--- title: "Inventor Claims His AI Is Sentient, Fights to Copyright Its Creations" description: "DABUS is fully autonomous, argues its creator Stepher Thaler, and anything that it creates should be patentable. The courts don't agree." date: "2023-09-01" modified: "2023-09-01" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/inventor-ai-sentient-copyright" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "ai copyright" - "ai generated images" - "generative ai" - "the digest" --- # Inventor Claims His AI Is Sentient, Fights to Copyright Its Creations ![DABUS is fully autonomous, argues its creator Stepher Thaler, and anything that it creates should be patentable. The courts don't agree.]() *Artificial intelligence robot with circuit and programming code background. \Image: Getty Images\* ## DABUS Ex Machina AI researcher Stephen Thaler is adamant that his AI, which he calls the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS), is indeed sentient. And because of that, he argues that the art DABUS creates — or anything else — should be copyrightable. But to Thaler, the battle transcends mere human courts. "DABUS and all of this intellectual property is not about setting precedents with the law," he [told *Wired* in a recent interview](). "It's about setting precedents in terms of human acceptance," "There is a new species here on Earth," he added, "and it's called DABUS." So far, the copyright fight has been a losing one for Thaler. Last week, a [US federal court struck down Thaler's attempt]() to copyright an image DABUS produced, reaffirming the [Copyright's Office decision in March]() and [the year before](). Those decisions upheld the doctrine that copyright requires human authorship, which disbars DABUS — or any "new species" — as much [as it does as animals](). And besides, for obvious reasons, experts aren't convinced by Thaler's claims of the AI's consciousness. "I don't even really know where to begin, other than to say, if there is a sentient AI on the planet currently, it's definitely not this," Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University, told *Wired*. ## Inventing Inventors Not that that kind of talk has ever deterred Thaler. He has a powerful legal alley: Ryan Abbott, a law professor at the University of Surrey who heads an effort of IP lawyers called the Artificial Inventor Project, founded in 2018. Its goal, as the name suggests, is to allow IP protections for works created by or using an AI. Abbott's core belief is that, in order to incentivize people to use AI to benefit humanity, its creations, like a disease-staving vaccine, should still be patentable. Under current patent laws, that's not possible, he argues. (Jonas Salk, the creator of the polio vaccine, would have something to say to that. When [asked on a live broadcast]() why he didn't patent the polio vaccine, Salk famously rejoined: "Could you patent the Sun?") "In the US, inventors are defined as individuals, and we argued there was no reason that was restricted to a natural person," Abbott told *Wired*. But Abbott is less concerned about an AI's autonomy and more worried about how the use of a generative AI affects authorship — or rather, that it shouldn't. For his part, Sag called this reasoning a "total nonstarter," saying the "bottom line is that we don’t need AI inventors to patent the outcomes of emergent processes." With their efforts falling flat in the US, Thaler and Abbott [await the UK Supreme Court's ruling](), set to release in September, on whether a pair of patents attributed to DABUS are valid. **More on AI:** *[OpenAI Rages at Report That Google's New AI Crushes GPT-4]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()