If an AI system writes a poem or creates a picture, can that work have copyright? In the United States, the answer is becoming clearer: copyright still starts with human creativity. On March 2, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Stephen Thaler’s appeal in Thaler v. Perlmutter, so a March 18, 2025 decision by the D.C. Circuit remains in force. That lower court said the Copyright Act requires a work to be authored by a human being. Thaler had tried to register an image called A Recent Entrance to Paradise while naming his “Creativity Machine” as the only author and describing the image as autonomously generated by the machine. (supremecourt.gov)
The court’s logic was practical, not science-fictional. It explained that many parts of copyright law make sense only if an author is human. Copyright first belongs to the author, often lasts for the author’s life plus seventy years, and can pass to family members after death. Machines do not own property, have a lifespan in the legal sense, or leave heirs behind. Still, the judges were careful to say that AI-assisted art is not automatically excluded. The real question is whether a human shaped the expressive parts of the final work, rather than simply asking a machine to produce something on its own. (copyright.gov)
The U.S. Copyright Office has drawn almost the same line. In its March 16, 2023 registration guidance and its January 29, 2025 AI report, the Office said purely AI-generated material is not protected, and prompts by themselves usually do not give enough control over the final expression. However, copyright can still cover the human contribution: a person’s own text or images inside the output, a creative selection or arrangement of AI-generated material, or meaningful edits and modifications. After reviewing more than 10,000 public comments, the Office concluded that existing law is flexible enough and that no new special copyright for AI outputs is currently needed. In short, U.S. law is not rejecting AI as a tool; it is insisting that copyright rewards human originality. (copyright.gov)
