Is a painting created by artificial intelligence protected by copyright?

Auction House Christe recently announced to auction for the first time an artwork created by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The work in question is a painting portraying a certain Edmond Belamy, which was produced by an algorithm called GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) developed by the Paris-based collective Obvious.

An interesting question is whether such an artwork can be protected by copyright.

The anthropocentric approach of Belgian (and by extension continental European) copyright law grants protection only to works produced by human beings (see Article XI.170 of the Economic Law Code that refers to a "natural person"). In the Infopaq Judgment ruled that copyright only covers original works, and that originality must reflect the author's "own intellectual creation. This means that an original work must reflect the personality of the author, which clearly means that a human author is necessary for copyright to arise on a work.

Thus, no copyright protection accrues to animals, robots or, as here, AI algorithms.

To the extent that the human hand that wrote the AI algorithm is reflected in the artwork, it could possibly claim copyright.