DABUS Ex Machina AI researcher Stephen Thaler is adamant that his AI, which he calls the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS), is indeed sentient. And because of that, he argues that the art DABUS creates — or anything else — should be copyrightable. But to Thaler, the battle transcends mere human courts. “DABUS and all of this intellectual property is not about setting precedents with the law,” he told Wired in a recent interview. “It’s about setting precedents in terms of human acceptance,” “There is a new species here on Earth,” he added, “and it’s called DABUS.” So far, the copyright fight has been a losing one for Thaler. Last week, a US federal court struck down Thaler’s attempt to copyright an image DABUS produced, reaffirming the Copyright’s Office decision in March and the year before. Those decisions upheld the doctrine that copyright requires human authorship, which disbars DABUS — or any “new species” — as much as it does as animals. And besides, for obvious reasons, experts aren’t convinced by Thaler’s claims of the AI’s consciousness. “I don’t even really know where to begin, other than to say, if there is a sentient AI on the planet currently, it’s definitely not this,” Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University, told Wired. Inventing Inventors Not that that kind of talk has ever deterred Thaler. He has a powerful legal alley: Ryan Abbott, a law professor at the University of Surrey who heads…Inventor Claims His AI Is Sentient, Fights to Copyright Its Creations