An AI artwork will always be a subject of controversy--such as a copyright lawsuit. A recent case involving a Colorado artist reignited the discussion on who holds the rights to an AI-generated art piece.
Jason Allen, who has earned attention by being the artist of the AI-supported art piece named Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, now faces a challenging legal battle regarding the ownership and copyright of his work.
The scandal began when his artwork won the digital art contest at the Colorado State Fair in 2022 but seems to have continued until now.
Emergence of AI-assisted Art
Jason Allen spent thousands of hours working on Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, feeding hundreds of prompts into the AI software Midjourney to generate the final image.
Now, however, with all that time and labor invested, Allen has a new problem: people reproducing his artwork without permission, 9News reports. Copies of his AI-assisted creation appeared online, some sold on OpenSea and Etsy, mostly as digital prints or NFTs.
As Allen points out, "There have been times when people have just ripped my work whole cloth." Many have also adapted his whole piece into new works or even sold it. Greater degrees of misuse by others have further complicated whether an artist like Allen can own a piece created with AI.
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The Copyright Conundrum
According to PetaPixel, the US Copyright Office denied Allen's copyright registration, suggesting that "the actual author of the work being registered is not Allen, but rather is Midjourney, the AI software setting the original parameters for the work."
Allen replied by filing a complaint in federal court, arguing that using AI doesn't change anything, as an artist uses a camera or paintbrush to create a finished piece.
Now, when photography was invented back in the 1880s, someone tried to register the copyright of a photograph, but the Copyright Office denied that too, according to Pester. At the time, the office believed that the camera, not the human photographer, was the creator. The historical comparison demonstrates some of the challenges inherent to new technologies in the art world.
A Precedent Case in AI and Copyright
Allen's ruling would mark a landmark case that shaped the direction of AI-generated content for quite a long time within music, film, and literature about questions about human input into the process.
Allen's is not the first instance of this kind of case. In August last year, a DC federal court rejected similar claims of copyright in Thaler v. Perlmutter. There, the artwork was entirely algorithmically generated without human involvement.
In that case, the court ruled that such work was missing the "human authorship" required for copyright protection. In that context, the court highlighted that such works require human input at any process stage.
Related Article: New AI Image Generator Trained to Draw Inspiration from Images Instead of Copying: Study
