{"id":9266,"date":"2026-03-08T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/supreme-court-blow-ai-artists-copyright\/"},"modified":"2026-03-08T19:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T19:00:00","slug":"supreme-court-blow-ai-artists-copyright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/supreme-court-blow-ai-artists-copyright\/","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court Just Dealt a Crushing Blow to \u201cAI Artists\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Proponents of generative AI say the tech has greatly lowered the barriers of entry in the art world, allowing practically anybody with internet access to dream up competently-executed landscapes, portraits, sketches and comics \u2014 all without any talent whatsoever.<\/p>\n

Critics say it\u2019s the lowest common denominator of human expression, outsourcing to bloated algorithms that feasted on copyrighted materials while exploiting human artists who have yet to be fairly remunerated for having their life\u2019s work be thrown into the AI wood chipper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The raging debate has metastasized into a prolonged legal battle, with some attempting to uphold the legitimacy of AI-generated art by arguing it\u2019s copyrightable \u2014 efforts that have met a major obstacle in the form of a recent Supreme Court decision.<\/p>\n

In 2022, not long before text-to-image generative AI tools like Midjourney went mainstream, the US Copyright Office rejected computer scientist Stephen Thaler\u2019s request to copyright his AI-generated image, titled \u201cA Recent Entrance to Paradise.\u201d After several years of back and forth, including an appeal, a US district court judge ruling that the work couldn\u2019t be protected since it didn\u2019t have a human creator, and eventually an affirming<\/a> of said ruling in 2025, the case finally made it to the US Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

And now, as Reuters<\/em> reports<\/a>, the country\u2019s highest court has declined to hear the ongoing dispute, dealing a crushing blow to those who argue that AI-generated art should be eligible for copyright like human-created works.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an especially thorny situation, considering AI companies are embroiled in a number of lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement of their own.<\/p>\n

Image generator Midjourney, for instance, was sued by Warner Bros. Discovery<\/a> last year. Artists also filed a lawsuit in 2024<\/a> against Google after finding their work had been scraped by the company\u2019s AI. OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and text-to-video generating app, Sora<\/a>, can also easily be used<\/a> to generate images and videos of copyrighted characters. <\/p>\n

That hasn\u2019t stopped a number of AI enthusiasts, including Thaler, from seeking copyright for their AI-generated work. Some of them have gone as far as to complain<\/a> that their prompts are being plagiarized by other \u201cartists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough the Copyright Act does not define the term \u2018author,\u2019 multiple provisions of the act make clear that the term refers to a human rather than a machine,\u201d the Trump administration told Reuters<\/em> in a statement.<\/p>\n

Apart from copyrighting his artwork, Thaler also applied for patents for a food container and search and rescue beacon in 2018, arguing he wasn\u2019t the inventor, but that an AI machine, dubbed DABUS, had come up with them.<\/p>\n

The US Patent and Trademark Office shut him down, followed by the Supreme Court, which also denied hearing his argument, per Reuters<\/em>. <\/p>\n

More on AI art:<\/strong> Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post The Supreme Court Just Dealt a Crushing Blow to \u201cAI Artists\u201d<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Proponents of generative AI say the tech has greatly lowered the barriers of entry in the art world, allowing practically anybody with internet access to dream up competently-executed landscapes, portraits,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3841],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-ethics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}