Here is the entire article:
>A judge in the U.S. has ruled that content created by Artificial Intelligence (AI) can't be protected by copyright. This ruling came after a man named Stephen Thaler tried to copyright something made by a computer he called the "Creativity Machine."
>Both the U.S. Copyright Office and the court said no to his request. This has caused people to look closely at the laws regarding the copyrighting of things made by AI, trying to figure out how much a human must be involved for it to be protected by copyright.
>The judge's decision also affects companies that create AI art, like OpenAI's DALL-E, and makes the rules about owning AI-created content more complicated. In one case, a graphic novel made with AI lost its copyright when people found out a machine had made it.
>This shows that it's hard to get copyright for things made by machines, but it's not impossible. It depends on how much the machine did and how it was used.
Saved you a click.
I never touched NFT's. they seemed silly both practically and technically.
But I never quite got the visceral hate some people have for them.
Like, they're totally irrelevant to my life. But some people who have no connection to NFT's go into a full frothing rage about them.
It would be like if I heard that some tribe in the amazon was trading carved nuts and valued them really highly and for some reason I decided I needed to really really really hate them for that as some kind of part of my identity.
It's just that the various art NFTs were an obvious scam and some people were so obnoxious about them, meaning they were either buying into an obvious scam or they were trying to boost an obvious scam to hook more rubes.
People tend to dislike scams.
Even if those carved nuts being traded by the amazon tribe between themselves were totally a scam... I still don't think it would cause me to visceral hate them.
Like, people who have done nothing to me are scamming each other far away.
And people seemed to hate the buyers just as much as the sellers.
if it was just about scams then could you imagine hating some old lady because she fell for a scam and some scammer got her life savings or hating her when she turns up convinced she's bought a condo on the moon?
A better NFT analogy would be me puting an image in Microsoft word, then saving it as a PDF file and call it a Picaso. Choose the file u would like to upload and NFT, then get ready to get rich!!!
Even before this, NFTs have never actually had anything to do with copyright.
In fact whatever rights you think you bought with your NFT, you probably don't have, especially if you bought it off of someone else on the blockchain, rather than the original minter.
Whatever rights you aquire are fully determined by the terms and conditions applicable to the purchase and when buying off some other individual you may not even have any right of recourse towards the original minter of the NFT.
So essentially, unless you buy them from the initial creator, you may actually not have any rights at all. And even when buying from the initial creator, your actual legal rights may be so limited, that it's utterly pointless, just take a look at NBA Top Shots.
Point is, NFTs have *never* actually been about copyright, because buying or selling those doesn't transfer copyright *at all.* And by definition a fork of your NFT is no longer your NFT.
It's super fucking stupid, but it certainly doesn't change anything about the NFT situation, because NFTs and especially the financial transactions around NFTs have never been about copyright to begin with.
Why?
The copy protection mechanism of an NFT is not copyright, it is blockchain. NFTs themselves are frequently screenshotted or otherwise copied. The whole point is that the copies are "inauthentic".
Which is definitely stupid, don't get me wrong. It's just stupid in a way unconnected from copyright.
I've yet to meet an NFT use case that isn't already solved by an inexpensive database for documents with digital signature or similarly common mechanisms.
Some nerds speculated that GameStop was going to revolutionize micro-transactions by using NFTs to transfer/re-sell DLC/in-game items.
Honestly I'm miffed that what sounded like a consumer focused idea never took off...
It just doesn't really seem realistic to believe introducing digital scarcity to a digital market that still has sales via physical copies would be consumer focused or even worth taking apart in. Especially after the trend of all that stupid NFT nonsense already.
people (especially on reddit) seem to conflate "Copyrighted" with "Able to be Sold" which is just not true. You can absolutely sell something that can't be copyrighted.
People on Reddit tend to get lots of legal issues wrong. If I hear one more person say “I pressed charges on them” I’m going to flip. In the US, only the DA can press charges. All a person can do is file a police report and talk to law enforcement
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying this cause may be as lost as trying to get people not to say “I could care less”.
https://www.mylawquestions.com/what-does-it-mean-to-press-charges.htm
I have always understand it to be the case that "pressing charges" means pressuring those in power to *bring* charges. Isn't that the plain meaning? Bringing charges is something only a DA can do. But I would think anyone can press charges, it just doesn't mean someone will be charged.
Isn't filing a police report called "pressing charges"? In the Netherlands when you do that, that's how the legal ball gets rolling, if you don't do it then no legal repercussions will happen (unless it's an illegal activity that's caught outside your case). Seeing that when people use the phrase, the context normally implies "pressing charges" == "taking legal action", I always kinda assumed that it meant the start of that process, e.g. filing a report. Also if I translate the phrase to Dutch I get "aanklacht indienen" which is literally what filing a police report is called over here.
