AI Authorship?

A second burst of interest in AI authorship broke out in the mid-1980s. Congress once again commissioned a study, this time from its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), to address this and other controversial computer-related issues. OTA did not offer an answer to the question, perhaps in part because at that time, it was a "toy problem" because no commercially significant outputs of AI or other software programs had yet been generated.5 But deep learning and other AI breakthroughs have caused IP professionals to rethink the AI authorship issue.1,2 For example, The Next Rembrandt video features a group of art experts and computer scientists discussing how they collaborated to digitize many Rembrandt paintings, develop models of particular features of the paintings, and then create a Rembrandt-like portrait of a man with facial hair wearing a hat and looking to the right.6 The resulting AI-generated painting really does look like a Rembrandt.