US Copyright Office Rejects Request to Copyright Artwork Created by Artificial Intelligence

Attendees take pictures and interact with the Engineered Arts Ameca humanoid robot with artificial intelligence as it is demonstrated during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Jan. 5, 2022. Patrick Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

The United States Copyright Office’s review board has rejected a second request by Dr. Stephen Thaler, founder of Imagination Engines, to copyright a work of art that was created by an artificial intelligence (AI) system, concluding that it failed to have any “creative input or intervention from a human author.”

The two-dimensional artwork is titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” and was created by an AI, which Thaler, who majored Summa Cum Laude in Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Russian at Westminster College, refers to as the “Creativity Machine.”

Thaler initially filed an application to register a copyright claim in the artwork on Nov. 3, 2018, stating that it was “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine” and that he was “seeking to register this computer-generated work as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine.”

However, a Copyright Office registration specialist in 2019 refused to register the claim on the basis that it “lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.”

Copyright law prevents the unauthorized copying of an original work of authorship “fixed in a tangible medium of expression” such as literary, musical, artistic and other works.

Undeterred, Thaler subsequently requested that the Copyright Office reconsider its initial refusal, claiming that “the human authorship requirement is unconstitutional and unsupported by either statute or case law.”

But the office, after reviewing the artwork again, refused the reconsideration because the artwork “lacked the required human authorship necessary to sustain a claim in copyright,” and because Thaler had “provided no evidence on sufficient creative input or intervention by a human author in the Work.”

The office also stated that it would not “abandon its longstanding interpretation of the Copyright Act, Supreme Court, and lower court judicial precedent that a work meets the legal and formal requirements of copyright protection only if it is created by a human author.”

Last week, a three-person board reviewed the 2019 ruling against Steven Thaler, and said that while it accepts that the artwork was autonomously created by artificial intelligence without any creative contribution from a human actor, copyright law “only protects the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the human mind.”

“The office will not register works ‘produced by a machine or mere mechanical process’ that operates ’without any creative input or intervention from a human author‘ because, under the statute, ’a work must be created by a human being,'” the review board said.

“So Thaler must either provide evidence that the Work is the product of human authorship or convince the Office to depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence. He has done neither,” the board added.

Thaler’s lawyer Ryan Abbott, in a statement to The Register, said he plans to appeal the board’s decision.

“We disagree with the Copyright Office’s decision and plan to appeal,” Abott said. “AI is able to make functionally creative output in the absence of a traditional human author, and protecting AI-Generated Works with copyright is vital to promoting the production of socially valuable content. Providing this protection is required under current legal frameworks.”

The ruling comes after the British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, DeepMind, announced it has taught artificial intelligence how to successfully control superheated matter inside a nuclear fusion reactor.

In September, the United Nations warned that AI systems may pose a “negative, even catastrophic“ threat to human rights and called for AI applications that are not used in compliance with human rights to be banned.