Proponents of generative AI say the tech has greatly lowered the barriers of entry in the art world, allowing practically anybody with internet access to dream up competently-executed landscapes, portraits, sketches and comics — all without any talent whatsoever.
Critics say it’s the lowest common denominator of human expression, outsourcing to bloated algorithms that feasted on copyrighted materials while exploiting human artists who have yet to be fairly remunerated for having their life’s work be thrown into the AI wood chipper.
The raging debate has metastasized into a prolonged legal battle, with some attempting to uphold the legitimacy of AI-generated art by arguing it’s copyrightable — efforts that have met a major obstacle in the form of a recent Supreme Court decision.
In 2022, not long before text-to-image generative AI tools like Midjourney went mainstream, the US Copyright Office rejected computer scientist Stephen Thaler’s request to copyright his AI-generated image, titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” After several years of back and forth, including an appeal, a US district court judge ruling that the work couldn’t be protected since it didn’t have a human creator, and eventually an affirming of said ruling in 2025, the case finally made it to the US Supreme Court.
And now, as Reuters reports, the country’s highest court has declined to hear the ongoing dispute, dealing a crushing blow to those who argue that AI-generated art should be eligible for copyright like human-created works.
It’s an especially thorny situation, considering AI companies are embroiled in a number of lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement of their own.
Image generator Midjourney, for instance, was sued by Warner Bros. Discovery last year. Artists also filed a lawsuit in 2024 against Google after finding their work had been scraped by the company’s AI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and text-to-video generating app, Sora, can also easily be used to generate images and videos of copyrighted characters.
That hasn’t stopped a number of AI enthusiasts, including Thaler, from seeking copyright for their AI-generated work. Some of them have gone as far as to complain that their prompts are being plagiarized by other “artists.”
“Although the Copyright Act does not define the term ‘author,’ multiple provisions of the act make clear that the term refers to a human rather than a machine,” the Trump administration told Reuters in a statement.
Apart from copyrighting his artwork, Thaler also applied for patents for a food container and search and rescue beacon in 2018, arguing he wasn’t the inventor, but that an AI machine, dubbed DABUS, had come up with them.
The US Patent and Trademark Office shut him down, followed by the Supreme Court, which also denied hearing his argument, per Reuters.
More on AI art: Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized