I’ve generally been against giving AI works copyright, but this article presented what I felt were compelling arguments for why I might be wrong. What do you think?
The moment that copyright is granted to AI art is the moment that the war against corporations loses. Getty images is just going to generate endless images, copyright them all, and sue any small artist that starts having an independent thought
Agreed. I believe in a strong public domain and militantly protected fair use; AFAIC, all unaltered AI output should be considered public domain. Direct human authorship (or “substantially transformative” modification) is the benchmark for where copyright should apply.
That’s not how copyright works. It’s perfectly legal to create exactly the same image that someone else made… as long as you didn’t copy their image.
True, but that assumes that the people filing copyright lawsuits know the law and are acting in good faith. And that the recipient does, too.
If I’m an artist living paycheck-to-paycheck and I get a copyright-related cease-and-desist, I probably won’t have the money or time to fight it even if I know that it’s wrong.
Yeah. In a world where lawyers cost money, corporations can and will squash small artists without hesitation, with cease and desists, DMCA takedowns via youtube and similar platforms, and by threatening lawsuits they won’t even have to persue because most people can’t afford to fight it.
Even companies often can’t afford to fight bigger companies. Like, the makers of Kimba the White Lion had a very clear case that Disney plagiarized them in making The Lion King (if you go on youtube you can find shot-for-shot scene comparisons, it’s bonkers) but couldn’t afford to fight it at all. And that was a company - individual artists have no chance vs disney & etc.
No, the arguments presented in the article are not compelling.
A bit like how Euthanasia is foundationaly fine but it’s allowance under capitalism leads to the poor being pressured to die, while capitalism oppresses us fucking over A.I. art’s ability to be copyrighted is good.
If it were allowed to be copyrit corporations would fuck over creatives more than they currently do and use it to union bust.
Of course in a post-capitalist world copyright won’t matter.Therefore this shit should never get copyright protection.
The argument relies a lot on an analogy to photographers, which misunderstands the nature of photography. A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.
A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.
This AI ruling is also actually completely in-line with existing precedent from the photography world.
The US Copyright Office has previously ruled that a photograph taken by a non-human (in this case, a monkey) is not copyrightable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
If he had deliberately caused the monkey to take that photo, he might have owned the copyright.
If you pay a photographer to take photos at your wedding, you own the copyright for those photos - not the photographer.
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If you deal with the photographer that you own the images from the wedding and that’s in the contract, yeah. Otherwise, traditional copyright law would apply, and the photographer gets the rights.
A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.
I like this analogy a lot.
“Prompts” are actually used a lot in creative circles, whether for art or writing. But no matter how specific you are when you write a prompt for, say, r/WritingPrompts (and some of them are incredibly specific due to posters literally having an idea and hoping someone else will write it for them), the resulting story will never be copyrighted to you.
What if you’re paying the writers on a work for hire basis?
The writing is still copyrighted to the writers, not to you, unless the contract states otherwise. Same as with the wedding photo example described in other comments.
In a work for hire contract, the contract explicitly states that the employer gets the copyright.
You can think of the compensation as being partly from employment, and partly from the sale of any copyright.
A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.
I understand what you’re trying to say, but I think this will grow increasingly unclear as machines/software continue to play a larger and larger part of the creative process.
I think you can argue that photographers issue commands to their camera and then evaluate the output. Modern digital cameras have made photography almost a statistical exercise rather than a careful creative process. Photographers take hundreds and hundreds of shots and then evaluate which one was best.
Also, AI isn’t some binary on/off. Most major software will begin incorporating AI assistant tools that will further muddy the waters. Is something AI generated if the artist added an extra inch of canvas to a photograph using photoshops new generative fill function so that the subject was better centered in the frame?
I think the major difference that determines copywrightability is the amount of control the artist has on the outcome. If a photographer doesn’t like the composition of a photo, there’s a variety of things they can do to directly impact the photo (camera positioning/settings, moving the subjects, changing lighting, etc.), before it’s even captured by the camera. If someone is generating a picture with AI and they don’t like the composition of the image, there’s nothing they can do directly impact what the output will be.
