Artificial intelligence will not be able to claim authorship of a work of art, say US lawmakers.
The ax fell at the end of last week: in the United States, the US Copyright Office (American office of copyright) rejected a request to attribute the authorship of a work to an artificial intelligence. Remember in 2019, Steven Thaler had filed an image in the name of his Creativity Machine algorithm, a first time rejected, the request was again dismissed. The counsel in charge of the case now believes that the work created by Thaler’s AI does not include no element of “human paternity”essential for legal protection in the context of copyright.
Are humans the only ones who can create?
baptized A Recent Entrance to Paradise, the work created by Thaler’s AI has all the elements of a real one. Designed to depict a near-death experience, it uses algorithms to recreate images bordering on abstract, all with almost no human intervention. It is on this precise point that the experts based their decision. For them, “the link between the human spirit and creative expression” is a requirement sine qua non to copyright. Without human author, no real paternity.
However, the experts have themselves recognized that the subject is delicate: American copyright law does not currently define no specific rules for non-human performers. However, in previous cases, the law had always been skeptical of the idea of attributing the authorship of a work to an animal or a divine entity. In 2018, the monkey’s selfie was particularly talked about, after a court concluded that the primate could not sue for copyright infringement. One evidence estimates the counsel in charge of the Creative Machine file, that “non-human expression is not eligible for copyright protection”.
Could AI (one day) be proprietary?
With his AI artist, Thaler is not at his first attempt. Last September, he also tried to attribute the paternity of a patent to his AI. Once again, the action had been dismissed by the experts.
