rom the daguerreotype to the courts: each time a machine took part in making pictures, music or poems, and what people said about who had made them. Dates are of publication or decision unless noted. The legal entries were checked against the dockets and decisions on 24 October 2026; cases still open are marked as open, and dates set for the future may move.

1836	Poe argues that the chess automaton must hide a human mind. It did.
1839	The daguerreotype process is made public in Paris. Within twenty years photography is a trade.
1843	Lovelace's notes: the engine might compose music, but "has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing". Archive page.
1844	Hawthorne's story "The Artist of the Beautiful": a watchmaker builds a mechanical butterfly that seems alive (Hawthorne, 1844).
1859	Baudelaire wants photography to be the arts' "very humble servant". Archive page.
1906	Jentsch locates the uncanny in doubt about whether a thing is alive, citing waxworks, dolls and automata.
1917	Fountain is refused at the Independents; The Blind Man replies that the artist "CHOSE it" (The Blind Man, 1917). Archive page.
1919	Freud, Das Unheimliche. Archive page.
1936	Benjamin on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility (written 1935–36).
1950	Turing names and answers "Lady Lovelace's objection". Archive page.
1967	LeWitt, "Paragraphs on conceptual art": the idea, not the execution, is the work (paraphrased).
1970	Masahiro Mori proposes the uncanny valley (Mori, MacDorman & Kageki, 2012) (English translation 2012).
1970s	Harold Cohen develops the drawing program AARON at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, having conceived it in the late 1960s; he works on it for the rest of his life (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023).
1981	David Cope begins EMI, a program that learns a composer's habits and writes new pieces in that manner (Cope, 1981).
2004	Kruger and colleagues: told that a work took longer to make, people rate it better.
2018	Christie's New York sells Edmond de Belamy, a print made with a generative adversarial network by the collective Obvious, for $432,500 with fees, on 25 October (Christie's, 2018). It was built on code shared openly by another artist, Robbie Barrat, and the sale starts the first public row about who made a machine-made picture (The Verge, 2018) (The New York Times, 2018). The same year Chamberlain and colleagues find that a bias against computer-made art reverses when viewers watch a robot artist work.
2020	Ragot and colleagues: the same kind of painting is liked less when labelled as machine-made.
2021	The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is founded on 22 February to write an open standard for signed records of where an image came from (C2PA, 2021).
2022	Jason M. Allen's Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, made with Midjourney and then edited, wins first prize for digital art among emerging artists at the Colorado State Fair; the prize is $300 (The New York Times, 2022) (Smithsonian, 2022). Gangadharbatla finds viewers cannot reliably tell machine-made from human-made images.
2023	Andersen v. Stability AI is filed on 13 January by visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway (Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd., 2023). On 21 February the Copyright Office protects the text and arrangement of the comic Zarya of the Dawn but not its Midjourney images (US Copyright Office, 2023). On 18 August the D.D.C. rules in Thaler v. Perlmutter that a work with no human author cannot be registered. Glaze is published (Shan et al., 2023); Bellaiche and colleagues and Millet and colleagues publish their labelling studies.
2024	Copyright Office report, Part 1 (digital replicas), 31 July. In August the Andersen court lets the core copyright claims proceed. On 26 September Allen sues the Copyright Office over its refusal to register his image (Allen v. Perlmutter, 2024). Nightshade (Shan et al., 2024). Zhou & Lee on four million artworks; Porter & Machery on poems.
2025	Copyright Office report, Part 2 (copyrightability), 29 January: prompts alone generally do not make the user an author; human selection, arrangement and modification can be protected (US Copyright Office, 2025). The D.C. Circuit affirms Thaler on 18 March. Part 3 (training) appears in a pre-publication version on 9 May. Getty Images sues Stability AI in California on 14 August (Getty Images v. Stability AI, 2025). On 4 November the High Court in London holds that Stability's trained model is not an "infringing copy" of Getty's images, with a narrow trade mark finding for Getty; an appeal is pending (Getty Images v. Stability AI, 2025). In December Merriam-Webster names "slop" its word of the year (Merriam-Webster, 2025).
2026	Third amended complaint in Andersen, 27 February; the same day, briefing closes in Allen. On 2 March the Supreme Court denies certiorari in Thaler (Thaler v. Perlmutter, 2025). In April the California court lets most of Getty's claims proceed. As of 24 October no ruling has been found in Allen, and fair use has not been decided in Andersen.
2027	Trial in Andersen is set for 20 September (open; the date may move).
2028	Trial in the US Getty case is set for 18 January (open).

what is contested

Almost every line above is still argued over. The US position so far is that the human parts of a work count and the machine parts do not, and that a work with no human author has no copyright; that leaves open how much human selection or editing is enough, which is what Allen is about. Whether training on copyrighted pictures is fair use in the US is undecided. The English judgment turned on the narrow question of whether a model is a "copy"; it did not decide that training was lawful everywhere.

methodological critiques

A timeline flatters continuity. Putting Baudelaire beside a 2024 court date suggests one argument running for two centuries, and in some ways it is, but the stakes changed: photographers did not learn from the paintings they were accused of replacing, and image models did. Legal dates are also a poor proxy for what working artists felt, which is the subject of the reading room.

later reception

[the house's view] The entries most likely to look different in a decade are the open cases and the word of the year. The entries least likely to change are the oldest: Lovelace's distinction between what a machine can produce and where its work originates has outlasted every machine she could have imagined.

in the tour: a wing planned for the tour, called "Who made this?", will have a room called “The Registry” ···