If you want a picture of an apple, where the apple is placed precisely at a certain spot in frame, a photographer can easily accomplish this, but someone using AI will have to generate the image over and over, hoping that the algorithm decides to eventually place the apple exactly in the desired spot
This isn’t true with AI generators. You can absolutely draw in a shitty stick figure with the pose you want and it’ll transform that into a proper artwork with the person in that pose. There are tons and tons of ways to manipulate the the output.
And again, we give copyright to artists that incorporate randomness into their art. If I throw darts at paint filled balloons I get to copyright the output. It would be absolutely impossible to replicate that piece and I only have vague control over the results.
The copyright office has been pretty clear that if an artist is significantly involved in creating an image but then adjusts it with AI, or vice versa, then the work is still eligible for copyright.
In all of the cases where copyright was denied, the artist made no significant changes to AI output and/or provided the AI with nothing more than a prompt.
Photographers give commands to their camera just as a traditional artist gives commands in Photoshop. The results in both cases are completely predictable. This is where they diverge from AI-generated art.
There’s gaussian noise involved in many of photoshop’s brushes I’m pretty sure.
Does that make photoshop not a pure function of the user’s input, and hence incapable of producing anything copyrightable?
You need direct control over some elements of a work to claim copyright. Not necessarily all of them.
So even if the microtexture is out of your control, you still have complete control of the framing, color, etc. That’s sufficient to claim copyright.
If you lose control of every element by replacing them all with prompts and/or chance, then you lose the copyright. Which is what happened in the “monkey selfie” photo.
There is literally no instance in which expanding the scope of copyright law is a good thing. Never.
I disagree with this reductionist argument. The article essentially states that because ai generation is the “exploration of latent space,” and photography is also fundamentally the “exploration of latent space,” that they are equivalent.
It disregards the intention of copywriting. The point isn’t to protect the sanctity or spiritual core of art. The purpose is to protect the financial viability of art as a career. It is an acknowledgment that capitalism, if unregulated, would destroy art and make it impossible to pursue.
Ai stands to replace artist in a way which digital and photography never really did. Its not a medium, it is inference. As such, if copywrite was ever good to begin with, it should oppose ai until compromises are made.
If capitalism were unregulated you’d have anarchy and no copyright law whatsoever.
The strongest argument against AI art is that it is derivative of the copyrighted art it is based on. A photo of a copyrighted artwork would be similarly difficult to copyright. In this sense, AI art is more akin to music sampling in that it uses original material to make something new – and to sample music you must ask permission.
You can’t copyright AI-generated art even if it was only trained with images in the public domain.
In fact, you can’t copyright AI-generated art even it was only trained with images that you made.
I think this nails it. It’s probably the attack authors will use against OpenAI.
But the copyright office clearly states otherwise, so we’re in for a showdown.
Personally, I think the AI stuff seems more akin to writing a book in the style of another author, which is completely legal. And, to be clear, my option has no legal effect here whatsoever. 😅
There are two separate issues here. First, can you copyright art that is completely AI-generated? The answer is no. So openAI cannot claim a copyright for its output, no matter how it was trained.
The other issue is if openAI violated a copyright. It’s true that if you write a book in the style of another author, then you aren’t violating copyright. And the same is true of openAI.
But that’s not really what the openAI lawsuit alleges. The issue is not what it produces today, but how it was originally trained. The authors point out that in the process of training openAI, the developers illegally download their works. You can’t illegally download copyrighted material, period. It doesn’t matter what you do with it afterwards. And AI developers don’t get a free pass.
Illegally downloading copyrighted books for pleasure reading is illegal. Illegally downloading copyrighted books for training an AI is equally illegal.
