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Comment by golemotron | Hacker News Reader

This is clearly a case where we need new legislation. The US Copyright Act needed to be amended to cover photography. Prior to that photos were not copyrightable. It seems like we are on the same trajectory now.

The real problem is that Congress is institutionally incapable of making simple amendments to law. Everything gets delegated to agency rule making regardless of whether anyone likes the outcome.

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Why do you think that? This obviously does not preclude copyright interests from existing in works which were generated using "AI" as a blanket rule; rather, this is about the fact that the applicant persistent in insisting that the author of the work was an "autonomous[] computer algorithm".

Do you think autonomous computer algorithms (to the extent we could suppose they exist, for the sake of argument) should have a statutory right to copyright?

No, I just think that the space can be cleared up with legislation.

It's a weird world where works created with a prompt are not creative enough for protection but pictures taken by randomly pointing smartphone cameras (which use significant amounts of AI internally, btw) are copyrightable.

Stepping back, would granting a time-limited exclusive license to the output of generative AI "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?

In other words is there important AI art that society would be missing out on because the originator deemed it not worth the effort without some protection against unauthorized copies being made?

And then the supreme court tosses out the agency rulemaking. And then the president makes his own executive order. Then the courts block that. It's kind of a mess right now. Congress is pretty broken.

No truer words have been said.

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