In British copyright law, there is a sentence that has been waiting nearly forty years for a summer like this one. Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides that, when a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is generated by a computer with no human author, the legal author "shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken."1 Parliament was legislating for the computing it could see in 1988 (e.g., expert systems, weather maps, statistical outputs. Legislators did not have in mind the general-purpose generative systems that now put images on art gallery walls. This March, the UK government published its long-awaited report on copyright and artificial intelligence. It observed that, under the 1988 provision the author of a prompted work "will usually be the person who inputted the prompt."
Okay, fair enough. But then the government proposed removing the provision altogether.2
The provision may well come off the statute book, but here’s the trick: the question inside that provision is now loosed upon the world.
Who undertakes the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work, and who bears responsibility for them?
The statute is British law and a narrow authorship rule, and two of the three cases I will examine here sit in American rooms it does not reach. But if we borrow the question rather than the rule, it travels much further, past the making of a work and into the decision to put the work in front of a public.
This summer, three art institutions gave their accounts: a new museum in Los Angeles, a gallery booth in New York, and a photography gallery on Donegall Street in Belfast. The accounts do not agree, and the disagreement is worth looking at directly.
Dataland opened on June 20 at The Grand LA, the Frank Gehry complex in downtown Los Angeles, billing itself as the world's first museum of AI arts. Refik Anadol, the Los Angeles artist who co-founded it with his partner Efsun Erkılıç, built the place around the Large Nature Model, which his studio trained on images and sounds of the natural world, gathered through data partnerships with the Smithsonian, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Getty, iNaturalist, and London's Natural History Museum—in addition to field expeditions to sixteen rainforests.3 The inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, runs through January 2027. Tickets go for $49 a pop.4
Anadol does not hedge on the question posed here. He calls the work as a 50-50 collaboration between humans and machines. When NPR visited in July, he drew the boundary with deliberate precision. "Of course, machines don't dream. Machines are collaborators." Walking the Los Angeles Times through the galleries before the opening, he put it more flatly. "The system is the art."5 What is being suggested here is a division of labor, with the human supplying intention and overall direction and the machine executing variations then subject to human selection.
No institution in this story names more of its arrangements visible. The datasets, institutional partners, studio process, underlying model, the claim that the training corpus is permission-based: all are publicly named. The account is unusually extensive and yet still not settled. Detractors point at the free public archives that feed the models behind a for-profit museum, Smithsonian and Oxford material among them, and at the studio's close relationships with Google and Nvidia, down to the cloud servers the model runs on and the artist residencies Google underwrites inside the building.6
My take is that, however the machine is styled, the responsibility does not move to it. It stays with the people and the institution that trained the model, published the data account, opened the doors.
New York's answer came at a modest fair booth, and it came in two parts a month apart. In late April, the Danziger Gallery brought an untitled print to The Photography Show, the annual fair of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers at the Park Avenue Armory.7 The wall text disclosed the work as “A.I. Generated,” from the prompt "Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams' iconic Moonrise Over Hernandez." In collaborstion with AI, the artists then proofed, regenerated, and photoshopped the image over several months.
But here’s the rub. The wall text credited the printing to a master printer, Esteban Mauchi, even as it named no software and no author.8 The gallery offered editions of ten in three sizes, at $6,000, $8,000, and $10,000. The Ansel Adams Gallery, run by the photographer's grandson, sells prints of the real Moonrise for over $100,000.9
Adams shot Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico on November 1, 1941, from the shoulder of US Highway 84. The trust he later established to steward his legacy learned about this new AI-colored version the way everyone else did—by seeing it. In late May, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust stated that it "did not authorize, endorse, consent to, or acquiesce" in the AI-generated color version, that the display "exploited Ansel's name, reputation, and his most iconic image, while failing to identify any human artist responsible for its creation," and that the episode reflected "a gross failure of ethical and professional judgment."10 The Trust went out of its way to say the quarrel was not with AI. Adams, it noted, was excited about what computers might one day do for photography. The quarrel was with the missing name.