You actually can. I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
Here’s an excerpt:
Like copying to create search engines or other analytical uses, downloading images to analyze and index them in service of creating new, noninfringing images is very likely to be fair use. When an act potentially implicates copyright but is a necessary step in enabling noninfringing uses, it frequently qualifies as a fair use itself. After all, the right to make a noninfringing use of a work is only meaningful if you are also permitted to perform the steps that lead up to that use. Thus, as both an intermediate use and an analytical use, scraping is not likely to violate copyright law.
The article I linked is about image generation, but this part about scraping applies here as well. Copyright forbids a lot of things, but it also allows much more than people think. Fair use is vital to protecting creativity, innovation, and our freedom of expression. We shouldn’t be trying to weaken it.
You should also read this open letter by artists that have been using generative AI for years, some for decades. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
I’m happy with the illegal downloading being illegal. Where things get murky for me is what algorithms you’re allowed to use on the data.
I get the impression that if they’d bought all the books legally that the lawsuit would still be happening.
Which works were sampled for this?
Is that a picture of a straw man?
It’s characters from a popular TV show as knitted figures.
I bet you could build a machine that could recognize subject matter from photographs of it more feasibly than you could build a machine that recognized training data from output
Derivative doesn’t mean what you think it means. I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
Here’s an excerpt:
First, copyright law doesn’t prevent you from making factual observations about a work or copying the facts embodied in a work (this is called the “idea/expression distinction”). Rather, copyright forbids you from copying the work’s creative expression in a way that could substitute for the original, and from making “derivative works” when those works copy too much creative expression from the original.
Second, even if a person makes a copy or a derivative work, the use is not infringing if it is a “fair use.” Whether a use is fair depends on a number of factors, including the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, how much is used, and potential harm to the market for the original work.
You should also read this open letter by artists that have been using generative AI for years, some for decades. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
This photography analogy is getting more tiresome the more it is repeated. It reduces the extensive work and techniques that photographers do to “using a tool”, ignoring we also have tools like photocopiers whose mechanical results are not considered separate artworks, while also trying to pass the act of iterating prompts and selecting results as something much more involved than it actually is. Like many people pointed out already, what is being described is the role of a commissioner or employer. Is Bob Iger an artist because he picked what works are suitable for release? I don’t think so.
One question I have is that if two people use the same prompt, do they get the same result?
If they do, how could that result be copyrighted because I can just as well reproduce the prompt, making an original “copy”.
If they don’t produce the same result, well it’s not the human that’s really doing the “original” part there, which is what copyright aims to protect, right?
On the other hand if I write an original comic book story and use AI as a tool to create the pictures, that, in my opinion, could be worth copyright protection. But it’s the same as just original story, it’s not really the pictures that are protected.
(And let’s not forget that AIs are mostly just fed stolen works, that needs to be solved first and foremost.)
I think your understanding of AI art tools is a bit limited. Its not all solely based on prompt. Prompts are the part of most of AI art but its not the only part of it. There are things like inpainting, outpainting, img to img, outside guidance (controlnet for SD), loras, etc. Hell that doesn’t even get into doing touch ups in other photo manipulation software where you can maybe get a general gist with art generator then draw over the output to get it closer to your real vision. Right now most people are only talking about the most bottom of the barrel stuff. Even though the user above hates that people are comparing photography to Ai art, the amount of “effort” required for the most bottom tier stuff (you posting a selfie of you doing duck lips or some other stupid trend) is at a similar level. Noone is arguing photographers don’t put a ton of skill and knowledge into their work but it seems unfair we only compare the most shit tier AI art to the true artistic end of photography instead of equating it to you take a picture of your food. Yes there is some level of effort to it but its acting like AI art requires 0 effort. You put as much effort into it as you would anything else. A use case I would love to see as the tech advances, we are seeing a ton of CGI in traditionally animated shows. Wouldn’t it be better to get a model that is trained on that specific character so you create the original scene in cgi, you run a AI art pass frame by frame, once that is done it should look far closer to the traditional style and have normal artists touch up the scene, which they already do with CGI.
I will also state since SD 2.0, they have respected robot.txt (them ignoring it prior wasn’t great).
You put as much effort into it as you would anything else.
