US judge: Art created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted

I&#x27;m still not sure how I feel about the actual copyright issue, but this was a bad test case. Thaler is trying to have his cake and eat it too; his position is inconsistent (this similar to a previous comment I&#x27;ve made: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34783707">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34783707</a>).<p>He wants credit for creating the AI, and he wants to that AI to be recognized as autonomous and independent by getting the Copyright Office&#x27;s imprimatur. But at the same time he wants to treat the art created by the AI as if it were his, or at least to act on behalf of the AI as if it were <i>not</i> autonomous.

Just spitballing here, because this is very fun to think about.<p>If I reproduce the likeness of Mickey Mouse via an AI, then because an AI made it, is there no defensible claim from Disney to own the copyright? That doesn&#x27;t make intuitive sense, as we &#x27;sort of know&#x27; that Disney owns the likeness.<p>Meanwhile, if I produce one single image that I own via copyright, and feed it to the AI as a prompt and receive a derivative of that image back, per this ruling I would not own the proceeds. It makes some sense-- an AI made it, and further, I did not produce enough instances of this art and the branding behind it for its likeness to be sufficiently &quot;mine&quot;. I don&#x27;t quite own the &quot;mindshare&quot;, so people would not recognize the brand as being anybody&#x27;s, really. So this is different from the way that Mickey Mouse is recognized.<p>But what if a bunch of artists were to band together to create a license of sorts for the use of an AI they altogether build? Suppose they collectively own a portfolio of copyrighted materials, characters, etc, that they use to feed the AI. Wouldn&#x27;t they own the proceeds of the likenesses produced by the AI, as would provide legal justification for their licensing of the AI, and to defend their collective works in the same way that Disney can?

&gt; Giving prompts to AI not enough for human authorship<p>If, as some predict, everything is soon done by people feeding prompts to AI, a great bonus would be if it all became uncopyrightable.<p>Shame neither is really going to happen.

There are rational people in the system still. Good to see.

&gt; For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the &#x27;&#x27;traditional elements of authorship&#x27;&#x27; are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.<p>This seems perhaps easy for the simplest cases, but what if the prompts get much longer? Where&#x27;s the dividing line? Even in music production, the machine can be instructed to generate a semi-random-sequence following some loose constraints, would trying a bunch and selecting one be authorship, why? What if this is repeated for several parts? Again, where&#x27;s the dividing line?

My understanding is the ruling actually says the copyright cannot be granted to the AI. But that might not mean a human cannot claim copyright for AI art.<p>Assuming the AI has a vast number of outputs, many which are uninteresting; a human can select a few outputs as being worthy of being called art or suitable for their purposes.<p>So an AI can create an image, but the process of selection constitutes an editorial process, and a person can the claim copyright for images they generate and choose to distribute.<p>This seems to be somewhat similar to copyrighting a found object as art, or taking a photo of a building and owning the copyright to that. It would not make sense to give the copyright to the camera, which is what this ruling confirms.

&quot;[Art,] Copyrights cannot be assigned to the AI software a human used to create the work&quot; which may or may not be sufficiently transformative, fair use, or apparently derivative

Does this effectively save SAG and such? By not being copyrightable why would studios do that? Or am I missing something?

Fine, I’ll crop it and copyright that instead.

[dupe]