How To Get to Paradise According to Artificial Intelligence

Where is paradise?  How do you get there? 

An inventor named Stephen Thaler wondered the same thing.  So he built the Creativity Machine. This machine was designed to use artificial intelligence to answer these questions once and for all.  According to the Creativity Machine, here is the entrance to paradise:

Where is this entrance to paradise?  And where do you get on the train to get there?  Only the Creativity Machine knows. 

Stephen Thaler thought this information needed to be protected so others could not pirate this valuable knowledge.  He filed an application with the U.S. Copyright Office to claim ownership of the entrance to paradise picture. He stated in his application that the picture had been "autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine."  And he claimed that the Creativity Machine was artificially intelligent enough to transfer ownership of the picture to him.

The Copyright Office and the reviewing court were amused.  Under copyright law, only a “person” can create a picture that can be copyrighted.  A picture that is “autonomously created” is obviously not created by a “person.”

Will an artificially intelligent machine running computer algorithms ever be considered a “person?”  The court thought this question is “only fun conjecture for academics.”  The court even thought the answer to the question is meaningless since “the day sentient refugees from some intergalactic war arrive on Earth and are granted asylum in Iceland, copyright law will be the least of our problems.”

Don’t wait for sentient refuges from some intergalactic war to arrive on Earth.  At Innovative Law Group, our team can help you protect and grow your valuable intellectual property portfolio now.  Then, you won’t even care about finding a train that goes to the entrance to paradise.

THALER v PERLMUTTER, 1:2022cv01564, US District Court for the District of Columbia, (April 6, 2023).