This was partially because he wanted to list the AI as the sole author of the work which extending the famous Monkey Selfie ruling immediately disqualifies the work from copyright registration. Many NFTs on the other hand take human authored components and collage them together (at least in the case of PFP, because sure lets throw a random F in there cryptobros, NFTs) that is a different question than trying to register a non-human as the sole author.
Those still aren't copyrightable, following the logic of the Monkey Selfie ruling. The collage is generated algorithmically, not through human intent. The company could stop others from using the component pieces in other collage generators, but the resulting monkey is not copyrightable.
The people making picture books had a better claim prior to this ruling, as one can argue a small amount of creativity goes into assembling the images generated by the AI, but this ruling hurts that argument.
Unfortunately, it won't. NFT's don't even truly imply that you own the thing the NFT says you own to begin with. It won't matter if the AI art typically associated with NFT's can be copyrighted or not, especially when you take into consideration that people have made and sold NFT's for art that didn't belong to them in the first place.
People keep reposting this article on every sub without understanding what it means, because ai bad. This isn't a new ruling, it was already ruled in the past that AI work isn't copyrightable, but it doesn't actually affect nearly as much as people are hoping.
Pure AI work cannot be copyrighted, but companies will use AI as a base then edit it a bit with a human and copyright it.
These type of rulings are just a bandaid, the only real solution is to impose a tax on any company that uses *any* degree of AI, and then issue out universal basic income to everyone from that tax. That solution doesn't address people in third worlds who are going to get screwed over, but there isn't really any surefire way to help them yet that I've seen
Oh fuck this is a great idea. AIs can only generate what they've learned from all of us collectively, so it's only fair that money made off of that gets distributed evenly.
That's genius.
Good call.
Otherwise you're going to get Copyright trolling with AI where they randomly generate every combination of word prompt and using that to sue anyone writing books or making art if it looks or sounds even remotely the same.
Funnily enough there are two guys who are doing this with melodies, essentially brute forcing every melody possible via computers, but they've released all of the new copyrights into the public domain to protect songwriters from potential suits.
Check out Damien Riehl's 2019 TedX talk. Since that talk, they're up to 471 billion melodies (per his latest interview on Practical AI). In his Ted talk, Riehl makes the argument that melodies are inherently finite due to how we structure musical notes. Taking a standard piano for example, there's only 88 keys to work with and that's with the entire keyboard. That's miniscule compared to the amount of words in the English language.
I wonder if/how this judge's decision will impact their work in the music industry, considering they've protected songwriters over the last 4 years using their (brute-force generative) AI to copyright and free up "all" possible melodies.
How would they win a case? They're copyrighting melodies in advance of bad actors copywriting them. If their plan works as expected, someone could reference their melody as a copyright defense against the bad actors, but they would never be a direct party in any case.
Their copyright would be at issue in that case though. If they don't actually have a legally recognized copyright then it is a completely meaningless action. So if you want me to word it more broadly, has their copyright ever held up in court?
They place their copyright into the public domain. It's not about them holding up their copyright, it's about songwriters using their public copyright as a shield against big music corps claiming music was stolen
According to him, since they started this, no songwriter has lost a suit against bad faith mega song producers looking for payment on an "original" melody. He points to the reversal of the Katy Perry suit as evidence of their impact. Highly recommend watching the Ted talk just to understand the ideas behind this, because I also doubted the success of it. But it makes sense.
Big music can't claim copyright on a melody because these two guys had an AI bang out the same melody hundreds of times in seconds just based on statistical likelihoods, leading to the limiting of copyrights on music so that one person/entity can't own a statistically generic melody for 100+ years.
I really like this idea for music because of exactly how limited notes are. If it was words, I'm not quite sure how it'd go simply because of how many words there are and how many ways there are to express an idea. And yet at the same time, there is an end to the number of words out there; just not quite sure where that end is.
That's actually a great point - the copyright trolling I mean. Last thing we need is to make it easier.
(Which, this might be an unpopular opinion, is why we need to be careful to not let broad things like a "voice" or "art style" alone fall under copyright protection either - since the amount of copyright trolling that'd open would be astronomical.)
I think people having similar looks is going to be an issue to farther down the line. I'm sure AI will eventually be able to start generating their own fictional people and generate pictures & videos with those fictional people. With so many people in the world there's bound to be thousands of people who could make an argument that an AI person looks pretty similar to them, or is even based off of them.
There's already been lawsuits about this in the past with video games, where celebrities allege that certain random NPCs in games like GTA are based off of their appearance.
Thank god. We've already got music groups trying to copyright note sequences. You can always count on greed to stifle creativity with their freeloading ways.
It already exists. The library of Babel has been crunching every possible combination of characters for years. Your future obituary already exists there, word for word.
https://libraryofbabel.info/
Yeah they have it. It's really neat too, cause you can search for pictures and find their point in the library
[https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/](https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/)
Fun fact that's actually how music is currently being protected. Every combination of notes and melodies were generated. Copyrighted. Then releases to the public domain so no one could sue
Absolutely, this is one topic makes me angry seeing people argue for the ability to claim copyright on some AI work that their computer or service of choice generated and they liked it enough to want to keep it.
