US judge: Art created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted
Just spitballing here, because this is very fun to think about.<p>If I reproduce the likeness of Mickey Mouse via an AI, then because an AI made it, is there no defensible claim from Disney to own the copyright? That doesn&#x27;t make intuitive sense, as we &#x27;sort of know&#x27; that Disney owns the likeness.<p>Meanwhile, if I produce one single image that I own via copyright, and feed it to the AI as a prompt and receive a derivative of that image back, per this ruling I would not own the proceeds. It makes some sense-- an AI made it, and further, I did not produce enough instances of this art and the branding behind it for its likeness to be sufficiently &quot;mine&quot;. I don&#x27;t quite own the &quot;mindshare&quot;, so people would not recognize the brand as being anybody&#x27;s, really. So this is different from the way that Mickey Mouse is recognized.<p>But what if a bunch of artists were to band together to create a license of sorts for the use of an AI they altogether build? Suppose they collectively own a portfolio of copyrighted materials, characters, etc, that they use to feed the AI. Wouldn&#x27;t they own the proceeds of the likenesses produced by the AI, as would provide legal justification for their licensing of the AI, and to defend their collective works in the same way that Disney can?