Artificial Intelligence can’t own artwork: US Copyright Office

In a significant ruling, the US Copyright Office has rejected a request to let an artificial intelligence (AI) system called ‘Creativity Machine’ copyright a piece of art it created.

Its developer Steven Thaler tried to copyright the artwork on behalf of the algorithm he dubbed as Creativity Machine, as per a report. The decision calls “the nexus between the human mind and creative expression” a vital element of copyright.

Now, a three-person board at the US Copyright Office has found that Thaler’s AI-created image didn’t include an element of ‘human authorship”. Thaler described the AI artwork as a “simulated near-death experience” in which an algorithm reprocesses pictures to create hallucinatory images and a fictional narrative about the afterlife, the report said late on Monday.

AI has recently become a big part of artists’ repertoires, including the digital artwork that is being sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, “the courts have been consistent in finding that non-human expression is ineligible for copyright protection,” the board said in its ruling. In a significant ruling, a federal judge in San Francisco in 2016 declined to give a macaque monkey the right to his famous selfie in Indonesia in 2011.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals animal rights organisation filed a lawsuit asking a US federal court here to declare Naruto - a then six-year-old male, free-living crested macaque - the author and owner of the famous monkey selfie photographs that he took himself a few years ago.