It's a weird assertion. Consider the hypothetical but very plausible case of an artist algorithmically generating collages of images posted around the Web. Fair

It's a weird assertion. Consider the hypothetical but very plausible case of an artist algorithmically generating collages of images posted around the Web. Fair use and attribution issues aside, I would be pretty surprised to hear that this was not a protectable work, or that there was a certain threshold of algorithm the complexity above which the work became unpredictable. That's more or less what today's AI art is, using a huge neural network in the core of the algorithm. Of course, the case in the article is even weirder than the headline: someone is trying to claim that the algorithm, which is not a person or legally-recognized organization by pretty much any sensible definition, is the author of a particular work of art. This is of course silly, and of course the US copyright office should tell the judge that it is silly. But the headline as written implies something else entirely, the more subtle conversation above.