AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted after Supreme Court declines review

hermannj314

Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and write those bytes to disk and you are the author of a perpetual stream of data. Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and describe those bytes in words and you are no longer the author a perpetual stream of data. In a world where slapping an overlay of someone looking incredulous over someone else's video is considered "adding substantive commentary" by every major video sharing platform, I don't even try to understand copyright law at all. It is way over my head.

stavros

AI-generated art can't be copyrighted, fine. But what does this mean for the huge spectrum between "I did some fingerpainting" and "Nano Banana spat out this painting"? What if I use Photoshop and context-aware fill a cloud in? Is that AI-generated or human-generated art?

OutOfHere

Why is "AI-generated code" not also "AI art"? What makes "AI-generated code" copyrightable then? Nothing! Being that everything will be made using AI in the future, the courts just suicided the copyright system! Or where exactly does art end and code begin? The same applies to documents and designs. If I take your AI-generated code file and write it as an artsy-looking image, do I get to deny you copyright?

dathinab

Long standing well known issue, no copyright (in many countries) and (in some countries) non patentable, too. Through this isn't true for AI assisted art. And the gray area is very wide and very legal unclear (gray area between human art with AI assistance (e.g. "AI"/transformer architecture based line smoothing or color calibration) and AI art with human touch added to it).

foltik

> Thaler’s request to copyright an image, called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, on behalf of an algorithm he created. The courts just take issue with him naming his AI system as the sole author and himself as the copyright owner. If you just copyright it normally with yourself as the author, seems like it would be fine to copyright whatever bs you want?

throwaway85825

Can you use "I believed this was AI generated" as a copyright defense now?

RavlaAlvar

I wonder by that logic, can AI generated art violate other’s copyright?

ModernMech

Exactly 0 of the artists I know “generate” their images outright - AI generations are always part of a pretty typical artistic workflow. The way I think of it is this: typical art creation starts from a blank canvas and the artist adds layer upon layer of what you want. Eventually something coherent (to the artist at least) pops out. AI art starts from a canvas which is filled, and the artist changes the filled canvas to meet their perspective. It’s like those projects where people take a vintage painting and add Pokémon to it. Mostly the people I see using AI art are traditional artists who view it as a new medium in their process, very few “generate” and call it a day.

delichon

> The outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts. https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html I think that this means that a single prompt alone does not convey copyright. But if you had spent many hours before the prompt fine tuning the model, or much effort after the prompt shaping the result with further prompts, it could be. I disagree with this approach because I've seen how much creativity and effort some people can put into slowly evolving a single elaborate prompt. AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece.

thedangler

does that mean movies with AI generated art can be repackaged and sold by anyone?

kirykl

Add a single pixel manually

simonw

I feel like the more important question here is whether AI-generated code can be copyrighted. Companies responsible for several billion dollars worth of software written over the past ~36 months would really like to know the answer to that one.

owenpalmer

If we're going to allow AI companies to use copyrighted material in training, the absolute least we could do is prevent copyright of the outputted content.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223022

SpicyLemonZest

I don't think this article's analysis is accurate. The "human authorship" in Thaler's case wasn't about the abstract concept of human authorship; he literally did not put his name in the "authorship" field of the form, and insisted on review that his name doesn't belong there because he's not the author. So the ruling doesn't necessarily endorse the Copyright Office's analysis referenced in the article ( https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... ), and I think that analysis is just not correct. They describe a creator of AI art as simply "re-rolling the dice" when they try different prompts, but that's not correct, clever prompt engineering definitely allows you to "constrain or channel the program’s processing of the sourcenmaterial" and "alter[] the degree of control over the process"

Ajakks

Every time I open my phone and find myself back on this comment thread, I find new nonsense. If you are "anti-AI" and you’ve never changed or evolved your argument - I suggest a pause, a step back and a substantial revaluation. Some of these comments in this thread - have me wondering if they have actually interacted with an AI. You are not correct on "principle" - this isn't a moral thing, if you have taken an ethical position - its bc you dont have a functional understanding of how to make it function. If you were functionally interacting with AI, you would have a more substantial postion, with actual criticism that would have value. I'm reading a lot of sloppy- written by people, about AI slop.

keeda

Unpopular opinion: AI is just a new medium of art. It's like the advent of photography after painting. It was dismissed as an art form for a long time: - https://antique-photography.com/when-was-photography-conside... - https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an... (from 2018!) Similarly, right now AI art is widely dismissed as "just prompts." But having tried many times to generate images via prompts, it's very hard to get what's in my head to show up in the result. I ended up spending much more time editing the images than creating them... but, I could do that with much simpler tools, without learning advanced tools like Photoshop. In a couple of instances though, the AI has blown me away by generating something that better captured what I wanted to convey! I suspect the trick is in beng very detailed in where I was coming from and the emotions I wanted to engender. I predict appreciation of AI art will shift to overall imagination, taste, and appreciation of technical nuances noticeable only to those "skilled in the art", such as prompting techniques and the quirks of the model used. I even suspect there will be genres of AI art using weaker models (kind of like photographs with Polaroid cameras.)

tracker1

What happens with software now?

dragonwriter

Note that this has very little bearing on the real interesting questions of whether and when human authors can copyright works where AI was used as a tool; this case is specifically about attempts by Thaler to apply for copyright listing an AI as author of a work for which he explicitly denied any human authorship.

joquarky

The main reason this is getting really complicated is because copyright inherently goes against the flow of how nature works. It's irrational at its core. It requires increasing amounts of maintenance to sustain. It doesn't even promote the progress of science and useful arts anymore, and in fact when mixed with our current form of capitalism, it hinders it.