is excellent news! But, to be fair, why shouldn't everything be in the public domain? AI makes objects 'inspired' by everything it has 'ingested', but so do human creators on a smaller scale. Copyright almost always only benefits big profits and corporations. I think people should be able to make a decent living from their work and their ideas, but I'm not convinced that copyright really helps to achieve that.

Wow this is huge. Let’s hope it holds up to years and years of legal threats from lobbyists

Does this mean we can, indeed, train AI on ChatGPT/other AI outputs?

Ehhhh. This isn't as exciting as you might think for, say, graphics. It's predicated on the fact that in the case, there's no human involvement.

Howell found that “courts have uniformly declined to recognize copyright in works created absent any human involvement,” citing cases where copyright protection was denied for celestial beings, a cultivated garden, and a monkey who took a selfie.

“Undoubtedly, we are approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put AI in their toolbox to be used in the generation of new visual and other artistic works,” the judge wrote.

The rise of generative AI will “prompt challenging questions” about how much human input into an AI program is necessary to qualify for copyright protection, Howell said, as well as how to assess the originality of AI-generated art that comes from systems trained on existing copyrighted works.

But this case “is not nearly so complex” because Thaler admitted in his application that he played no role in creating the work, Howell said.

They're just gonna nail down the line judicially on how much human involvement is required and then they'll have a human do that much.

I mean, AI tools are gonna be just increasingly incorporated into tools for humans to use.

It might be significant for something like chatbot output, though.

Copyright is outrageously long, anyway. Seriously, who benefits from works after the creator is long dead? AI works won't ever replace a human's level of ingenuity, creativity and imagination, let alone at the spur of the moment. That being said, what it does interrupt based on what we ask from it can be fresh and aid in the development or adoption of ideas we may not have thought of before. Being in the public domain is the best outcome.