A Federal Judge Just Ruled That AI-Generated Art Cannot Be Copyrighted. Artists Are Celebrating. Studios Are Not

That Friday afternoon, the courtroom was empty. In these kinds of situations, it is rarely the case. However, what Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in her ruling has since spread farther than most decisions ever do, passing through the legal departments of studios that had been covertly experimenting with generative models up until recently, Hollywood agencies, and Discord servers full of illustrators. She decided that works of art created without a “guiding human hand” are not protected by copyright. It sounds easy. It isn’t.

The case started years ago when Missouri computer scientist Stephen Thaler attempted to register a piece titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which featured a surreal image of train tracks disappearing into a portal surrounded by odd green and purple vegetation. He gave his system, the Creativity Machine, credit for the work. He was turned down by the Copyright Office. He filed a lawsuit. He was defeated. He filed an appeal. He was defeated once more. And the door was permanently closed this March when the Supreme Court discreetly refused to hear his case.

I’ve talked to illustrators and concept artists over the past year, and they seem to think that this decision came at the perfect time. As studios turned to Midjourney and its cousins for mood boards, background plates, and even complete character sheets, many of them had seen their commissions dry up. I was casually informed by a Burbank freelance illustrator that she had lost three of her regular clients in a single quarter. Prompts were taking the place of her work. At least those prompts now result in something that nobody owns.

The studios aren’t having a party. It’s difficult to hold them accountable. Building pipelines around generative tools has already cost billions of dollars, and the entire reasoning behind those expenditures was predicated on the largely unspoken premise that anything that emerged would be protected. That presumption no longer exists. An AI-generated character design cannot be licensed, sold, or protected from imitations if it is not copyrighted. Theoretically, a rival could sell t-shirts by Monday after lifting it directly from a trailer.

To her credit, Judge Howell left the door slightly open. She admitted that the law is “approaching new frontiers,” that artists will increasingly use AI as a tool rather than a substitute, and that the question of how much human input is sufficient will need to be addressed in future cases. Courtrooms will be plagued by the question of how much is sufficient for years to come. Is it sufficient to write a prompt? Choosing from a four-output grid? Using Photoshop to manually retouch one? As of yet, no one knows.

The way the decision has been interpreted by those outside the legal system is noteworthy. Vindication is seen by artists. Studios perceive danger. From what I understand, venture capitalists see a messier, slower route to profits than they did when they pitched their LPs. Thaler, who also lost a concurrent patent battle over AI-generated inventions, is presumably moving on to whatever comes next somewhere in Missouri.

As this develops, it’s difficult to ignore something more ancient beneath the legalese. The concept of an individual creating something was the foundation of copyright from its inception. For the time being, the courts are not allowing that notion to fade. The real question is whether that holds true as the tools become more complex and the output improves. Right now, the machines produce what they produce. It simply doesn’t belong to anyone, according to the law.