Supreme Court Rejects AI Art Copyright Appeal

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from computer scientist Stephen Thaler, who sought federal copyright protection for an artwork generated entirely by artificial intelligence. The decision upholds lower court rulings that copyright law requires human authorship, leaving AI-created works ineligible for protection under current U.S. statutes.

Thaler's case centered on an image titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," produced in 2018 by his AI system, known as the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, or DABUS, which he also called the Creativity Machine. Thaler applied for copyright registration that year, listing the AI as the sole author and acknowledging no human involvement in the creative process. The U.S. Copyright Office rejected the application in 2019, stating that works must have a human creator to qualify for protection. Officials emphasized that the Copyright Act, while not explicitly defining "author," implies human authorship through provisions on ownership transfer to heirs and other legal contexts.

Thaler challenged the denial in federal court in Washington, D.C., arguing that the Copyright Office overstepped its...