Owner James Danziger replied two days later on his gallery's website. Moonrise is in the public domain, he noted. Having hired "one of the most respected copyright lawyers in the country" to confirm it, he believed he had "every right" to commission a new work from the image. The prompt was merely the starting point. Months of human proofing and Photoshop followed. He described the print as "an imagining of what Adams saw in real life" on Highway 84, the Pontiac pulled over, the sun going down on the adobe church. "From my perspective, this was done with great respect to the image and the artist." He apologized for one thing only, not telling the Trust in advance.11
Put the two statements side by side and something surfaces that neither party said aloud. Nobody disputes that a person undertook the arrangements. Danziger claims them in detail: the prompt, lawyer, proofs, months of refinement. The Trust does not argue that the machine made the work on its own. It asks what the person who made the arrangements owes—and to whom—when the raw material is a dead man's most famous act of seeing. A public-domain determination, however sound as a matter of law, answers the first question concerning fair use but is silent on the second question of obligations arising from that use.
The label at the Armory disclosed the process and credited a printer. No human artist appeared anywhere on it.
If cultural appropriation names the contested taking of cultural material without sufficient recognition, consent, or reimbursement, then this seems to be its technological counterpart: appropriating artistic vision through computational means. The closest cultural analogy may be sampling in hip hop, which likewise raised questions of source, transformation, credit, control, and—most importantly—compensation.
Belfast's case ran the longest and closed last. Belfast Exposed, the photography gallery at 23 Donegall Street, opened Beneath the Surface in its second gallery on June 4. It featured new work by nine MFA graduates of Ulster University and the show ran through late August.12
One of the nine, Jonny Sheridan, hung a series called Galatea. The title comes from the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with what he had carved. Sheridan's version depicts a failed near-future romance between a man and his robotic AI girlfriend, and the project text asks whether AI compounds misogyny or merely reflects it.13
The complaints that followed did not center on how the images were produced. They centered on how the institution classified them. These were AI-generated works, yet they were hung in a photography gallery. The institution decided to place them within the artistic lineage of professional photography. Naturally, some photographers and artists objected.
Sheridan told BBC News NI that the work explores the perils of AI and that making it "took far more than pressing a button." Each scene began as an idea and passed through rounds of prompting, rejection and revision, with composition, style and symbolism weighed at every pass.14
Deirdre Robb, the gallery's chief executive, left the work on the wall. She granted that the images were controversial, but defended what they ask of viewers. "Belfast Exposed has never been afraid of controversy or putting things out there or asking the important questions and to me this is no different than that." In effect, the gallery sough the audience’s active confrontation with what photography and authorship mean in the age of AI.
Then the Belfast gallery did the thing neither Los Angeles nor New York did; it called a public meeting on its own decision. On the evening of July 30, it convened a free panel titled "AI, Art and Society: A Public Conversation," with Robb on it alongside the professor who directs the MFA program the nine graduates came from and two members of the Northern Ireland Assembly. A week later the gallery posted the full recording, an hour and twelve minutes of it, on its own channel.15
Belfast distributes the arrangements in almost Solomonic fashion: Sheridan made the images, and Belfast Exposed named him among the project’s nine credited contributors from the first day, which is more than the Armory label managed. The gallery made the second, institutional arrangement by deciding the work belongs on these walls, and then treated that decision as something it owed the public an accounting for. Robb never claimed the work was beyond argument. She claimed the argument belonged inside that building.
In Los Angeles, the people and the studio behind the model publish their arrangements and promote the machine to collaborator, without the machine being asked to answer for anything. In New York, the arrangements were extensive and documented: the fight being over the absent name and the borrowed one. In Belfast, the maker was named from the start, and the institution put its own judgment up for public cross-examination in a public venue and then posted the tape.
Back, then, to this essay’s opening prompt.
The UK government now proposes to remove its forty-year-old sentence, arguing that copyright exists to incentivize and reward human creativity. It may be right.16 Its position is simple: no human creator, no special copyright. But, put a human being meaningfully in the loop, and the old protections still apply.