Copyright is not meant to reward effort. This is a common misconception. Thirty years ago there was a landmark SCOTUS case about copyrighting a phone book. Back then, collecting and verifying phone numbers and addresses took a tremendous amount of effort. Somebody immediately copied the phone book, and the creators of the phone book argued that their effort should be rewarded with copyright protection.
The courts shot that down. Copyright is not about effort, it’s about creative expression. Creative expression can require major effort (Sistine Chapel) or take very little effort (duck lips photo). Either way, it’s rewarded with a copyright.
Assembling a database is not creative expression. Neither is judging whether an AI generated work is suitable. Nor pointing out what you’d like to see in a new AI generated work. So no matter how much effort one puts into those activities, they are not eligible for copyright.
To the extent that an artist takes an AI generated work and adds their own creative expression to it, they can claim copyright over the final result. But in all the cases in which AI generated works were ruled ineligible, the operator was simply providing prompts and/or approving the final result.
You make a fair point but as I said people keep focusing only on prompts. So when people see the takeaway that “Oh AI art isn’t copyrightable” it means very little since noone in an actual industry is going to give out a raw render (well they shouldn’t). So that is why I pointed out other tools in AI art. Like inpainting and img to img can easily make it or break how much we influence the AI. You are still using all the AI besides scribbling on paint on top of your raw then rerendering it.
Most of these court cases are primarily on prompt only images. So yes, its great we have the line of well duh if an artist does “sufficient” touch ups its back to being but the question becomes what is sufficient. Would it be sufficient if you still used mostly AI tools especially ones that give the users far more control over what they are rendering (Going to focus mostly on SD since it gives far more versatility than most of its competitors) like if you only use image to image. You posted your own art and it does it thing and bing bang boom is it copyrightable? Img to img only, probably is a low bar and may not get over the hump to be copyrightable but inpainting probably has a far more likely chance to be since it can factor in many things that the “curator” is wanting.
We are at a time when people are very hot on this topic. I just feel some artists are going a bit too insane with this, I understand their anxieties but its quite easy to lose sight and make draconian demands about this future especially the ones who are suggesting that you can copyright a style. Such suggestions are asinine and will hurt everyone including themselves.
The question “what is sufficient” basically amounts to convincing an official that the final work reflects some form of your creative expression.
So for instance, if you are hired to take AI-generated output and crop it to a 29:10 image, that probably won’t be eligible for copyright. You aren’t expressing your creativity, you are doing something anyone else could do.
On the other hand, if you take AI-generated output and edit it in photoshop to the point that everyone says “Hey, that looks like a ThunderingJerboa image”, then you would almost certainly be eligible for copyright.
Everyone else falls in between, trying to convince someone that they are more like the latter case. Which is good, because it means actual artists will be rewarded.
These are my thoughts as well. It seems obvious that putting in ‘cat with a silly hat’ as a prompt is basically the creative equivalent of googling for a picture.
But, as you say, that sort of AI usage is just dumb, bottom tier usage. There’s going to someday be a major, critical piece of art that heavily uses AI assistance in it’s creation and people are going to be surprised that it’s somehow not copyrightable under the laws and rulings they’re working on now.
I remember in the LOTR behind the scenes they talked about how WETA built a game l like software to simulate the massive battle scenes, giving each soldier a series of attacks and hp, etc. They then used this to build out the final CGI.
Stuff like that has already been going on for ages and it’s only going to get more murky as to what ‘AI art’ even means and what is enough human creativity and editing added to the process to make it human created rather than AI created.
Same comment with paragraph breaks added by GPT-4:
I think your understanding of AI art tools is a bit limited. Its not all solely based on prompt. Prompts are the part of most of AI art but its not the only part of it. There are things like inpainting, outpainting, img to img, outside guidance (controlnet for SD), loras, etc.
Hell that doesn’t even get into doing touch ups in other photo manipulation software where you can maybe get a general gist with art generator then draw over the output to get it closer to your real vision. Right now most people are only talking about the most bottom of the barrel stuff.
