Yup, AI robo-authors don't qualify for copyright, says appeals court

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has affirmed a lower court ruling that content created by an AI model without human input cannot be copyrighted.

The plaintiff in this case is computer scientist Stephen Thaler, who developed a machine-learning system called the Creativity Machine that produced an image titled, A Recent Entrance to Paradise. Here it is in all its machine-generated glory...

In 2018, on behalf of his AI system, Thaler asked the US Copyright Office to issue a copyright for the artwork. That application was rejected. The egghead asked the agency to reconsider that decision in 2019 and again in 2020.

Both times, the Copyright Office refused, using the following reasoning:

We cannot register this work because it lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim. According to your application this work was 'created autonomously by machine.'

In 2022, Thaler took the ...