"This is Quadratic Gaussian, a piece of digital art generated by Michael Noll exactly 60 years ago (August 28th 1962) and successfully copyrighted two years later in 1965 after a lengthy debate."

"As he felt a personal connection to this work, Noll attempted to exhibit it and copyright it. As he recalled in a short autobiographical essay (https://jstor.org/stable/1575947) this was not an easy process and the copyright application has to be resubmitted several times:"

"“At first they refused since a machine had generated the work. I explained that a human being had written the program that in- corporated randomness and order. They again refused to register the work, stating that randomness was not acceptable. (…)"

"I finally explained that although the numbers generated by the program appeared ""random"" to humans, the algorithm generating them was perfectly mathematical and not random at all.”"

"On April 6th 1965, Gaussian Quadratic was finally registered by the copyright office of the US as a “Geometric Abstract Forms”"

"The two main issues are still personal originality (has the art been made by someone?) and unicity (is the work unique and not a large universe of “possible” works?)"

"Noll has defined the parameters of the generation and then he has chosen one particular work, in the same way as AI artist can associate a prompt and a seed."

"Another aspect that remain very much actual is that Bell Labs had contemplated applying some form of corporate ownership to generative art"

"Conversely he got back his full ownership to the generated work, as Bell Labs even supported his own copyright application to distance themselves."

"The leading creators of AI visual model seems to go through the same road and acknowledge the generator as the ""author"" although not because AI art is ""not serious"", but rather because it is *too* serious and create potentially huge issues of public accountability."

"If a working version of midjourney or stablediffusion had magically appeared in the 1960s, the small emerging community of digital artists would have completely shocked and amazed. But that would not have radically challenged their own views of authorship and art making"

"On top of the generation process, there is now this immense cumbersome collective memory of all major artworks made that do complicate further the assignment of authorship (at least if the prompt are not careful enough to dilute the mention of influential authors and artworks.)"