this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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278
U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material (www.cnbc.com)
submitted 19 hours ago by FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday ⁠to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away ​a case involving a computer ​scientist from Missouri who was ​denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.

Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual ⁠art ‌at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection ⁠because it did not have a human creator.

Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering ‌a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery.

The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors ​to be eligible to receive a copyright. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Thaler’s appeal.

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not a lawyer, maybe you are. I can't fully speak to the legalities at play.

This is specifically about legalities, though.

AI simply cannot produce an output without consuming other works to be used as training data.

Obviously an AI can't work without being trained. Neither can a human.

The issue is about the legalities of this process.

From what I understand, the scope of those judgments are limited to the specific context of those uses, as well as the jurisdiction in which they were made, right?

As is the case for basically all court judgements, yeah. But once one's been made it becomes precedent that can be cited in subsequent cases that makes them go the same way a lot easier. So when a court rules that Anthropic was operating within fair use when it trained its LLMs off of books that makes it a lot more likely that OpenAI will win a ruling about its own similar training processes. They're opinions that matter.

It's worth noting, for the sake a more complete discussion, this draft report from the United States Copyright Office from May 2025,

Also worth noting that this is the lowest starting level for regulation. The US Copyright Office makes rules like these, then they get challenged in court and the court that can decide whether those rules actually conform to the law. Thaler v. Perlmutter is exactly such a case.

I think if you look at something as blatant as the OpenAI Studio Ghibli filter, it's very clear that the works that were used in training could have been, and almost certainly should have been licensed from Studio Ghibli for the creation of such a feature

Okay, you think that. What do the judges think? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

I should note that it's a very long-standing and well established principle that style cannot be copyrighted.

[–] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 3 points 6 hours ago

Obviously an AI can't work without being trained. Neither can a human.

This is a false equivalency that equates natural learning and human agency with "machine learning", when in that they are not remotely the same. This is a common and extremely flawed personification of a mathematical system that simply does not "learn" in the same way that a human being does.

Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief today, the creative insight of a human artist is not simply a combination of all of the other works of art that they have seen (akin to training data superimposed into a model). A human artist has the x-factors of personal agency, taste, and the constant sensory barrage of simply living as a huge part of their creative development. For every painting that a human artist sees, they see an unknowable score of other things that influence their perception of the world and art.

This is very much not a legal point that you're arguing here, by the way, it's a technical and practical one.

I should note that it's a very long-standing and well established principle that style cannot be copyrighted.

"Style" is not what's in question. It never was, and it wasn't a word that I used in my example.

ML models are not trained on "style". They are trained on actual works.

And in many cases (including in OpenAI's case) trained on an unimaginable amount of full copyrighted works, in their entirety, without license or consent from the copyright holders, often times pirated with DRM circumvented.

It's a simple fact of the technology that OpenAI's Ghibli filter could not have been made without training off of a large amount (probably every frame of every film, if I had to make an educated guess) of their actual artistic work. OpenAI have admitted that much themselves in court.

Okay, you think that. What do the judges think? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

You seem to have forgotten that this is a social media website comments section discussion, not a court of law.

I'm sharing my personal opinion, with a background in art, music, and programming, not law.

I'm entitled to do so, and I won't stop because it should go without saying that the copyright system matters a great deal to people who actually make things.

If you think you're above that then I'm not sure why you're even here, frankly. Are you here to argue that any of this is fair use? I don't see you making that case... (Maybe slightly timidly making that case, but not really going for it.)

In the end this topic is central to human culture and society, it's not some kind of intellectual exercise for only people in blue suits to muse about.

Welcome to "the court of public opinion", where Texan judges and Roman popes alike can be wrong.