No one owns the copyright to works created by generative AI.
Whenever I say that, people ask: “But what if a person makes important contributions to the work?”
Untitled, Bathers Series 1986 From the software AARON.
An exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art provides one interesting answer. Starting in the 1960s, artist Harold Cohen (1928-2016) began using “a procedural system [that] mimics human decision-making by processing its bodies of knowledge through instructions for completing tasks and if-then rules.”1
Cohen personally developed the software he used, which he named AARON.
Cohen trained AARON by programming it with algorithms that express the cognitive processes that artists learn through study and work.
Cohen built the plotters and printing machines that drew and painted the works AARON created.2
“Cohen sought to always program the cognitive processes of a painter into his algorithms, imitating the work of understanding the relationship between line and form in representations as an abstract painter would. Cohen’s unique code creates legible figures and objects in infinite combinations with a spatial knowledge of the third dimension.”
From the Figurative Phase “Harold Cohen: AARON” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, February 3 to May 19, 2024.
Surely with that level of involvement, Cohen would own the copyright to the art AARON created.
As far as I can tell, he never did.
I was able to find only ONE copyright registration in which Cohen was mentioned as an author: A registration for a coloring book with images created by AARON. The copyright covers only the text , meaning there’s no copyright to the images.
In contrast, contemporaries Georgia O’Keeffe and Andrew Wyeth each have hundreds of copyright registrations for their art.
Maybe there are no copyright registrations3 because Cohen “understood his work with AARON to be a collaboration”4 so he never tried to claim copyright for another’s work. Or, maybe he tried and the Copyright Office wouldn’t grant the registration.
From the “Figurative Phase” to the “Harold Cohen: AARON” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, February 3 to May 19, 2024. ↩︎
“Cohen built his own plotters and painting machines, which interpret commands from a computer to make line drawings on paper with automated pens and add color with brushes.” From the “Introduction” to the “Harold Cohen: AARON” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, February 3 to May 19, 2024. ↩︎
Not having a copyright registration doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no copyright in a work but, it’s common practice for working artists to register their copyrights. ↩︎
From the “Introduction” to the “Harold Cohen: AARON” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, February 3 to May 19, 2024. ↩︎
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