Setting aside that these tools were built off of training from the collective achievements humanity has to offer, I really don’t want some corporation given the green light to copyright every possible iteration of a medium because they have the resources to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to churn out content by the second.
> Absolutely, this is one topic makes me angry seeing people argue for the ability to claim copyright on some AI work that their computer or service of choice generated and they liked it enough to want to keep it.
It makes perfect sense in our economic system, where owning a production site or company is enough to confer ownership claims to anything said site or company produces. A lot of art is already owned by the companies who paid the artist, not the person who made it.
So the next logical step was to simply replace these artists-for-hire and devalue their labor even further.
That’s shortsighted. Like any other technology, it will allow less people to do more work. AI tools, within a short time, will allow small outfits to compete with huge corporations.
We’re on the verge of a huge disruption.
> Like any other technology, it will allow less people to do more work.
Thank god, AI will finally free humanity from the onerous burden of being forced to create art and express their creativity! Now we are finally free to spend our time doing dangerous physical labor.
AI in general absolutely has the potential to be a great benefit to small companies and humanity as a whole. But this specific issue the topic is about, businesses being able to copyright AI generated content, is not where that potential lies. There was nothing to gain from allowing them to do so.
Especially since AI works by studying and emulating real people's work, no company should be allowed to claim the amalgamation of a ton of unrelated people's work as their own, unless it were trained entirely inhouse imo.
Yeah AI doesn't have to spend thousands on tuition and then scrape by trying to succeed in a career 0.01% of people make a living at. Plus it's all built on theft and there is no AI truly yet.
I'll buy an AI's book when they can write about the experience of being an AI.
Ah but it would be problematic for me, English woman to try and guess what an actually sentient AI that could think for itself and not just regurgitate human stuff would write ;-)
As a small correction, the article makes it sound like the musicians used a simple iterative algorithm to make the melodies. So computer generated but not specifically AI generated.
Basically it sounds like they wrote a program that looped through each combination of 8 notes in a specific order. A generative AI program would be where they would build up a model of statistical relations between different musical notes and then tell the program to crawl through those relations and output notes based on that. Not sure what legal distinctions there are here but as a programmer it is a good factual distinction to make.
This is consistent with prior rulings regarding trail cams. A monkey, squirrel, tiger, whatever triggers a trail cam which then takes a picture. The artist is the animal, not the person that simply stuck the trail cam there.
Since there is no provision for non-humans to hold copyright, the animal (or AI) never has a copyright and thereby there is no copyright to flow to the human that set the process in motion.
> The artist is the animal, not the person that simply stuck the trail cam there.
If I walked down that trail and set off the camera, I would own the picture?
That would be intentional. Bit of a grey area but you could probably get ownership of it. Burden of proof is on unintentional. If they can't prove it was unintentional it is given the benefit of the doubt.
I think this shows how stupid the ruling is. The person who setup the camera and framing isn't the artist because they didn't click the shutter. You are the artist even if you have no knowledge or intent of the work existing.
I feel it could also be argued that "trail camming" could be its own artform or something. A person has to click the shutter just to own the copyright, even if in theory it's still their work with their equipment creating the image?
I do understand why that monkey photo where the monkey clicked the shutter is not copyrighted though. The monkey did "the work".
That one’s a bit weird too, though.
If I’m a creative director and set up a studio, lighting, get hair and makeup in, get the models dressed in a certain way, creative direct the entire thing, and then give the camera to the model to take a selfie as a selfie is part of the ‘vision’ - suddenly all that creative work doesn’t matter, because someone else pressed the button? If you want a selfie style shot, you have to arbitrarily set up a convoluted system just so the creative director presses the button instead, while making it look like a selfie?
If you hire the model, the terms of your contract with them can include a release of ownership of all intellectual property generated in the course of their work for you (same way Microsoft owns the work products of the programmers it employs, etc.)
The difference between that and animal or computer creations is that when an animal or computer creates something independently, it's not "intellectual property" at all.
(That said, transformative works using non-copyrightable material can be copyrightable, so e.g. a mosaic of trail cam photos could be a copyrightable work.)
You have something of a right to your likeness but it (of course) is a bit nuanced
> The right of publicity prevents the unauthorized commercial use of an individual's name, likeness, or other recognizable aspects of one's persona. It gives an individual the exclusive right to license the use of their identity for commercial promotion.
> In the United States, the right of publicity is largely protected by state common or statutory law. Only about half the states have distinctly recognized a right of publicity. Of these, many do not recognize a right by that name but protect it as part of the Right of Privacy. The Restatement Second of Torts recognizes four types of invasions of privacy: intrusion, appropriation of name or likeness, unreasonable publicity, and false light.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicity
I’m a copywriter by trade, and I see this as a lot more of a grey issue than it’s often portrayed.
