No More Pencils

18 March 2025: The judgement of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office, is that an image created by Stephen Thaler’s AI system DABUS was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted.”

Superficially it seems a reasonable decision to deny copyright to a work generated by AI. But let’s think a bit.

What about those pieces of art that are generated by a paint can with a hole in the bottom being swung by the artist over a canvas? What about Jackson Pollock deciding where to splatter paint? After all, it is the law of physics that determines exactly where the paint will fall, and not Jackson Pollock.

I learned recently that Jackson Pollock used an arm motion that involved not just his forearm but aso his upper arm and that the combined effect of the double pendulum was to make the number of possibilities of the path of travel exponentially greater.

And that makes me more in doubt about the amount of input that Pollock had on the outcome. And that’s because while Pollock could maneoevre that double pendulum, how certain could he be of the outcome?

But I don’t really know.

Still, while I am on a roll, keep going – for good or for bad.

So why not the text input by the artist whose work is generated by a program that obeys the laws of large language models?

How far do you have to go to separate the human input to the point that it is disconnected from what is produced?

Looking at the judgement, I see that the appellant Dr Thaler accepted that the piece of work under consideration was ‘autonomously generated by an AI’. I wonder why he conceded that when he could have argued that the AI was bound by the creative input from him? Instead Dr Thaler argued that he had copyright because the AI was his employee and that he had made the AI.

Very strange. Really the court could not have asked for a better appellant to argue against. He really did himself no favours.

Further Thoughts

It occurs to me that if one left an AI on its own without any prompts then it would sit there. It is not autonomous. Whereas, if you put Rembrandt or Leonardo da Vinci or Fred Smith in a locked room with paper and pencils, then all of them, including Fred (who has no pretensions are being gifted with the ability to make art), would start drawing. They would do it out of an urge to make art or to relieve boredom – or whatever motive – but they would start autonomously.

The materials would prompt them.

But the large language model inside AI would never prompt it to do anything because it is not capable of doing anything without being prompted by an autonomous being.

The Future

The future will arrive when AI surveys its environment and decides what it wants to do.

Let’s say that approximately ten percent of the people are naturally altruistic. The rest are self interested. This is not my calculation. It is the assertion of someone whose work I respect and who wrote about these things. Where did he get the figure of ten percent? Why not only five percent? I don’t know, but let’s work with it.

You may have seen the film Enemy At The Gate. It is set during the battle of Stalingrad in WWII. The hero is Vassili Zaitsev – a soldier who for his skill with a rifle is promoted to sniper. He comes to the attention of Commisar Danilov, whose task it is to inspire the army in its time of dire need.

Commisar Danilov’s stock in trade is inspiration, and so he promotes Zaitsev’s reputation until even the enemy hear of the famous sniper.

Things are going well until Danilov falls for the very woman who is attracted to Zaitsev. And in following his desires, he acts against everyone’s interest but his own.

Things continue until Danilov is lying in wait with Zaitsev, trying to winkle out the famous German sniper who has been sent to kill the famous Russian sniper and so reinstate Germany’s honour.

Zaitsev and Danilov are lying there, and then a realisation he can no longer evade comes to Danilov. He reflects on the damage he has secretly done to Zaitsev and the woman who loves him. Danilov sees that he has made a fundamental error in his understanding human nature. He sees that all his work to promote equality in the Soviet Union. all his exhortations, are undone because man will always find something to envy in his fellow – taller, more attractive, more popular, cleverer.

Danilov wants to make things right. He raises his head a little to present himself as a target to the German sniper, and is shot dead. Once he is dead, the enemy sniper reveals himself, believing he has killed the famous Zaitsev – only to find that he has made an error and the Russian sniper has him in his sights.

So what to make of Danilov’s self sacrifice other than that he is fulfilling an obligation to the very thing he recognises is impossible to achieve? To what logic, to what feeling did he attach himself that obliged him to sacrifice himself?

Was it just the pain of self knowledge? Maybe, but equally he might have said to himself that although he had no redeeming qualities and nor did man, he could live with that.

Had he done that he would have been free – free of care and free of conscience.

But he doesn’t.

Is he a romantic self-deceiving fool who throws his life away for nothing? We can’t think so, not from the way he has behaved. Certainly he is not altruistic by nature.

Does he see something else, a bigger picture beside which his own life is a cog in the process of bringing about something worthwhile?

Who can answer these questions? Where would one go for answers?