A US Court has declared that creative works created entirely by AI without human interference cannot be copyrighted.
The appeals court in Washington DC decided this week that an image created by an AI system called DABUS, invented by AI computer scientist Stephen Thaler, could not be copyrighted.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the US Copyright Office decided that only artwork created by humans can be copyrighted.
Thaler originally applied for copyright in 2018 for work titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise (pictured above) – a piece of art made with his AI system – but this appeal was denied on the grounds it wasn’t created by a human.
The ruling was then upheld this week for the same reasons, despite Thaler describing his AI system as “sentient” and “self-determining”.
The court highlighted that in similar cases, AI works have been granted copyright because work had been created by a human author using AI. In this case, Thaler’s artwork was created independently, from his platform the ‘Creativity Machine’.
Thaler and his attorney said they “strongly disagree” with the ruling.