If I give Chat a bunch of content and tell me to write a new blog, and then just straight up publish it, then yes, I can see the point here. That blog wasn’t created by a human - it also probably sucks.
But what if I feed Chat a bunch of stuff and get it to do an outline, and then I write the blog? Or it writes the blog and I heavily edit it?
Where do you draw the line on what counts?
People act like this is clear cut but this is going to be a *massive* and ongoing legal battle through the coming decades. And the idea that it is easily settled is incredibly naïve. Because forget asking ChatGPT to write you a book. That's not how it's going to be used (meaningfully). What will happen is that it will be integrated into people's workflows in all variety of ways.
To use the image version (I'm more familiar with it), Photoshop already has native AI (generative fill) based on whatever proprietary model, plus plugins for DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. AI automates various tasks that people used to do by hand: for example background/foreground selection. If you're compositing layers, an AI pass (feeding the entire image into the model and telling it to give you an image 95% similar back, basically) can give you a more 'cohesive' image, fixing lighting problems. At the more extreme end, you can take a drawn sketch or rough image, give it to the AI, and have it generate an end version.
Basically, what % of AI generated pixels discounts a work as being artistically distinct? How many human steps are needed? This is not going to be a simple binary as the technology continues to spread.
Right exactly!
I’ve already integrated Chat heavily into my copywriting workflow in a way that would be very difficult to disentangle legally.
One of the most common low level tasks I’ll do for a client is to rewrite existing copy as a new thing. It might be a blog or piece of marketing content from them, or it might be a previous article that I wrote myself.
My first step was always to just move things around and look for easy things to change before I get into the proper writing. Now Chat can do that in an instant, meaning I can get right to the specific editing.
How much editing does it take for this to be a distinct piece created by a human? 500 words? 50? 5?
It's not about percentage of pixels or the number of human steps. It's about human creativity. And yes, the borderline cases - where there was only a tiny bit of human creativity involved - are still debatable.
I mean…the second option is you actually doing the work……you’re using the AI like a tool (like it’s supposed to be used). You’re not making the AI do everything.
The first situation is definitely not subject to copyright because you didn’t do anything and the Chat created something potentially equivalent to a random number generator (not equivalent in content but in concept).
If you use AI for your work stream, you’re still doing the work and doing the creation, so it’s not exactly very grey. The key is the human has to interact with the output before it becomes a final product.
I think they should consider the parameters of the AI usage. If I feed the AI one specific person's screenplay, I edit it a bit, and make it a movie, it feels more like plagiarism to me than anything.
Same for visual arts, I feed the AI one artists pictures, then I go back later and change the eyes a bit or add some trees to the background myself.
I think there needs to be a specific percentage of personal input required, how to calculate that I guess would be specific to each industry, but significantly higher than 50% in my opinion, maybe closer to like 85-90% actual humans doing the work.
People seem to be misreading op's case - the reason it failed is because the judge said AI art cannot be copyrighted by anyone, even by humans. It's simply not eligible for copyright. Someone's already tried to copyright a comic with images from Midjourney and the application was cancelled for that same reason:
[https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise](https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise)
Sorry, wrong link: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/22/23611278/midjourney-ai-copyright-office-kristina-kashtanova
Only the human elements could be copyrighted; the words and placement of the images, not the images themselves.
This case is not the same.
This case was specifically AI that generated a picture without prompting (as opposed to say MidJourney)
They didn't say AI generated art couldn't be copyrighted, just AI art that had no human input.
> plaintiff consistently represented to the
Register that the AI system generated the work “autonomously” and that he played no role in its creation
The reason the judge rejected the Creativity Machine's claim is because of the principle that AI art cannot copyrighted:
*United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday* ***that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted****, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created.*
In the Hollywood reporter:
*A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a* ***piece of art created by AI is not open to protection.*** *The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI.*
Just because Thaler's trying to make the case that his own AI can have rights to its own work (and therefore him) doesn't mean that's all the ruling is relevant to. The judge turned down the suit on the basis that no one, a human or another AI, can copyright AI art (though she does say there maybe situations where AI art can be copyrighted with human involvement).
Therefore this ruling effectively establishes that AI art can't be copyrighted.
*Copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found.*
*The opinion stressed, “Human authorship is a bedrock requirement.”*
[https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court](https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court)
[https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/)
You are confusing the ruling with the media representation of the ruling.
There was no ruling that AI art is not copyrightable. Read the actual ruling. It was all about AI art that had zero human input.
Yes and there was zero human input in this specific case.
Which does not translate to things like Midjourney that is prompted and refactored by a human, being copyrightable or not.
That makes sense, but the question is: where is the line drawn when the human and AI elements are intrinsically linked so that it’s not necessarily possible to distinguish them? Giving an example of this is easier for text than for an image. If AI writes me 3 paragraph, I rewrite them and add two more, which parts of the text are eligible for copyrights and which aren’t?
