Famous AI artist sues US Copyright Office over Midjourney painting

Two years ago, Jason M. Allen shocked the creative world when an image he generated with Midjourney took first place at the Colorado State Fair. Facing intense backlash from artists, he declared to The New York Times that art was dead, AI won, and humans lost.

Now, the tables have turned. Allen has just filed a lawsuit in a Colorado federal court against the U.S. Copyright Office, claiming that its refusal to grant him copyright protection is costing him millions of dollars.

Prompt engineering meets pirate markets

The dispute centers on his award-winning piece, Théâtre D'opéra Spatial. Ever since his controversial win in late 2022, Allen has tried repeatedly to register the piece with the U.S. Copyright Office, only to be rejected.

In March of last year, the agency firmly ruled that outputs generated directly by AI lack human authorship and cannot receive copyright protection. That decision effectively placed Allen's work in the public domain.

Without legal ownership, Allen claims he is losing out on serious money. He told Colorado Public Radio that the decision caused price erosion and hurt his ability to charge standard licensing fees.

To make matters worse, other people are cashing in. Allen told KUSA News that people are brazenly stealing his work, slapping it onto physical prints or turning it into crypto assets to sell across marketplaces like OpenSea and Etsy, leaving him with zero legal recourse.

How much human input counts?

Allen's legal team is now fighting back by arguing that prompting is legitimate human labor. His lawyer said Allen engaged in an extensive dialogue with Midjourney and spent significant time tweaking the image with Photoshop and Gigapixel AI.

In filings before the Copyright Review Board, Allen argued that typing detailed prompts, framing scenes, selecting focal areas, and setting atmospheric tones represent creative input on par with traditional artistic methods.

The irony is hard to miss: Midjourney itself is fighting massive copyright lawsuits from working artists who say the platform trained on their work without permission or compensation, while power users like Allen are demanding full copyright protection for the machine outputs.

Why it matters

This case exposes the sheer hypocrisy and legal mess at the center of generative AI. You cannot celebrate the death of human art one day and demand human legal protections for machine-rendered pixels the next.

For digital creators and marketers leaning heavily on AI tools, this lawsuit highlights a massive practical risk. As the law stands today in the U.S., assets created primarily by AI cannot be copyrighted, meaning rivals can legally copy, repackage, and monetize your prompts and outputs without paying a dime.

We think Allen is facing an uphill battle for good reason. If the courts decide that steering an algorithm with text prompts meets the legal bar for human authorship, it would open the floodgates for mass copyright grabs on automated machine outputs. Until legal frameworks fundamentally change, treating AI-generated visuals as proprietary commercial assets remains a dangerous bet.