The highest legal authority in the USA has refused to take a case involving a Missouri computer scientist who wants to copyright art created by his own generative AI system. The compsci guy in question, Dr Stephen Thaler, appealed to the Supreme Court justices after lower courts upheld a US Copyright Office decision that his art doesn’t make the cut for copyright protection, because it wasn’t created by a human.
As reported by Reuters, Thaler’s generative AI tech is the winningly dorkish “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”, aka DABUS. He applied for a US federal copyright registration, asking for DABUS to be recognised as the author of a picture of a train tunnel surrounded by mucky green and purple vegetation, called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”.