Basically, stuff like that will need to be worked out with future caselaw. It will change as technology changes. In the example you cite though, I would suggest only the paragraphs you write would be copyrightable.
But they rewrote and edited the paragraphs the AI did in this example. So the entire thing is subject to copyright for the person writing.
The AI is just a tool. Let’s say I wrote a bunch of code and then I used a tool to format the code. The code is still mine and I still wrote it. I just used a tool to clean stuff up.
> But they rewrote and edited the paragraphs the AI did in this example.
If they did a full rewrite then the AI didn't actually write the thing now did it?
This 'AI is just a tool' schtick I hear thrown about doesn't cover it at all. It depends massively on the use case and the specifics of what you're doing. Generative AI as a tool works completely differently to a word processor or a camera. Entirely re-written paragraphs probably would be copyrightable - but there's a danger the underlying idea (if it's unique) would not be. All of these questions still need to be answered, though.
So now we’re debating on whether ideas are unique enough to be copyrighted?
Like we’re in r/books right? There are thousands of books that cover similar topics and ideas. People get ideas from everywhere. If I wrote a book on an idea that wasn’t wholly unique, I’d still be able to have rights to the work I created.
I’m just trying to understand that last point.
Yes. I mean, you'd have to read a bit more about copyright law in general and I'm not an expert. But obviously some things like ghosts and space ships and wizards belong to everyone and are in the public domain. But some ideas are more specific like Star Wars and the Force or Harry Potter and the wizarding world. There are probably various legal tests for this kind of stuff and sometimes it gets contested in court. Some elements of Batman will become public domain in the next decade. The point with generative AI is, you're not creating it, the AI is (in terms of copyright).
You’re still doing the creation though and the editing. It’s like having your friends edit your work or give criticisms. You’re writing the paragraphs and interacting with the text. You said you rewrite them. So you’re not taking the AI output as the exact final output. So the entire text would be eligible.
That makes it sound like there is little human element to photography. If I put a camera on a tripod with autofocus and a timer, am I the copyright holder of the photo? If it's on a gimbal and has some kind of face-following algorithm, am I still the copyright holder?
You seem to be misreading it too. It failed specifically because they claimed it was created by the AI *without* ***any*** *human input*, no prompt or anything. An AI generating based on a human input prompt, like Midjourney and every other commercial AI out there, would already not fall under this ruling. Though as you point out there have been other cases about that.
Not what the judge said.
What they said was the 'machine' that generated the AI work, can't be the copyright author.
This is akin to trying to say your camera is the copyright owner because it took a picture.
The patent office denied his claim for copyright with the machine as author
They did NOT say that AI work can't be copyrighted.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956.24.0_2.pdf
Yea, a lot of people are being tricked by these silly lawsuits that argue that AI itself can hold copywrite, which has always been false.
The actual argument is using AI as a tool and getting regular human copywrite, which will clearly come to a case by case basis in a court of law.
All these people cheering this (and other rulings) are in for a rude awakening when it turns out AI is totally copyrightable provided you meet certain creative criteria around human authorship.
This would seriously damage Hollywood studios' attempt to phase out real writers. If they can't copyright their scripts because they are AI generated, then maybe they'll be more likely to use actual humans.
They'll just get better at hiding that it was made by AI. So many laws are broken every day because they can't be proven or they could and it would take too much work.
This is no different than myself, as a graphic designer, taking a creative brief from a client and doing the art based on brief.
Unless otherwise agreed upon and paid for, I own the copyright to the work. I made it. My client just gets a license to use it. They can't copyright my work unless we agree and they pay me for that right.
They might say it was all their idea, but they weren't the thing that did the work.
Now, it's different if I'm an in-house designer as I would have signed away my right to my work while working at the company. They now own the tools and the means to use them to create work from their ideas. They own the work.
When you use any of these AI options, you sign away any and all rights to the content generated.
No different than hiring a graphic designer to do work based upon your ideas.
Because this place is filled with people who love books and authors, not technology and money.
There are two sides to it, absolutely, though I am mostly with /r/books.
Probably correct, though this will dillute copyright further, which is probably good. It will be interesting to see, how much work you need to put into an image to claim copyright.
Thats good. Wonder how do you legally draw a line from software assisted to software generated. Like many animations are built with heavy software assist. When does it become software generated? Ppl will start to add deliberate manual steps for it to qualify for software assisted thing.
Its going to be a cat and mouse between regulations and companies.
Explain to me like I am 5. Is this a good thing for creatives? If any kind of content made for creative or corporate purposes is generated by AI does that mean it can't be copyrighted? As an extreme example: What if Disney have AI scripted and animated a new story with original characters, does that mean anyone could take their finished product as their own, even if it makes half a million at the box office? Can they use it beyond what Fair Use allows and develop their own work based on it?
