AI-generated images still can't be copyrighted as US Supreme Court declines to hear case

As reported Monday by Reuters, the US Supreme Court has affirmed the US Copyright Office's stance that purely AI-generated images cannot be copyrighted, declining to hear a case brought by computer scientist Dr. Stephen Thaler, who for years has been seeking copyright protection for an AI-generated image titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise."

You can see that image above, on account of it not being copyrighted.

The Copyright Office declined Thaler's initial request in 2022 because it said that the image didn't meet the requirement of "human authorship." Thaler appealed, but a federal court said the same thing. Now that the Supreme Court has turned the case away, there's no higher authority to appeal to in the US.

There's still wiggle room to be sorted out here, though. AI-generated images can be modified by hand, and thus become copyrightable. In 2025, the creator of AI image generation tool Invoke managed to secure copyright for an AI-generated image on the basis that it contained sufficient human authorship to qualify.

And this is all happening more or less on the honor system, because it is difficult to prove that an image was AI generated. In one instance, the Copyright Office learned after the fact that it had issued a registration to a comic book with AI generated images. The agency then issued a new registration maintaining copyright for the layout of the book and its story, but not the images themselves.