Even though the user above hates that people are comparing photography to Ai art, the amount of “effort” required for the most bottom tier stuff (you posting a selfie of you doing duck lips or some other stupid trend) is at a similar level. Noone is arguing photographers don’t put a ton of skill and knowledge into their work but it seems unfair we only compare the most shit tier AI art to the true artistic end of photography instead of equating it to you take a picture of your food.
Yes there is some level of effort to it but its acting like AI art requires 0 effort. You put as much effort into it as you would anything else. A use case I would love to see as the tech advances, we are seeing a ton of CGI in traditionally animated shows. Wouldn’t it be better to get a model that is trained on that specific character so you create the original scene in cgi, you run a AI art pass frame by frame, once that is done it should look far closer to the traditional style and have normal artists touch up the scene, which they already do with CGI.
I will also state since SD 2.0, they have respected robot.txt (them ignoring it prior wasn’t great).
Never used image generators, but usually these generative AIs don’t give the same results due to the random number generator used in the implementation.
If they do, in theory, you might be able to copyright the prompt if it’s fairly complex.
I mean you could copyright the prompt.
In my experience, it’s not a 1:1 from prompt to output. There’s noise in the models’ operation.
“Intellectual property” is a silly concept that only exists because under capitalism massive powerful corporations benefit if they can leverage the legal system to permeantly keep knowledge, innovation, and art behind a paywall, and people in society are dependent on monetary gain to survive.
We should, to the fullest extent of the law, make it such that proper credit is given to people who make things, but calling something “theft” when the person you’re “stealing” from literally does not lose anything is asinine.
It’s not actually called “theft” or “stealing”, it’s called “infringement” or “violation”. Infringement is to intellectual property as trespassing is to real estate. The owners are still able to use their property, but their rights to it have nevertheless been violated.
Also, corporations cannot create intellectual property. They can only offer to buy it from the natural persons who created it. Without IP protection, creators would lose the only protections they have against corporations and other entrenched interests.
Imagine seeing all your family photos plastered on a McDonald’s billboard, or in political ad for a candidate you despise. Imagine being told, “Sorry, you can’t stop them from using your photos however they want”. That’s a world without IP protection.
They lose remuneration for their work.
If I was never going to remunerate them they aren’t losing shit.
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Just move to that one worker’s collective in Spain that worked for a little while.
The author of this opinion has a point, and that artist not getting ownership of works involving AI image generation is a consequence, but I like that it also discourages big studios from taking AI generated mishmash as a drop-in replacement for human produced artwork. If they used it some video generation program at this moment to replace strikers, there are grounds that the studios have no ownership of it.
Anyways, I think copyright law should be fully torn down and rebuilt to reasonable levels, so AI may be a good catalyst to achieve this vision of mine.
As an author, I say cut the term waaay down. 12 years plus the option for a 12-year one-time renewal.
Some will get screwed, but the entire populace will gain.
I’d been thinking recently that cutting the copyright term down to 20 years would be reasonable. So while 12 years feels a bit low to me, the optional 12 year renewal (taking it to 24 years in total) works just fine. You have my vote.
Copyright itself is weird.
That said, a simpler way to handle this would be that the image generator model is a tool. And it doesn’t really matter if your input is through a paintbrush or a prompt in an image generator, you’re responsible for that piece of content thus you have copyright over it.
You can further couple it with the argument @luciole@beehaw.org used, that AI art is derivative work, and claim that the authors of the works used to train the model shall have partial copyright over it too.
AI art is derivative work, and claim that the authors of the works used to train the model shall have partial copyright over it too.
To me this is a potential can of worms. Humans can study and mimic art from other humans. It’s a fundamental part of the learning process.
My understanding of modern AI image generation is that it’s much more advanced than something like music sampling, it’s not just an advanced cut and paste machine mashing art works together. How would you ever determine how much of a particular artists training data was used in the output?
If I create my own unique image in Jackson Pollock’s style I own the entirety of that copyright, with Pollock owning nothing, no matter that everyone would recognize the resemblance in style. Why is AI different?
