The US Copyright Office says an AI can't copyright its art

The board found that Thaler's AI-created image didn't include an element of "human authorship" -- a necessary standard, it said, for protection. Creativity Machine's work, seen above, is named "A Recent Entrance to Paradise." It's part of a series Thaler has described as a "simulated near-death experience" in which an algorithm reprocesses pictures to create hallucinatory images and a fictional narrative about the afterlife. A 1997 decision says that a book of (supposed) divine revelations, for instance, could be protected if there was (again, supposedly) an element of human arrangement and curation. This doesn't necessarily mean any art with an AI component is ineligible.