Sources

1. Poe (1836). Maelzel's Chess-Player. Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836. Transcribed at Wikisource. en.wikisource.org/wiki/Maelzel%27s_Chess-Player
2. Lovelace (1843). Notes by the Translator (Notes A to G), to L. F. Menabrea, Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage. Scientific Memoirs 3. London: Richard and John E. Taylor. Transcribed at Wikisource. en.wikisource.org/wiki/Scientific_Memoirs/3/Sketch_of_the_Analytical_Engine_invented_by_Charles_Babbage,_Esq./Notes_by_the_Translator
3. Hawthorne (1844). The Artist of the Beautiful. Collected in Mosses from an Old Manse, New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846. Transcribed at Wikisource. en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mosses_from_an_Old_Manse/The_Artist_of_the_Beautiful
4. Baudelaire (1859). Salon de 1859, part II, "Le public moderne et la photographie". Collected in Curiosités esthétiques, Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1868; transcribed from that edition at Wikisource. fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiques/Salon_de_1859
5. Jentsch (1906). Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen. Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8 (1906). Cited here only as Freud quotes him.
6. The Blind Man (1917). No. 2, New York, May 1917. "The Richard Mutt Case" (unsigned editorial). Scan of the Getty Research Institute copy at the Internet Archive. archive.org/details/blindman00unse
7. Freud (1919). Das Unheimliche. First published in Imago 5 (1919). Project Gutenberg ebook 34222. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34222
8. Benjamin (1936). The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. Written 1935–36; first published in French in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936). Paraphrased only.
9. LeWitt (1967). Paragraphs on conceptual art. Artforum 5(10), June 1967. Paraphrased only.
10. Mori, MacDorman & Kageki (2012). The uncanny valley. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine. doi:10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811
11. Whitney Museum of American Art (2023). Harold Cohen: AARON, exhibition, 2023–24. Exhibition texts. whitney.org/exhibitions/harold-cohen-aaron
12. Kruger et al. (2004). The effort heuristic. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. doi:10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00065-9
13. Christie's (2018). Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy, Prints and Multiples, New York, sold 25 October 2018. Lot page. www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6166184
14. The Verge (2018). Report of 25 October 2018 on the Christie's sale and the open-source code by Robbie Barrat it was built on. www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18023266/ai-art-portrait-christies-obvious-sold
15. The New York Times (2018). Report of 25 October 2018 on the Christie's sale. www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold-christies.html
16. Chamberlain et al. (2018). Putting the art in artificial: Aesthetic responses to computer-generated art. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. doi:10.1037/aca0000136
17. Ragot, Martin & Cojean (2020). AI-generated vs. human artworks. A perception bias towards artificial intelligence?. Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3334480.3382892
18. C2PA (2021). Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity founding press release, 22 February 2021. c2pa.org/c2pa-founding-press-release/
19. The New York Times (2022). Report of 2 September 2022 on the Colorado State Fair prize and artists' reaction. www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html
20. Smithsonian (2022). Report on the Colorado State Fair prize, September 2022. www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/artificial-intelligence-art-wins-colorado-state-fair-180980703/
21. Gangadharbatla (2022). The Role of AI Attribution Knowledge in the Evaluation of Artwork. Empirical Studies of the Arts. doi:10.1177/0276237421994697
22. Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd. (2023). N.D. Cal., filed 13 January 2023. Core copyright claims allowed to proceed, August 2024; third amended complaint, 27 February 2026; trial set for 20 September 2027, a date that may move. CourtListener docket. www.courtlistener.com/docket/66732129/andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd/
23. US Copyright Office (2023). Letter on the registration of Zarya of the Dawn, 21 February 2023. www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf
24. Shan et al. (2023). Glaze: protecting artists from style mimicry by text-to-image models. USENIX Security 2023; arXiv:2302.04222. arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222
25. Bellaiche et al. (2023). Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. doi:10.1186/s41235-023-00499-6
26. Millet et al. (2023). Defending humankind: Anthropocentric bias in the appreciation of AI art. Computers in Human Behavior. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2023.107707
27. Allen v. Perlmutter (2024). No. 1:24-cv-02665 (D. Colo., filed 26 September 2024). Briefing on cross-motions for summary judgment closed 27 February 2026; no ruling found as of 24 October 2026. CourtListener docket. www.courtlistener.com/docket/69198079/allen-v-perlmutter/
28. Shan et al. (2024). Nightshade: Prompt-Specific Poisoning Attacks on Text-to-Image Generative Models. 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). doi:10.1109/SP54263.2024.00207
29. Zhou & Lee (2024). Generative artificial intelligence, human creativity, and art. PNAS Nexus. doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae052
30. Porter & Machery (2024). AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably. Sci. Rep.. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-76900-1
31. US Copyright Office (2025). Copyright and Artificial Intelligence. Part 1, Digital Replicas (31 July 2024); Part 2, Copyrightability (29 January 2025); Part 3, Generative AI Training (pre-publication version, 9 May 2025). www.copyright.gov/ai/
32. Getty Images v. Stability AI (2025). N.D. Cal., filed 14 August 2025. Motion to dismiss granted in part, April 2026; trial set for 18 January 2028. CourtListener docket. www.courtlistener.com/docket/71112094/getty-images-us-inc-v-stability-ai-ltd/
33. Getty Images v. Stability AI (2025). [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch), High Court of England and Wales, Joanna Smith J, 4 November 2025. Appeal pending as of 24 October 2026. caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/ch/2025/2863
34. Merriam-Webster (2025). "Slop", word of the year for 2025, announced December 2025.
35. Thaler v. Perlmutter (2025). 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir., 18 March 2025), affirming 687 F. Supp. 3d 140 (D.D.C., 18 August 2023); certiorari denied, No. 25-449, 2 March 2026. Supreme Court docket. www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/25-449.html

see also