I explained it in detail in a comment I put on the root of the thread. In a nutshell, Thaler is declaring "I am not the copyright holder of this artwork, the AI itself is the copyright holder of the artwork. I want to register this artwork's copyright to the AI that produced it." The copyright office - and, subsequently, all the courts he has appealed the case to - have told him "but an AI is not a legal person, so an AI cannot hold copyright to the artwork. And you are declaring that you yourself are not the holder of the copyright, you are quite insistent on that. So this artwork has no copyright holder. That means it's public domain." This is an important distinction. The court isn't ruling that AI art in general is in the public domain. It's ruling that this art is in the public domain because this guy trying to register it is insisting that it was created without any human involvement. Unfortunately a lot of news articles miss this distinction because a headline declaring "AI art ineligible for copyright" draws a ton of clicks. This has been going on for over three years now, at least. Criminy, I just checked. Thaler began jousting this windmill in 2018, that's when he first made this ridiculous application. Years before modern generative AI came onto the scene. The Thaler v. Perlmutter case started in mid-2022. He is a very persistent loon.