FaceDeer

Clearly people aren’t wishing hard enough.

Yeah. And “personhood” in the legal sense, which is already pretty well defined. If Thaler had made a corporation to hold that copyright then this would be an entirely different situation.

Thaler v. Perlmutter has been cropping up under this headline again and again over the years since the courts keep ruling against him and “AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted” is an extremely popular bait for clicks. The one positive about this particular cycle is that now that the Supreme Court has ruled he may finally be out of ways to have yet another do-over. This might be the last one.

This headline implies a misunderstanding of what this case is actually about. This is the Thaler v. Perlmutter case. Thaler has been arguing - since 2018, before the current AI “boom” - that the copyright of a particular image that he’d generated with an AI belonged to the AI itself rather than to him.

The copyright office, and every court he’s appealed to since then, have responded “AIs aren’t legal persons and so cannot hold copyright.” That’s all this Supreme Court rejection is affirming. It’s a really obvious outcome, Thaler is basically a loon with too much money and time on his hands for continuing to pursue the case.

It doesn’t address the general copyrightability of AI-generated art. In this particular case Thaler is explicitly saying “I don’t hold the copyright, my AI holds the copyright.” The courts have said “well, if you don’t hold the copyright and the AI can’t hold the copyright, that means nobody holds the copyright and therefore this particular piece is in the public domain.” Thaler is allowed to disclaim his own copyright over the work, he just can’t assign it to an AI like this.

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

And you are forgetting that it’s a discussion about a court of law. It’s right in the title, this is about a lawsuit.

You’re presenting a big wall of text that’s explaining your opinions on the matter. I could likewise present a big wall of text that explains my opinions on the matter. Neither of those things actually matter, though. The title and subject of this thread is not “hey, what do you all think about this stuff?” It’s “here’s what the US Supreme Court ruled (or in this case chose to let stand without making a ruling).”

I get what your opinion is. I’ve seen this opinion presented plenty of times over the years. I don’t think that’s how the courts are going to rule, though, because so far they’ve been ruling in other ways and I think I’ve got a pretty firm understanding of why they’ve been ruling that way.

Still, this all feels a bit like Schroedinger’s Copyrighted Work to me… the work exists, so who made it?

It’s simply not the court’s job to determine this, in this particular case. Which is why it’s so frustrating that this particular case keeps ending up under headlines claiming that it’s established that “AI generated art can’t be copyrighted.”

All the rest of this argument is out of scope of this case, you’d need to look to other cases. You can argue and opine however you like about what you think the outcomes should be but that doesn’t change what the outcomes of those cases actually end up being.

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.

I was wondering what I’d done to warrant this attention. It’s kind of puzzling - I’m not keeping my Reddit account “secret”, I link to it and mention my interests in my profile bio. But XLE has been acting like he was a sleuth cracking a case.

I explained it in detail in a comment I put on the root of the thread. In a nutshell, Thaler is declaring “I am not the copyright holder of this artwork, the AI itself is the copyright holder of the artwork. I want to register this artwork’s copyright to the AI that produced it.”

The copyright office - and, subsequently, all the courts he has appealed the case to - have told him “but an AI is not a legal person, so an AI cannot hold copyright to the artwork. And you are declaring that you yourself are not the holder of the copyright, you are quite insistent on that. So this artwork has no copyright holder. That means it’s public domain.”

This is an important distinction. The court isn’t ruling that AI art in general is in the public domain. It’s ruling that this art is in the public domain because this guy trying to register it is insisting that it was created without any human involvement. Unfortunately a lot of news articles miss this distinction because a headline declaring “AI art ineligible for copyright” draws a ton of clicks. This has been going on for over three years now, at least.

Criminy, I just checked. Thaler began jousting this windmill in 2018, that’s when he first made this ridiculous application. Years before modern generative AI came onto the scene. The Thaler v. Perlmutter case started in mid-2022. He is a very persistent loon.

I honestly don’t know what his underlying reasoning is, he really seems like a loon with too much time and money on his hands to me. The only reason I pay any attention to this case is because Thaler v. Perlmutter has been coming up in headlines like this one for years now.

I shouldn’t be able to create derivative media and have it be legal and public domain.

Well, there’s the rub - proving that AI-generated works are “derivative works” (in the legal sense).

This court case had nothing to do with that. I’m aware of a few cases that have established the opposite, that AI models and their products are not derivative works. Do you know of any that have established that they are?

The unlicensed training itself is a rights violation,

There are cases where it’s been ruled fair use.

Says the guy who follows me around and dredges through months of my Reddit history looking for vaguely relevant comments to try to play “gotcha” with.

You could just block me, you know.

This is not remotely what the case was actually about.

Can you, though? What if you didn’t save it?

That’s not what this case was about. Thaler wasn’t trying to copyright the image himself.

That’s not what this case was about.

Ah, this is Thaler v. Perlmutter.

I seem to have picked up a reputation in these parts as being “pro-AI”, so I’m not sure how my view will be interpreted, but Thaler is basically a loon. This case is not really over whether AI art can be copyrighted. It’s about whether AI itself can hold copyright. ie, Thaler isn’t arguing “I hold the copyright to this piece of art.” He’s arguing “my AI holds the copyright to this piece of art.”

Since AI is not a legal person - it’s neither human nor a corporation - this is basically an open and shut case. There is no entity capable of holding copyright in this case.

Since Thaler himself is explicitly disclaiming that he holds the copyright, that means the work in question has no copyright holder. Which puts it into the public domain. This specific piece in this specific circumstance, not all AI-generated pieces.

It’s a commonly misinterpreted case.

Nice. I take it the paired rotors means it can manage if one fails.

Such an ironically predictable response.

GIGO. If you give an LLM such a minimalistic prompt it’s got nothing to work with but its weights, so of course it’s going to produce something basic and samey. You need to provide it with creative context to get creative results.

But that sounds like the much-derided “prompt engineering takes skill” position, so I suppose that can’t be the solution.

OP provided no context whatsoever.

Over the years there have been so many conversations I’ve been in online where someone asked something where the answer was trivially found with Google or some other search engine, but the conversation was interesting so I would Google it and provide the answer as part of my response. Is that blockworthy too?