On 2 March 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving in place the lower-court rulings that refused copyright registration for an image said to have been created autonomously by AI. The immediate result is limited but significant: in the United States, a work presented as having no human author remains outside copyright protection.
That development is unlikely to be treated in Europe as a foreign curiosity. It reflects a broader principle that remains central on both sides of the Atlantic: copyright protects human creative contribution. The U.S. Copyright Office’s 2025 report confirms that AI-assisted works may still qualify for protection where a human author determines sufficient expressive elements. The report also makes clear that using AI as a tool does not, by itself, prevent copyright protection, whereas purely AI-generated material is not protected.
For European artists, the practical lesson is straightforward. The legal question is not whether AI was used at all, but how it was used. If a creator simply enters prompts and accepts the output, the case for copyright protection becomes weaker. If, however, the artist shapes the final work through identifiable creative choices — selecting, editing, combining, transforming, or arranging the material — the position becomes materially stronger. That approach fits comfortably with the EU originality standard, which centres on the author’s own intellectual creation and on free and creative choices.
This is why documentation is becoming increasingly important. Artists using generative tools should keep a clear record of the human creative process: draft versions, source materials, editing stages, rejected outputs, compositional decisions, and post-generation modifications. In future disputes or transactions, the key question may be less theoretical than evidential: can the artist show where human authorship lies?
AI also brings a wider legal and market context into view. For artists, galleries and cultural institutions, the relevant issues now extend beyond copyright subsistence to include the evidencing of human creative contribution, contractual allocation of risk, licensing position, transactional documentation, and the way authorship and authenticity are described in the market. A work may be commercially valuable and artistically significant, yet its legal position may still be weakened by poor documentation or imprecise language about how it was made. This is not because copyright law has ceased to matter, but because copyright now sits closer to due diligence, contracting and market representations in a more visible way.
The same is true for the market. Galleries and collectors should increasingly expect to ask not only whether a work is original, but how the creative process can be evidenced. If authorship is likely to affect protection, licensing, or enforceability, it is also likely to affect valuation, sale documentation and buyer confidence.
The more prudent view for European artists is therefore a practical one: use AI where it serves the work, but preserve evidence that the final expression remains the result of human judgment. In the years ahead, that distinction is likely to matter not only for copyright, but also for licensing, enforcement and the long-term value of the work.