{"id":380508,"date":"2026-04-15T10:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T10:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/380508\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T10:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T10:36:10","slug":"this-monkey-selfie-will-protect-you-from-ai-slop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/380508\/","title":{"rendered":"This monkey selfie will protect you from AI slop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monkey business<\/p>\n

The monkey took that selfie in 2011. For a brief, blissful period, Slater enjoyed global attention<\/a> from the picture, but the troubles began when someone uploaded the photo to Wikipedia, from where it could be downloaded and used free of charge. He asked the Wikimedia Foundation to take it down, arguing it cost him \u00a310,000 (worth about $13,400 today) in lost sales. In 2014, The organisation refused, arguing the photo was in the public domain because it wasn’t taken by a person.<\/p>\n

The row prompted the US Copyright Office to issue a statement<\/a> that it would not register work created by a non-human author, putting “a photograph taken by a monkey” first in a list of examples. (Slater didn’t respond to interview requests, but his representation arranged for the BBC to use the photo in this article.)<\/p>\n

The story gets weirder. Soon after, the advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) sued Slater on behalf of the monkey. The case argued all proceeds from the photo belonged to the macaque that took the picture, but it was really seen as a test case, an attempt to establish legal rights for animals. After four years and multiple court battles, a San Francisco judge dismissed the case. The judge’s reasoning<\/a> was simple: monkeys can’t file lawsuits.<\/p>\n

“It was kind of the biggest public conversation piece on this topic,” says intellectual property lawyer Ryan Abbott, a partner at Brown, Neri, Smith and Khan in the US. “At the time it was very much about animal rights. But it could have been a conversation about AI.”<\/p>\n

\"CourtesyCourtesy of Stephen ThalerTechnologist Stephen Thaler says an AI created this image, A Recent Entrance to Paradise, all by itself. US courts say that means no one can own it (Credit: Stephen Thaler)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Monkey business The monkey took that selfie in 2011. For a brief, blissful period, Slater enjoyed global attention…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":380509,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-380508","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}