The sentence was never the durable part. The phrase inside it is what lasts. Every generated image that reaches a wall now arrives with the same question attached: who undertook the arrangements necessary for its creation?
This summer, three art institutions agreed on that much and on nothing after it. In the museums and galleries that must decide what they will hang and defend, the question of what the arranger owes, and to whom, is being settled the way such places settle anything--one hanging at a time.
Stephen DeAngelis
Princeton, NJ
August 2026
About the Author
Stephen F. DeAngelis is the founder, president, and CEO of Enterra Solutions and Massive Dynamics, two companies that apply artificial intelligence and advanced mathematics to complex enterprise challenges. His work spans international relations, national security, and commercial technology, with visiting research affiliations at Princeton University, Department of Chemistry, the Computing and Computational Sciences and National Security Directorates of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He holds patents in autonomous decision science.
Endnotes
1 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 9(3), quoted in UK Government, Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, March 2026. The report records that the 1988 provisions were written for the computing of that decade. They were intended to cover expert-system outputs, statistical data, and weather maps, and Lord Young of Graffham presented the bill as "the first copyright legislation anywhere in the world which attempts to deal specifically with the advent of artificial intelligence." https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-and-impact-assessment-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/report-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence
2 UK Government, Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, March 2026. On general-purpose systems: "In the case of a general purpose AI which generates output in response to a user prompt, the 'author' will usually be the person who inputted the prompt." On removal: "in the absence of evidence of its ongoing value, we propose that it should be removed." https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-and-impact-assessment-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/report-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence
3 NPR, "Dataland AI art museum to open in June in LA," April 25, 2026, reporting the June 20 opening at The Grand LA, the Large Nature Model's data partnerships with the Smithsonian, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Getty, iNaturalist, and London's Natural History Museum, field data gathered from sixteen rainforests, and Anadol's description of permission-based datasets and a collaboration with the Yawanawá people of the Amazon. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/25/nx-s1-5799511/dataland-refik-anadol-los-angeles-ai-art-museum
4 NPR, "'Machines are collaborators' at this new museum of AI art," July 29, 2026, reporting the co-founding with Efsun Erkılıç, the exhibition run through January 2027, and standard entry from $49. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5894941/machines-are-collaborators-at-this-new-museum-of-ai-art
5 The 50-50 description and "Of course, machines don't dream. Machines are collaborators." are from NPR, July 29, 2026 (https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5894941/machines-are-collaborators-at-this-new-museum-of-ai-art). "The system is the art" is from the Los Angeles Times, "Dataland defies expectations. But will L.A. embrace the world's first museum of AI arts?" June 5, 2026, which also reports the model was trained on more than 500 million nature images. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2026-06-05/dataland-worlds-first-museum-of-ai-arts-refik-anadol-large-nature-model-downtown-los-angeles
6 NPR, July 29, 2026, reports that detractors object to Anadol's relationships with Nvidia and Google and to his use of free, publicly available archives, from sources including the Smithsonian and Oxford University, to build the models that underpin his for-profit projects. The same report notes that the studio runs on Google Cloud servers in Oregon and that Google Arts & Culture has underwritten artist residencies at Dataland. Dataland's own site describes the Large Nature Model as "trained on one of the most extensive permission-based datasets of the natural world" (https://www.dataland.art/). https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5894941/machines-are-collaborators-at-this-new-museum-of-ai-art
7 ARTnews, "Ansel Adams Trust Slams Gallery for AI-Generated Work at AIPAD Photography Show," May 23, 2026. The fair ran April 22 to 26 at the Park Avenue Armory, and ARTnews reported the work remained visible on the gallery's website after the Trust's statement. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ansel-adams-trust-danziger-gallery-ai-artwork-aipad-1234787113/