It feels like expanding the definition of derivative works is more likely to result in companies going after real artists who mimic or are otherwise inspired by Disney/Pixar/etc and attempting to claim partial copyright rather than protecting real artists from AI ripoffs.
[Warning: IANAL] The problem is that you guys assume that those generator models are doing something remotely similar to humans studying and mimicking art from other humans. They don’t; at the end of the day the comparison with music sampling is fairly apt, even if more or less complex it’s still the same in spirit.
Furthermore from a legal standpoint a human being is considered an agent. Software is at the best seen as a tool (or even less), not as an agent.
Quantifying “how much” of a particular artist’s training data was used in the output is hard even for music sampling. Or for painting, plenty works fall in a grey area between original and derivative.
It feels like expanding the definition of derivative works is more likely to result in companies going after real artists who mimic or are otherwise inspired by Disney/Pixar/etc and attempting to claim partial copyright rather than protecting real artists from AI ripoffs.
Following this reasoning (it’ll get misused by the American media mafia), it’s simply better off to get rid of copyright laws altogether, and then create another legal protection to artists both against the American mafia and people using image generators to create rip-offs.
Following this reasoning (it’ll get misused by the American media mafia), it’s simply better off to get rid of copyright laws altogether, and then create another legal protection to artists both against the American mafia and people using image generators to create rip-offs.
Certainly no disagreement from me on this point
To me this is a potential can of worms.
Copyright is absolutely a can of worms. It always has been.
That doesn’t work with AI for a variety of technical and practical reasons.
Two people could, completely coincidentally, generate something that is so similar that it looks the same at a glance… even with dramatically different prompts on dramatically different models.
No, the output of an AI is fundamentally “coincidental” and should not be subject to copyright. Human intent and authorship MUST be a significant factor. An artist can still use AI in their workflow, but their direct involvement and manipulation must be meaningfully “transformative” for copyright to apply in a fair and equitable way.
That doesn’t work with AI for a variety of technical and practical reasons.
As a rule, the law doesn’t care about technicalities or practicalities.
Two people could, completely coincidentally, generate something that is so similar that it looks the same at a glance… even with dramatically different prompts on dramatically different models.
Sure. If two humans take a photo of the same sunset standing next to each other, they will be virtually identical and they will both own full copyright protection for the photo they took.
That protection does make the other person’s photo an illegal copy - because it wasn’t a copy.
No, the output of an AI is fundamentally “coincidental” and should not be subject to copyright. Human intent and authorship MUST be a significant factor. An artist can still use AI in their workflow, but their direct involvement and manipulation must be meaningfully “transformative” for copyright to apply in a fair and equitable way.
Of course. By the way that applies to human created works too. Copyright doesn’t apply to everything created by a human, only certain things are protected. If someone asks you what 2 plus 2 is, and you reply “4”… you don’t own the copyright on that answer. It wasn’t creative enough to be protected under copyright. If you reply with a funny joke, then that’s protected.
Two people could generate the same short story through different creative processes too.
No, the output of an AI is fundamentally “coincidental” and should not be subject to copyright.
If the image generator in question generated a piece of content that looks similar enough to some piece of content protected by copyright, odds are that it has been trained with it, or that both were produced with the same set of pieces of content.
That shows that the issue might be elsewhere - it isn’t the output of the image generators, but the works being fed into the generator, when “training” them. (IMO the word “training” is rather misleading here.)
Human intent and authorship MUST be a significant factor.
Refer to the link in the OP, regarding photography. All this discussion about “intent” (whatever this means) and authorship has been already addressed by legal systems, a long time ago.
their direct involvement and manipulation must be meaningfully “transformative” for copyright to apply in a fair and equitable way.
What does “meaningfully” mean in this context? It’s common for people using Stable Diffusion and similar models to create a bunch of images and trash most of them away; or to pick the output and “fix” it by hand. I’d argue that both are already meaningful enough.