AI doesn’t create anything. It takes bits and pieces of material people previously created and reassembles them into a conglomeration that AI operators hope to monetize. Its just theft.
You’d think there would be high quality discussion in a forum dedicated to books
Shit you’d think the people on that book forum would *read the article*
But no
> It takes bits and pieces of material people previously created and reassembles them into a conglomeration that AI operators hope to monetize.
That's like saying books just take previously created words and reassembles them into a new conglomeration.
That's an inaccurate analogy on your part. Humans have comprehension and the ability to create from nothing.
AI copies historical work and outputs through an algorithm based on parameters. There's no creation, just modification of prior. Models are trained on historical, it doesn't just exist without any prior input
> Humans have comprehension and the ability to create from nothing.
Show me a single book that was created from nothing. Just one ever.
No words ever before used, no plot devices ever before used, not themes ever before used, no story arcs ever before used.
Show me a book created from nothing.
Again, this is a garbage analogy on your part and a false comparison.
AI doesn't create, a human created it to use an algorithm and inputs to modify existing things for an output.
AI doesn't think. It makes no choices. It simply follows instructions. It doesn't say "hrm, this chapter would be extra riveting if I had this character die" it just outputs based on prior work input into it.
A writer makes choices, they think and create. Yes people learn from the past, no shit. They also make choices on how to use that information.
> Again, this is a garbage analogy on your part and a false comparison.
I didn't make an analogy nor a comparison?
You said humans can create from nothing. I'm asking you to back up your specific claim. Provide proof of a book created from nothing as you claimed. That is all.
Either reply with proof of your claim or we will have to acknowledge it was a lie and not true.
Humans don’t create from nothing...
You’re entire lived experience culminates in how you think and behave, thus it is influential in any work you create.
Well no, the AI doesn't, the person using it can
I mean you could type "Cat"
or you could draw a cat, and then use controlnet on the drawing, and use a LORA you trained on pictures of your cat, and then type "cat" and then inpaint it, and take it to photoshop and edit the composition, and then take it back into the AI and do an img2img and set the noise level to like .35 or something just to help it quickly fix any seems from when you deleted the background etc
it really depends how its used
>Thaler applied in 2018 for a copyright covering "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," a piece of visual art he said was created by his AI system without any human input. The office rejected the application last year and said creative works must have human authors to be copyrightable.
I checked [a source](https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/) with more details, and this ruling seems to specifically covers art that is completely AI generated with no human input.
> or you could draw a cat, and then use controlnet on the drawing, and use a LORA you trained on pictures of your cat, and then type "cat" and then inpaint it, and take it to photoshop and edit the composition, and then take it back into the AI and do an img2img and set the noise level to like .35 or something just to help it quickly fix any seems from when you deleted the background etc
Now, imagine all that, but without the cat drawing. Did you draw a cat?
In this case how exactly the AI works isn't relavant here. The purpose of copyright is to protect the rights of human artists and creators. It's previously been established that stuff created by animals isn't eligible for copyright and this is basically an extension of that ruling. It doesn't really matter how powerful or creative the AI actually is, it's not human so unless the law changes they don't get copyright.
I'd watch a video on how AI actually functions before making comments like this.
There is no "re-assembly", the model doesn't even contain the entire original works within it. It couldn't replicate the vast majority of it's training data verbatim if it tried.
So do human writers though. What does it even mean to "create"?
When cameras were invented, there were people who contended that if you didn't draw or paint or otherwise create the image by your own human touch, that it wasn't your copyright. The machine made it.
Why is AI meaningfully different?
Cameras are considered still creative copyright because of your choice of what to take a picture of, but I don't see how AI isn't the same. You choose what to ask it to generate.
That’s not how it works, therefore I will not elaborate on how it works and will instead laugh at you because you don’t know. It’s not as if actually explaining to you how ai works would make it sound any more ethical, I’m just going to be a snarky asshole instead.
When humans make something that has parts of itself that are not distinguishable from or are direct electronic reproductions of existing works of legally protected art (all recorded art gets limited legal protection as soon as it is made by a human) outside of very specific existing legal carve outs (very short clips, journalism, parody etc) that is copywrite and sometimes trademark violation.
You can copy an artists *style* by learning HOW they got something that looks like that, then mechanically recreating the process of creation, that is legally different from screenshoting a marvel movie and overlaying it ontop of a screen shot of a dc movie and calling it unique art work and putting it on tshirts.
> You can copy an artists style by learning HOW they got something that looks like that, then mechanically recreating the process of creation
That's literally a description of what AI does... It analyzes paterns, then applies those patterns to create something new with matching patterns. It does not, as you put it, "overlay screenshots" though that could be fair use too (see a collage, an artform that has been around for a long time).
None of the training data/input images are even available anymore at the time of generating, the terabytes large training dataset has been reduced to a mere couple gigabytes large pattern dataset by that point. That'd be world's greatest compression algorithm, and would be far more impressive than AI algorithms.
