The technology has increasingly commanded the legal system's attention, and as such office began seeking public comments on Wednesday about some of AI's thorniest issues (via Ars Technica). "The crucial question appears to be whether the'work' is basically one of human authorship, with the computer merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine," the USCO wrote. Although the issue is far from resolved, several cases have hinted at where the boundaries may fall. On the other hand, a Federal judge recently rejected an attempt to register AI-generated art which had no human intervention other than its inciting text prompt. Sarah Silverman is among the high-profile plaintiffs suing OpenAI and Meta for allegedly training ChatGPT and LLaMA (respectively) on their written work -- in her case, her 2010 memoir The Bedwetter. OpenAI also faces a class-action lawsuit over using scraped web data to train its viral chatbot.

The USCO agreed that the work was generated by an AI model that Thaler calls the Creativity Machine. He claimed that the USCO's "human authorship" requirement was unconstitutional. However, Howell indicated that Thaler's case wasn't an especially complex one, since he admitted that he wasn't involved in the creation of A Recent Entrance to Paradise. "In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the [Federal] Register: No," Howell ruled. Thaler plans to appeal the decision.

The Supreme Court decided that a photograph is not just a mechanical process, but an authored work based on the photographer's decisions in curating the backdrop and subject's clothing. In the realm of generative works, the Office asks applicants if the included AI elements are the result of "mechanical reproduction" or of an author's "own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form."

Want to have an impressionist painting of Thai temples in the style of Claude Monet, but you cannot afford to commission an artist? Let artificial intelligence (AI) do the work for you. Then you change your mind and want to have the painting in a surrealistic style. Type what you want in the message field of the AI art-generating program. You get what you wanted.

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.

In his application, Stephen Thaler stated that the related work was created autonomously by the "creativity machine" algorithm, and it is a work created by the "work made for hire" doctrine, and that he filed the application by being the proprietor of the machine following the assignment declaration he submitted. On the other hand, Thaler requested reconsideration of this decision stating that it is unconstitutional to require a "human authorship" requirement for registration and that such a requirement is neither included in the law nor the case law. In the subsequent examination, the Office again rejected these requests, reiterating its initial assessments and stating that Thaler did not provide evidence to prove that human-provided sufficient creative contribution to the relevant work or that the human intervention had taken place. Therefore, he argued that the Office's refusal grounds were based on old views that did not address current needs. Evaluating this second request for reconsideration, the Board stated that the law protects the fruits of intellectual labour.

The image, entitled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," represents a "simulated near-death experience" in which an algorithm reprocesses pictures to create hallucinatory images in creating a fictional narrative about the afterlife. In doing so, the Board accepted Thaler's representation that the image was autonomously created by artificial intelligence without any creative contribution from a human. Thaler did not seek to be named the registered author. Thus, the primary issue before the Board was Thaler's assertion that the human authorship requirement is unconstitutional and unsupported by case law. With advances in artificial intelligence accelerating at an exponential rate, there is no doubt this question will be raised again.

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.

The growing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are changing the world as we know it. Ideas once confined to the imagination are now becoming a reality, with AI technology creating outputs either largely or entirely independent from human intervention. In 2018, an album called I AM AI was the first of its kind to be entirely composed and produced by AI technology, through a music composition software called Amper. Deep learning networks allow Amper to analyse data to learn chords, notes, genres, tempo and song length to independently compose melodies. A qualified person is an Australian citizen or a person resident in Australia.[1]

Artificial intelligence is already capable of creating a staggering array of content. It can paint, write music, and put together a musical. It can write movies, angsty poems, and truly awful stand-up comedy. But does it have ownership over what it produces? For example, an AI at Google has managed to create sounds that humans have not heard before, merging characteristics of two different instruments and opening up a whole new toolbox for musicians to play around with.