The automated artist Stephen Thaler attempted to challenge the US Copyright Office again to push for copyright protection for his 2012 AI-generated piece, A Recent Entrance to Paradise. After reviewing his request to overturn the ruling of Thaler v. Perlmutter, the Supreme Court still stands with the then-director of the registry’s conclusion that: “Human authorship is necessary for AI artwork to be protected from theft.”

While it appears to be another win for traditional and digital artists, Thaler’s third copyright loss may not matter. One AI artist successfully tested the limitations of transforming autonomous tech into a human tool to showcase elements of expression and creativity. So why did the Thaler repeatedly fail?

Stephen Thaler’s DABUS Destroyed His Credibility

The leading cause as to why A Recent Entrance to Paradise could not be considered an original work is DABUS’s generative functions. DABUS stands for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. Stephen Thaler has developed previous versions of growing artificial intelligence since the 1990s that gather useful information and were later trained with prompts to create generative outputs.

With each successfully tested version, he patented their functionality up to 2012. DABUS became the subject of whether an AI machine can be considered an inventor. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) and the Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) debated two applications that Thaler submitted in 2018.

He claimed that DABUS designed the flashing beacon “Neural Flame” and the food-and-beverage holder “Fractal Container”. He credited himself as the contributor rather than the AI’s creator. The CAFC and the USPTO cited the US Patent Act, Title 35, which states that the inventor must be a “natural person”. DABUS was rejected on Aug. 5, 2022, because the system could not be considered human.

Around the same time, Thaler also submitted a copyright request for A Recent Entrance to Paradise to the Copyright Office. Former Director Shira Perlmutter reviewed the form and, on Feb. 14, 2022, ruled that DABUS was prompted to create an image that lacks human involvement. The AI researcher filed a petition with the CAFC to reverse her judgment on Jan. 12, 2023.

Thaler vs. Perlmutter’s court proceedings concluded on Mar. 18, 2025. The majority favored the director and the US Copyright Office’s decision for the previous reasons, with the understanding that generative AI can plagiarize and alter natural artworks. Thaler attempted to have the ruling overturned by petitioning the US Supreme Court. Unfortunately for DABUS’s inventor, they declined his request on Mar. 2, 2026.

Kent Keirsey Earned the First AI Art Copyright Protection

Where Stephen Thaler failed doesn’t mean that AI artists will give up on experimenting with the limitations of the Copyright Act. Invoke founder Kent Keirsey previously failed three times to secure the authorship rights between 2023 and 2024.

According to Artnet, he adopted the image generator Stable Diffusion, which allows people to generate images based on a user’s prompt. The AI artist took what he learned from the AI program and developed Invoke from there. When the Copyright Office rejected his generated piece, “A Single Piece of American Cheese,” in August 2024, Keirsey decided to demonstrate the human effort that Invoke allows.

The AI art platform goes beyond prompt image generation and equips users with Photoshop-esque tools. Unlike Stephen Thaler’s DABUS and Stable Diffusion, Invoke allows AI artists to apply image edits and their placement before rendering an export.

Keirsey recorded the process of “A Single Piece of American Cheese” and presented the areas that rely on human additions, removals, and readjustments. The Copyright Office witnessed him making trial-and-error attempts with various parts of a stained-glass woman’s head.

They corrected Invoke for almost every mistake; it couldn’t properly generate from the prompts it was given. Keirsey stopped editing after he found artistic satisfaction. Because of his efforts, the Copyright Office granted copyright protection to “A Single Piece of American Cheese.”

He explained his achievement as something the law should be consistent with. “The intent and purpose to show that there is a threshold, and if you cross that, human creativity can merit the copyright,” he said to Artnet. “[They] don’t really provide great guidance because it doesn’t have any examples. […] The challenge right now is we need good examples; we need demonstrations.”

AI Art Will Live if Used Responsibly

After the world experienced the damage that generative AI can cause, the adopters and supporters will never make it go away. The lesson we can learn from Stephen Thaler is that he lacked the understanding of human expression and involvement. He was too focused on patenting DABUS as the “Creativity Machine” when his competition, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, wants users to generate any prompt.

Yet, social media will agree that the artificial intelligence ecosystem has been used for the worse for nearly 4 years. From wanting to automate animation to deepfake pornography, guardrails on the technology are needed more than ever. Kent Keirsey successfully found a middle ground with Invoke. It encourages AI artists not to rely too heavily on prompt image generation and to use practical art techniques to help AI realize their vision.