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Judges Find AI Doesn't Have Human Intelligence in Two New Court Cases
Brief published March 10, 2026 ยท Original source published March 9, 2026
Original reporting by EditorDavid at yro.slashdot.org.
Automated brief. Verify important details at the original source.
Supreme Court Confirms Water Still Wet, AI Still Not Human
Two U.S. judges have made the groundbreaking legal determination that artificial intelligence systems are not, in fact, human beings. Legal scholars nationwide are reportedly stunned by this judicial wisdom, which ranks somewhere between "fire is hot" and "software needs electricity to run" on the scale of earth-shattering revelations.
The latest chapter in humanity's ongoing quest to convince computers they deserve legal rights began with Stephen Thaler, an artist and computer scientist who apparently has enough free time to file lawsuits claiming his AI bot should get copyright protection for its artwork. Thaler's legal crusade represents the kind of forward-thinking that only emerges from spending too much time in a lab where your primary conversation partner is a neural network that thinks every problem can be solved with more matrix multiplication.
Within the span of a month, two separate courts have essentially told Thaler what anyone who has ever tried to explain a joke to ChatGPT already knows: AI systems, despite their impressive ability to generate human-like text and images, remain fundamentally different from actual humans in legally significant ways. The Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler's copyright case on Monday, while another judge ruled that AI cannot qualify for patent ownership. These decisions have sent shockwaves through exactly zero practicing attorneys, who have somehow managed to continue breathing despite AI not yet achieving legal personhood.
The copyright case centered around artwork that Thaler's AI system had generated autonomously. In the grand tradition of naming AI systems after concepts they don't understand, Thaler called his creation the "Creativity Machine," which sounds like something a startup would pitch to venture capitalists right before asking for $50 million to disrupt the art industry. The machine allegedly created visual art without human intervention, leading Thaler to argue that since he owned the AI, he should own the copyright to whatever it produced. This logic follows the same reasoning that would make Toyota the author of every grocery list written in a Camry.
The U.S. Copyright Office, displaying the kind of bureaucratic common sense that typically gets lost in government agencies, has consistently maintained that copyrights can only be granted to human authors. This position stems from the reasonable assumption that copyright law exists to incentivize human creativity, not to create a new asset class for whoever can afford the most GPUs. The Copyright Office has been surprisingly consistent on this point, even as tech companies have spent the last few years trying to convince everyone that their large language models are basically digital Shakespeare with better training data.
Patent law has followed a similar trajectory, with courts ruling that AI systems cannot be listed as inventors on patent applications. This creates the delicious irony that the same AI systems being marketed as revolutionary problem-solving tools are legally considered too non-human to take credit for solving problems. The Patent Office has maintained that inventors must be "individuals," a term that has historically referred to humans rather than collections of weighted matrices that excel at predicting the next token in a sequence.
The legal reasoning behind these decisions reveals the gap between AI capabilities and AI rights that tech evangelists prefer to ignore. Current AI systems, regardless of their impressive outputs, operate through statistical pattern matching rather than conscious creativity. A neural network that generates a painting has no more understanding of art than a calculator has understanding of mathematics. Both tools can produce sophisticated results, but neither possesses the intentionality, consciousness, or legal standing that copyright and patent law assume of their human beneficiaries.
These court decisions arrive at a particularly amusing moment in AI development, when companies are simultaneously arguing that their AI systems are sophisticated enough to replace human workers while also claiming they're not sophisticated enough to be held responsible for their outputs. It's the corporate equivalent of wanting your AI to be Michelangelo when it comes to capability and a toaster when it comes to liability. The legal system, displaying admirable consistency, has essentially responded with "pick one."
For developers and founders watching this legal theater, the implications are straightforward: AI remains a tool, not a legal entity. Your startup's "AI co-founder" cannot actually co-found anything, your AI-generated code cannot hold patents, and your AI artist cannot copyright its masterpieces. The technology may be advancing rapidly, but the law moves at its own pace, guided by principles that predate the current hype cycle by several centuries.
The real winners here are the lawyers who will spend the next decade helping companies navigate the gap between AI capabilities and AI rights, billing hourly while society figures out where machines fit in legal frameworks designed for humans. At least someone's getting rich from the AI revolution, even if it's not the AI itself.