TECH NEWS – Just because artificial intelligence can generate appealing audiovisual content does not mean that the works are protected by copyright.
On Monday, Reuters reported that the US Supreme Court upheld the US Copyright Office’s position that images generated solely by AI cannot be copyrighted. The Court dismissed the case filed by Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who has been seeking copyright protection for an AI-generated image titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” for years. The image is not protected by copyright and can be seen below.
The Copyright Office originally rejected Thaler’s application in 2022 because the image did not meet the requirement of human authorship. Thaler appealed, but the federal court upheld the decision. Now that the Supreme Court has rejected the case as well, there is no higher court of appeal in the United States. However, there is still some room to resolve the issue. AI-generated images can be modified by hand and thus placed under copyright protection. In 2025, the creator of Invoke, an AI image-generating tool, obtained copyright protection for an AI-generated image on the grounds that it contained sufficient human authorship.
This system is based more or less on trust because it is difficult to prove whether an image was generated by artificial intelligence. In one case, the Copyright Office later discovered that it had issued a registration for a comic book containing AI-generated images. The agency then issued a new registration, reserving the copyright for the book’s layout and story but not the images.
What is the lesson here at the end of the day? In short, you can’t generate an image with ChatGPT and publish it without modification because it’s not protected by copyright. However, this issue can be overcome if we dig deeper.