If anything, this only highlights how the copyright laws were already broken, even before image gen…
But it does matter whether your input is a brush or a prompt.
If you physically paint something with a paintbrush, you have a copyright over your work.
If someone asks you to physically paint something by describing what they want, you still have copyright over the work. No matter how picky they are, no matter how many times they review your progress and tell you to start over. Their prompts do not allow them to claim copyright, because prompts in general are not sufficient to claim copyright.
You’re ascribing full human intelligence and sentience to the AI tool by your example which I think is inaccurate. If I build a robot arm to move the paintbrush for me, I would have copyright. If make a program to move the robot arm based on various inputs I would have copyright. Current (effective) AIs prompts are closer to a rudimentary scripting rather than a casual conversation.
It’s not a matter of intelligence or sentience. The key question is whether the output of a prompt is fully predictable by the person who gave the prompt.
The behavior of a paintbrush, mouse, camera, or robot arm is predictable. The output of a prompt is not (at least, not predictable by the person who gave the prompt).
Fuck A.I. art and fuck its copyright, so we’re clear where I’m coming down on things, but that argument alone would seem to discount alot of experimental stuff I’ve done where I won’t know how it’ll come out when I start but I keep it if it looks/sounds cool.
In most experimental work, the artist does make a direct contribution to some key elements of the work, for example framing or background. Which is all that’s necessary, you can still obtain copyright over something that is only partially under your control.
If an artist gives up all direct control over an experimental work - such as the infamous monkey selfie - then I think they should no longer be able to copyright it.
Even if you can’t fully predict how a work will turn out, you still have control over your artistic processes in a way that the AI user is lacking. Even AI engineers often struggle to figure out what makes their models make the decisions that they do.
But don’t forget that this is a question that exists in both philosophical and practical aspects. Philosophically “what is art” is a very nebulous thing to pin down. Practically, if AI users are allowed to copyright their output, they can use it for “plagiarism laundering” so to speak, by ripping off artists’ entire collections, training AI on it, and then selling works that are clearly based on those other artists’ even if non-identical. This is not something current copyright accounts for, but current copyright was made for a world with printing presses and photocopiers, not one with AI.
Predictable? How are people ‘predicting’ those abstract paintings made by popping balloons or spinning brushes around or randomly flinging paint around. Where does predictable come in? Humans have been incorporating random elements into art for ages.
After you’ve spun enough brushes or popped enough balloons, the results will be fairly predictable. And some elements, for example the color of paint in the brushes/balloons, would be under full control.
Even if the final result is not completely predictable, an artist only needs to establish that a significant part of it is a form of creative expression.
A prompt is more than a command. It is a command with an immediate output that is not fully predictable by the prompt-giver.
So for example the copyright office might ask, “This image includes a person whose left eye is a circle with radius 2.14 cm. Why is it 2.14 cm?”
Traditional artist: because I chose to move the paintbrush (or mouse) 2.14 cm. The paintbrush (mouse) can only go where I move it.
Photographer: because I chose to stand 3 meters from the subject and use an 85mm lens on my camera. The magnification (size) of the eye depends only on those factors.
AI-assisted artist: because I asked for larger eyes. I did not specify precisely 2.14 cm, but I approved of it.
In your example, if you can fully predict the output of the vacuum by your voice command, then it is no different than using a paintbrush or mouse.
Counterpoint: imagine that I used physical dice to decide the size of the eyes, I just rolled 4d6 and got 21 so the eye is going to be 21mm large. From a legal standpoint, I believe that I’d be still considered a trad artist; however effectively I’m doing a simpler version of what the image generator-assisted artist does.
The output is still fully predictable by the artist.
The dice didn’t make the eyes, after all. They just showed 21, now it’s your job to actually make 21mm eyes. In doing so, you could mess up and/or intentionally make 22mm eyes. If someone asks, “Why are these eyes 21mm?”, you can answer “I decided to do what the dice asked”.
The dice are more like a client who asks you to draw a portrait with 21mm eyes. In other words, they are giving you a prompt. Nobody but you knows if they will get what they asked for.