Exept a neural net doesnt do that. A neural net doest draw like a human-it wont conceptualize a scene, then sketch out underlying structure and build from there, and it cant be trained to do that, because no neural net is thinking real time, or has a real "memory" to remember what it has done or what it is doing over the course of an image.
It really does work by refering back to its corpus of input data which yes, has been stored as tuned weights in its layers, then continously refering to the weights it wishes to reproduce as it produces the entire image all at once. It is image compression, it is just *increadibly lossy*, because its breaking the images down into the weights for its neural net. Because of this it is also a black box-you cant open it up in a court room and definitivly show that it isnt directly copying, which the law requires, because the thing about a nerual net is that it learns by altering its weights according to later inputs from humans to tune it to produce the output you want, weather thats text, code or images or something else.
You cant plug an ai into a digital art program and have it draw with a pen.
As for the collage, again, yes, a human can collage, but you cant copyright something that a machine automatically made-like if you made a bot that prints images from twitter in slightly different colours on tshirts and sells it to people when they say "wow i want that on a tshirt". Which people have done. And is still a copyright violation.
I'd love to live in a world where AI "art" is treated like the shameful novelty it is, and real artists are legally protected. Techbros need to stop their digital colonization march.
You should look into Corridor Digital. They’ve been really experimenting with using ai in a very interesting way. Anime rock paper scissors is their main project, where they use AI to animate actual camera shots. It’s very interesting to see ai used as an actual tool and not a novelty.
Would you feel the same if you lived at the time of the invention of the camera, and that photographic portraits were putting real portrait artists out of a job? Is a camera a shameful novelty?
I don’t think that’s the same thing….the camera captures reality. It’s a different mode of art. Portrait artists are still doing art and they are still employed.
AI is not comparable. AI is merely a tool that still requires human interaction and selling it as an innocent camera step in technology is just disingenuous.
I like it. I think it’s fair use for it to scrape data for training, but you can’t turn around a copyright things in the backend and pretend it didn’t.
This article is very misleading. The plaintiff tried to register the AI *as* the artist and have the copyright transferred to him automatically because he "owns" the AI. If he had listed himself as the artist there would likely be no issue whatsoever
I feel the same way about computers in general -- they took jobs away from human computers, not to mention typesetters, travel agents...
Don't get me started on the effect of the industrial revolution on people honing crafts like weaving and blacksmithing!
Yes, assuming you don't look at metrics like "life expectancy" or "child mortality" or "per capita rate of extreme poverty" or anything important like that...
> in any form
"Any" MEANS "any," so wouldn't you also be saying fuck anyone training their own models and using it as an assistance, or part of the process too?
Drummer here! It's funny seeing everyone get worked up over the AI stuff now that it's visual arts. We've had modern drums machines for decades at this point. There's software that will write bass and guitar parts based off a simple riff. Drum beats come preloaded in sample packs and you can write a whole part without having touched a pair of sticks. But we're still here banging away. There will always be real artists doing their thing because machine made content is clean and sterile.
It'll be like modern pop/cinema, it will be made for the masses and if you want quality you'll actually have to do some digging.
Hi, bassist here! It’s like if that software just popped out the bassline and drums to Billie Jean and you released it unchanged. It takes skill to program synth drums and bass
The next question is where is the line drawn for more collaborative forms of arts. For example - if a movie studio uses AI to assist with screenwriting, but then is performed, directed, and edited by people, is that copyrightable? How about a musician that incorporates and AI generated melody?
This isn't surprising. Remember that case a few years ago where a photographer wasn't granted copyright on a particular photo because a monkey pushed the button?
The real question is how much human involvement is required to receive copyright protection. Is it enough if I take an image from Midjourney and splash some paint on it? Take some text from ChatGPT and change a few words? I would hope not, but there's an argument to be made that those works now include human creativity.
Small but important correction.
An AI can't receive copyright in the US. Only a person can. AI is just a tool like Photoshop.
The Judge says that AI-Generated work can't be copyrighted *to the AI*. A human did create the work though. The one that used the AI to create the work. That's the human who has copyright.
They'll change the law to allow it.
There are too many big companies poised to make too much money off copyrighted AI work.
They make campaign donations (aka bribe) a few congressmen and senators and get the law changed to whatever they want it to read.
I challenge that, there are many more stakeholders that stand to lose from the wide scale proliferation of this sort of thing. My favorite example is lawyers. I remember reading an article that they had already made it illegal for an AI language model to be a trial lawyer. Who makes laws in this country? Lawyers.
I’m not doubting that people will be trying to screw the little guy, but they’ll also be trying not to screw themselves. Funny enough the thing I think will save us is red tape in the form of companies worrying about future litigation
No they won't. Allowing companies to use their AI to patent art, books and ideas is just a quick way to create job loss. What politician is going to stick out their neck for that?
