An old master? No, it's an image AI just knocked up … and it can't be copyrighted

Artist Jason Allen claimed his use of the online AI-platform Midjourney allowed him to claim authorship of the image because he "entered a series of prompts, adjusted the scene, selected portions to focus on, and dictated the tone of the image". But the board ruled that "if all of a work's'traditional elements of authorship' were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship, and the Office will not register it". Allen told the Pueblo Chieftain local newspaper that he "wanted to make a statement using artificial intelligence artwork. I feel like I accomplished that, and I'm not going to apologise for it." "Judges don't understand art, or have an old-fashioned idea of a very specific skill that is being able to re-produce a very specific vision of the world by hand," said New York artist-critic Walter Robinson, who has been using Midjourney, he said, "for fun".