The artwork, Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, was created by Matthew Allen and came first in last year's Colorado State Fair. Now, Allen plans to file a lawsuit against the US federal government. "I'm going to fight this like hell," he says. Allen was dogged in his attempt to register his work. He specified that creating the painting had required at least 624 text prompts and input revisions.

I was open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page. It wasn't altered in any other way," Kashtova writes. I registered it as visual arts work. My certificate is in the mail and I got the number and a confirmation today that it was approved. My friend lawyer gave me this idea and I decided to make a precedent."

Sign up for dot.LA's daily newsletter for the latest news on Southern California's tech, startup and venture capital scene. Computers can now write poems, paint portraits and produce music better than many humans. The case will now head to federal court as the AI program's owner, Stephen Thaler, plans to file an appeal, according to Ryan Abbott, a Los Angeles-based attorney representing Thaler. The case arrives as artists are increasingly using AI to help generate artwork, including works produced by autonomous machines. Abbott, a partner at L.A.-based law firm Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan, noted that AI-produced artwork is creating significant commercial value, such as an AI-authored painting that sold for $432,000 at auction in 2018.

Thaler first brought the image created by his "Creativity Machine" algorithm to the USCO in November 2018, Eileen Kinsella reported for Artnet News. A Recent Entrance to Paradise is part of a series Thaler describes as a "simulated near-death experience," where an algorithm repurposes pictures to create images seen by a synthetic dying brain. Thaler noted to the USCO he was "seeking to register this computer-generated work as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine." Providing this protection is required under current legal frameworks." Thaler has previously tested the limits of patent laws in numerous countries.