The U.S. Copyright Office has rejected an AI’s request to copyright a work of art. Last week, a three-person panel reviewed a 2019 decision against Steven Thaler, who sought to retain copyright in an image on behalf of an algorithm he called the Creativity Machine. The board found that the image created by Thaler’s artificial intelligence (AI) did not include an element of “human authorship” — a necessary standard, he said, for protection.
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Creativity Machine’s work, shown above, is called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” It’s part of a series that Thaler has described as a “near-death simulation” in which an algorithm reprocesses images to create hallucinatory imagery and a fictional narrative about the afterlife. Crucially, the artificial intelligence (AI) is supposed to do this with extremely minimal human intervention, which has been proven to be inviolable by the Copyright Office.
The board's decision calls "the bond between the human mind and creative expression" a vital element of copyright. "Courts have been consistent in finding that non-human expression is not eligible for copyright protection," the board says.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that any art with an AI element won’t be copyrightable. Thaler stressed that humans aren’t really involved, because his goal was to prove that machine-generated works could be protected. (He has unsuccessfully tried to prove that AIs can be patented for inventions in the U.S..) The board’s reasoning assumes his explanation. So if someone tries to copyright a similar work by claiming it was the product of their own creativity executed by a machine, the result might look different.
Even so, the Copyright Office emphasizes the importance of human intervention in machine-generated works. As artificial intelligence spreads, the limits of this conclusion could be tested for years to come.
Source of information: theverge.com