The dice didn’t make the eyes, after all.
And arguably, neither the image generator did. Who did were the artists of the works being fed into the model. In this sense, the analogy is like the artist picking an eye from some random picture and, based on the output of the dice, resizing it to 21mm.
you can answer “I decided to do what the dice asked”.
The same reasoning still applies to Stable Diffusion etc., given that you can heavily tweak the output through your prompt. And you can also prompt the program to generate multiple images, and consciously pick one of them.
And arguably, neither the image generator did. Who did were the artists
In which case, neither the image generator nor its operator are eligible for copyright.
The same reasoning still applies to Stable Diffusion etc., given that you can heavily tweak the output through your prompt.
The point is that the AI generator (or, if you prefer, its training data) exercised direct control over the image, not you. Providing additional prompts does not change this, just as rerolling the dice wouldn’t make the dice the author.
For that matter, gives extensive prompts or other artistic direction to a human artist would not make you eligible for copyright, either. Even if the artist was heavily influenced by your suggestions.
Finally, choosing one among many completed works is not a creative process, even if it requires artistic judgment. Choosing repeatedly does not transform it into a creative process. That’s why choosing your favorite song does not mean you are a song creator.
Ultimately the only agent involved is the person commanding the vacuum cleaner through the voice assistant. If someone got copyright, that should be that person; and if we’re going to be consistent with the current (and rather shitty) typical copyright laws used by plenty govs, it should.
But it does matter whether your input is a brush or a prompt. // If you physically paint something with a paintbrush, you have a copyright over your work.
By “thus you have copyright over it”, I’m saying that it should apply equally to both (paintbrush vs. image generator), not that it currently does.
So if someone asks you to paint something and gives you detailed instructions about what they want to see in your painting, do you think they should have copyright over your work?
Under the spirit of copyright law (that, again, I criticise), and depending on how detailed those instructions are, that wouldn’t be “my work”. It would be “our work”, because the person in question is actively creating the work alongside me.
Transposing this reasoning to images generated by Stable Diffusion etc., you’d get co-authorship between the person inputting the prompt and the people who made the works used to feed the model with. You could even theoretically argue a third author - the person/people coding the model. (It’s a legal nightmare.)
No, under copyright law it would be your work and your work alone.
Someone who is providing suggestions or prompts to you is not eligible to share the copyright, no matter how detailed they are. They must actually create part of the work themselves.
So for instance if you are in a recording studio then you will have the full copyright over music that you record. No matter how much advice or suggestions you get from other people in the studio with you. Your instruments/voice/lyrics, your copyright.
Otherwise copyright law would be a constant legal quagmire with those who gave you suggestions/prompts/feedback! Remember, an idea cannot be copyrighted, and prompts are ideas.
In the case of Stable Diffusion, the copyright would go to Stable Diffusion alone if it were a human. But Stable Diffusion is not a human, so there is no copyright at all.
This is going to be the kind of thing that builds resentment against humanity among AI persons. Of course the law will lag by perhaps a hundred years before recognizing them as persons, and more likely they’ll fix it themselves instead of waiting for us to fix it.
Removed by mod
There is an error that many in the dispute are making…
Imagine that BORG-AI is an ai that was trained ONLY on GPL2 program-code…
Imagine that you use it to fill-in some functions in your codebase…
What sort of copyright-status should be on those??
I say they should be GPL2, and they should be considered derivative of the ENTIRE training-data-set.
That doesn’t mean I think that the BORG-AI should be a copyright holder, though!
I’m saying that there should be a NEW category, between uncopyrighted & copyrighted, and that the training-sets need to be segregated by license, so that derivatives CAN know what their legal licensing-status is.
GPL2, GPL3, BSD, LGPL2, whatever… it needs to be consistent within the training-data-set, so that the derivative of THAT module/expert can be having the same license, see?
not supernatural beings
If God was real and literally came down and showed up at the copyright office, would they really deny him the rights to all creation?
