United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled recently that AI-generated artwork cannot be copyrighted. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the creativity Machine algorithm he created.

Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image "as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity machine", which would have listed the author as the creator and Thaler as the artwork's owner, but he was repeatedly rejected.

After the Office's final rejection, the previous year, Thaler sued it, claiming its denial to be 'arbitrary, capricious ... and not in accordance with the law'. However, Judge Howell did not see it that way. In her decision, Judge Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work that was 'absent any guiding human hand', adding that 'human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright'. 

That has been borne out in past cases cited by the judge, like the one invoking a money selfie. To contrast, Judge Howell noted a case in which a woman compiled a book from the notebooks she'd filled with "words she believed were dictated to her by a supernatural "voice" was worthy of copyright. 

According to the Judge, humanity is "approaching new frontiers in copyright," where artists will use AI as a tool to create new work. In her opinion, this would create "challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary" to copyright AI-created art. She added that AI models are often trained on pre-existing work. 

Stephen Thaler plans to appeal the case. His attorney, Ryan Abbot Brown Neri Smith & Khan LLP, stated that they respectfully disagree with the court's interpretation of the Copyright Act. Bloomberg Law also reported a US Copyright Office statement saying it believed the court's decision was correct.