US Government Refuses to Acknowledge the Legitimacy of AI Art

Art has been a core component of human society since the very beginning, and cave paintings found France that are thousands of years old definitely seem to attest to that. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the manner in which we create art has changed drastically over time, and main driving factor for this change has almost always been technological advancement and the like.

The advent of AI created a lot of new opportunities but one of the most interesting things that happened because of the creation of this new type of tech was that art could be made through it. In fact, there are several examples of works of art that are created solely through a machine learning algorithm which absorbs data from various sets and then uses it by mixing and matching different elements to create something that is arguably different from anything that it might have originated from in the first place.

It turns out that the US government does not think that art created by an artificial intelligence is all that legitimate, at least from a copyright point of view. The copyright agency in the US refused to grant a copyright to a piece of art created the Creativity Machine which is an AI that was created by Dr. Stephen Thaler who then used it to create various surreal arts work that many people have started to become rather interested in.

The main reason why this agency refused to grant a copyright is that they only want to grant copyrights to artwork that was created through human labor or through the human mind. The Supreme Court has set this precedent by previously refusing to copyright photos that had been taken by monkeys, but the difference here is that AI could very well become sentient at some point in the future. While that day is still a long way off, it will be interesting to see how these government institutions and agencies deal with the change that this will bring to the world around them.


Photo is just for illustration purposes which is courtesy of Birmingham Museums Trust / Unsplash.

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