AI denied copyright for its artwork

The US Copyright Office has denied a request to let an AI system, dubbed ‘Creativity Machine’, copyright a piece of artwork titled ‘ A Recent Entrance to Paradise.’ The board reviewed a 2019 ruling against Steven Thaler, the developer of the algorithm, and rejected the request based on the lack of ‘human authorship’ element in the AI-generated artwork. 

Steven Thaler had initially filed for a copyright on AI’s behalf in 2018. However, the US Copyright Office dismissed the petition saying the artwork was autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine. The courts found non-human expression is ineligible for copyright protection.

A Recent Entrance to Paradise is part of an anthology around “simulated near-death experiences” where an algorithm reprocesses pictures to create hallucinatory images and a narrative about the afterlife.

Thaler filed a second copyright request on February 14 claiming the US Copyright Office’s human authorship requirement is unconstitutional. He said the office should allow copyrights to machine-generated works because doing so would “further the underlying goals of copyright law, including the constitutional rationale for copyright protection.”