to fake handwritten? Not handwriting, handwritten. An AI can’t write in graphite and ink.
I’m not an artist, I just write silly game systems. I took for granted that a handwritting machine was an easy assumption. I doubt AI companies even have the insentive to try and create physical handwriting/sketching but I see no reason to believe it’s impossible.
Here appears to be a handwriting printer “holding” a pen. People can probably tell this was not human written but I just imagine a machine that can replicate human hand motion better - like a robot hand on a robot arm.