The dispute involved computer scientist Stephen Thaler, who is seeking copyright protection for an image generated by his artificial intelligence. Lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision rejecting the application because the work lacked a human author.
“Thaler has been pursuing this somewhat quixotic litigation over an image created by an early generative AI model that he created and named the ‘creativity machine,’” Brian Fyre, a University of Kentucky law professor, told Decrypt.
“Pretty much everyone across the board has said human authorship is required, and AI doesn’t have human authorship, whatever we mean by that,” Fyre said.
Attorneys for Thaler did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.
While the Supreme Court’s refusal ends Thaler’s appeal, Fyre explained, it does not resolve the broader legal debate.
“The Supreme Court denied the petition, so Thaler lost and the Court is not going to hear the case,” Fyre said. “What’s really interesting about that is that it suggests the Supreme Court thinks there’s something here it wants to talk about.”
Despite Thaler's repeated attempts and legal defeats, Fyre described the copyright dispute as a test case; he said it did not amount to being frivolous.
“Thaler and his attorneys are making legitimate, interesting, and actually conceptually really difficult questions about the metaphysics of copyright law,” he said.
For now, courts in the United States continue to treat AI as a tool used by humans rather than a legal creator under existing intellectual property law. However, Fyre said similar disputes are likely to come, particularly involving plaintiffs with clearer stakes.
“It’s almost certain to come up again with a plaintiff that’s slightly differently situated, like a plaintiff that has an economic interest in the work in question that’s more robust than what Thaler has here,” he said.
