A legal battle over AI copyright that has gone on for more than a decade may have reached its end, with the US Supreme Court declining to hear a case involving AI-generated visual art.
The subject of the case is an image created by computer scientist Stephen Thaler in 2012, titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," using an AI tool he also created, DABUS. Thaler applied for a copyright for his visual art in 2018, but the application was eventually rejected by the US Copyright Office on the grounds that creative works must have human authorship to be eligible. A district court later upheld the decision.
Thaler's legal team argued that because he created the system that generated the artwork, he is, in effect, its author.
"Other countries, like China and the United Kingdom, already permit copyright protection for AI-generated works. But the Copyright Office's reliance on its own nonstatutory requirements have led to an improper cabining of United States copyright law in contradiction of this Court's precedent that copyright law should accommodate technological progress," the filing alleges.
"The Copyright Office believes the Supreme Court reached the correct result, confirming that human authorship is required for copyright," a spokesperson said.
The question of who owns AI-generated artwork and what AI work violates existing copyrights is an important one as AI companies develop increasingly sophisticated image generation tools such as Nano Banana 2 from Google and video generation tools such as OpenAI's Sora 2.
While these kinds of tools are making it harder to distinguish between human-generated art and material created by or with AI, they're also enabling a flood of AI slop across the internet. Tech companies and social media networks have been struggling to find ways to deal with the influx, including using metadata to label AI content and creating better filters to keep unwanted slop away from their users.
This AI-designed image was created in 2012 using a tool called DABUS, developed by computer scientist Stephen Thaler. The artwork is the subject of a copyright battle that the US Supreme Court declined to hear. Stephen Thaler/DABUS
A 'philosophical milestone' for AI and copyrights
In an email to CNET, Thaler said that although the court declined to hear his appeal, "I see this moment as a philosophical milestone rather than a defeat."
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