No Copyright for Certain AI-Generated Works, but Maybe Yes for Others, if Prompt

A federal court held that a work generated autonomously by a computer system is not eligible for copyright because it lacks human authorship. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, Judge Beryl Howell upheld the Copyright Office's denial of Stephen Thaler's application to register an image made by his "Creativity Machine," noting that his filings described it as "autonomously created." The court left open whether a user's sufficiently detailed prompts could make them an author. The Copyright Office's Zarya of the Dawn letter concluded that Midjourney users are not authors of the images the tool generates.