You may have heard that on March second the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in a case called Thaler v. Perlmutter. That decision leaves in place lower-court rulings, saying that artworks created entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted.
At first glance, this might look like a win for “Team Human.” It seems to reinforce the idea that AI is just a tool—not an author—and that copyright protection still depends on human creativity. But the situation is more complicated than that.
What the courts actually decided is that neither the AI system nor the human who uses it counts as the author of the resulting work. Simply prompting ChatGPT or Claude to produce something isn’t considered the kind of creative activity that copyright law recognizes as authorship. And that creates an unexpected result. If neither the AI nor the human user is the author, then the work has no author at all. In effect, AI-generated images, music, and text become “orphan works”—creations that belong to no one. And that means that anyone can use them.
So the long-term consequence of this might not be a victory for human creators. Instead, it could open the door to a flood of AI-generated material clogging up our media environment. The music playing in hotel elevators, the graphics illustrating online news stories, even the background images used in advertising could increasingly be produced by AI. And because these works have no recognized author, no one needs to be paid or credited for creating them.
I'm David Gunkel, and that's my Perspective.
