The legal battle over AI continues: AI artist files lawsuit seeking copyright protection

Artist Jason M. Allen is seeking to reverse a ruling by the U.S. Copyright Office that rejected his request for copyright protection on an award-winning image he generated using the AI image generator Midjourney.
The case was brought before a federal court in Colorado last week.
“Theatre D’opera Spatial,” an image depicting a sci-fi royal court, won the Colorado State Fair’s art competition in 2022. It was later revealed to be an AI-generated image created by Allen.
“This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told The New York Times at the time. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.”
That year, Allen attempted to copyright the image, but his request was rejected because the image “contained more than a minimal amount of AI-created material,” according to Reuters.
Allen told the Copyright Office that his image was generated using hundreds of different prompts and altered with Adobe Photoshop to produce the final result.
Per Reuters, in a statement about the Copyright Office’s decision, Allen said he had “no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
Allen’s lawsuit claimed that he “had a specific artistic idea, conceived of in his mind, and he used Midjourney as a tool to create an artistic expression of that idea.”
“Such creative input is on par with that expressed by other types of artists and is capable of copyright protection,” the statement continued.
Other AI-generated works have faced similar hurdles in obtaining copyright protection, according to Reuters.
Kris Kashtanova, who created images using Midjourney for a graphic novel, had her argument that the images expressed her unique artistic vision dismissed. Stephen Thaler, whose AI system created an image autonomously, was also denied copyright protection.
The battle over copyright issues involving AI extends beyond images.
As previously reported by the Deseret News, newspaper publishers such as The New York Times and Chicago Tribune have filed lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement for training their AI tools on material owned by the companies.
In June, the Center for Investigative Reporting joined the growing list of journalists filing a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Bestselling authors, including John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, also sued OpenAI last year over copyright concerns related to their creative works.
In August, U.S. District Judge William Orrick ruled that Stable Diffusion, an AI image generator, might be in violation of copyright infringement, allowing the artists’ case to proceed.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Orrick said Stable Diffusion was “created to facilitate that infringement by design.”
This lawsuit could implicate other AI companies that use Stable Diffusion to generate images, such as Midjourney and DeviantArt.
“The havoc that would be wreaked by allowing this to proceed against DeviantArt is hard to state,” Andy Gass, a lawyer for DeviantArt said in a statement, per The Hollywood Reporter. “Here, we really have an innumerable number of parties no differently situated than (us) that would be subject to a claim.”