In stark contrast to Western rulings (well, except some early ones) and previous Chinese stance of control over generative AI, a Chinese court just awarded copyright protection to AI-generated images.

The case revolved around the generation of a pop idol image; not the use of copyrighted images in the training of a generative AI model that is the source of a current US lawsuit with artists.

The argument was the one that we’ve been hearing already: because it was a human being who wrote the relevant parameters for the AI model and ultimately selected the image in question, the final output is directly generated based on their intellectual input and “reflects the plaintiff’s personalized expression.”

It will be interesting to see how this goes.