8 The wall label is reproduced photographically by PetaPixel, "NYC Gallery Sold an AI-Generated Ansel Adams Photo Without Permission," May 25, 2026. It discloses the prompt, a production window from November 2025 to April 2026, the credit "Printed by master printer Esteban Mauchi," and editions of ten in three sizes. No software or model is named anywhere on it. ARTnews likewise reports the work "is listed as printed by master printer Esteban Mauchi." https://petapixel.com/2026/05/25/nyc-gallery-sold-an-ai-generated-ansel-adams-photo-without-permission/ and https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ansel-adams-trust-danziger-gallery-ai-artwork-aipad-1234787113/
9 The Art Newspaper, Helen Stoilas, "Bad moon rising: AI debate erupts over 'colourised' version of a classic Ansel Adams photo," May 27, 2026, reporting the edition prices and the comparison with prints of Moonrise offered by The Ansel Adams Gallery for over $100,000. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/27/ansel-adams-photograph-ai-colourised-danziger-aipad-controversy
10 The "did not authorize, endorse, consent to, or acquiesce" language and the November 1, 1941 date are reported by PetaPixel, "NYC Gallery Says it Has 'Every Right' to Create AI Version of Iconic Ansel Adams Photo," May 26, 2026 (https://petapixel.com/2026/05/26/nyc-gallery-says-it-has-every-right-to-create-ai-version-of-iconic-ansel-adams-photo/). The "exploited Ansel's name, reputation, and his most iconic image" language and the Trust's note that Adams was "remarkably prescient about" and "excited by" the potential of computers are reported by ARTnews, May 23, 2026 (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ansel-adams-trust-danziger-gallery-ai-artwork-aipad-1234787113/). The "gross failure of ethical and professional judgment" language is reported by The Art Newspaper, May 27, 2026. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/27/ansel-adams-photograph-ai-colourised-danziger-aipad-controversy
11 James Danziger, "Statement by James Danziger," Danziger Gallery. The statement asserts the public-domain status of Moonrise, describes the confirming counsel, claims the right to create a new work from the image, describes months of human intervention after the AI starting point, and closes with an apology for not informing the Trust in advance. These are the gallery's positions. No court has ruled on any of them. https://www.danzigergallery.com/exhibitions/statement-by-james-danziger
12 Belfast Exposed, "Beneath The Surface," exhibition page, Gallery II, June 4 to August 22, 2026, listing nine exhibiting artists from the Ulster University MFA Photography programme. The gallery's page lists the artist as Jonathan Sheridan. BBC News NI and the Belfast Telegraph render the name Jonny Sheridan, and this piece follows that rendering. https://www.belfastexposed.org/exhibitions/beneath-the-surface/
13 Belfast Telegraph, "Belfast gallery hosts discussion with creatives after criticism over use of digital images," July 29, 2026, quoting the project text for Galatea, which "depicts a failed near-future romance between a man and his robotic AI girlfriend" and "asks whether AI compounds misogyny or if it merely reflects it." https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/belfast-gallery-hosts-discussion-with-creatives-after-criticism-over-use-of-digital-images/a/159307456.html
14 BBC News NI, "Gallery defends decision to use AI images in exhibition," July 24, 2026, quoting Sheridan on the process, Robb's defense, and objections from photographer Brendan Harkin and artist Chloe Austin. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5n2zvyl7no
15 The panel was announced for Thursday, July 30, 2026, at 6pm, free to attend, at 23 Donegall Street, chaired by Dr Katy Radford MBE, with panelists Deirdre Robb, Kate Nicholl MLA, Sian Mulholland MLA, and Professor Donovan Wylie, director of the MFA Photography Programme at Ulster University (Belfast Telegraph, July 29, 2026, https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/belfast-gallery-hosts-discussion-with-creatives-after-criticism-over-use-of-digital-images/a/159307456.html). Belfast Exposed published the full recording, running one hour and twelve minutes, on its YouTube channel on August 6, 2026, under the title "Belfast Exposed presents 'AI, Art & Society, an open conversation,'" describing in past tense the panel it hosted and the panelists it featured. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sfc5tWUTBU
16 UK Government, Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, March 2026. The report's stated grounds include that copyright should incentivise and protect human creativity and that there is minimal evidence the computer-generated works protection is actively used. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-and-impact-assessment-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/report-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence
Share this post