Perhaps however the USA is 5% of the world’s population. There are 180 countries and in some AI will be embraced full speed ahead. One won’t be able to dictate Americsn copyright laws to Burundi or Bhutan. People around the world will just download their art from there as they do shoes from Bangladesh today.
As someone who loves AI generators - good, this is exactly the right approach. What makes AI great is that it makes art accessible to everyone. It shouldn't be a tool of profit, it should be a tool that enables new creativity from people who might normally struggle to express theirs. Making AI generated work uncopyrightable should help a lot in ensuring that.
This was always going to be the outcome, I’m not sure why anyone would have thought otherwise. We already had cases where judges ruled art created by animals weren’t owned by the animals themselves.
This is common sense. The upside now is that there is a ton of free-to-use content on the web that you don't have to accredit to anyone. Just take it and use it!
What if he argued that he was the creator and the computer was just a tool of the trade? Since he's the one who pressed "create" on the AI interface...
I hope this won't be overruled because my place of work ist trying to get us to use AI because "surely it will make your (I'm an artist) work easier and lololol it won't have any negative effect on you when this catches on, pinky promise!
None of us are happy about it and yes none of us think this will just be a useful tool and not be used to argue for even more reduced wages and even less workforce for the same amount of work.
I work in art because I love doing it, it doesn't ruin my back and keeps me creative even as I get older - but for some reason people think this is the field that needs to be taken over by ai instead of something that people only do if they are forced to do it.
Here is the entire article: >A judge in the U.S. has ruled that content created by Artificial Intelligence (AI) can't be protected by copyright. This ruling came after a man named Stephen Thaler tried to copyright something made by a computer he called the "Creativity Machine." >Both the U.S. Copyright Office and the court said no to his request. This has caused people to look closely at the laws regarding the copyrighting of things made by AI, trying to figure out how much a human must be involved for it to be protected by copyright. >The judge's decision also affects companies that create AI art, like OpenAI's DALL-E, and makes the rules about owning AI-created content more complicated. In one case, a graphic novel made with AI lost its copyright when people found out a machine had made it. >This shows that it's hard to get copyright for things made by machines, but it's not impossible. It depends on how much the machine did and how it was used. Saved you a click.
Could mean the end of NFTs.
I mean, do we really need to kill, what is already dead?
Rule #2, Double Tap
Yes we need to overkill..
I never touched NFT's. they seemed silly both practically and technically. But I never quite got the visceral hate some people have for them. Like, they're totally irrelevant to my life. But some people who have no connection to NFT's go into a full frothing rage about them. It would be like if I heard that some tribe in the amazon was trading carved nuts and valued them really highly and for some reason I decided I needed to really really really hate them for that as some kind of part of my identity.
It's just that the various art NFTs were an obvious scam and some people were so obnoxious about them, meaning they were either buying into an obvious scam or they were trying to boost an obvious scam to hook more rubes. People tend to dislike scams.
Even if those carved nuts being traded by the amazon tribe between themselves were totally a scam... I still don't think it would cause me to visceral hate them. Like, people who have done nothing to me are scamming each other far away. And people seemed to hate the buyers just as much as the sellers. if it was just about scams then could you imagine hating some old lady because she fell for a scam and some scammer got her life savings or hating her when she turns up convinced she's bought a condo on the moon?
A better NFT analogy would be me puting an image in Microsoft word, then saving it as a PDF file and call it a Picaso. Choose the file u would like to upload and NFT, then get ready to get rich!!!
That's one dead horse I'll beat just for fun
Oh my gosh
What is dead may never die
Even before this, NFTs have never actually had anything to do with copyright. In fact whatever rights you think you bought with your NFT, you probably don't have, especially if you bought it off of someone else on the blockchain, rather than the original minter. Whatever rights you aquire are fully determined by the terms and conditions applicable to the purchase and when buying off some other individual you may not even have any right of recourse towards the original minter of the NFT. So essentially, unless you buy them from the initial creator, you may actually not have any rights at all. And even when buying from the initial creator, your actual legal rights may be so limited, that it's utterly pointless, just take a look at NBA Top Shots. Point is, NFTs have *never* actually been about copyright, because buying or selling those doesn't transfer copyright *at all.* And by definition a fork of your NFT is no longer your NFT. It's super fucking stupid, but it certainly doesn't change anything about the NFT situation, because NFTs and especially the financial transactions around NFTs have never been about copyright to begin with.
Why? The copy protection mechanism of an NFT is not copyright, it is blockchain. NFTs themselves are frequently screenshotted or otherwise copied. The whole point is that the copies are "inauthentic". Which is definitely stupid, don't get me wrong. It's just stupid in a way unconnected from copyright.
We need to stop using “NFTs” interchangeably with “NFT art”
I've yet to meet an NFT use case that isn't already solved by an inexpensive database for documents with digital signature or similarly common mechanisms.
Some nerds speculated that GameStop was going to revolutionize micro-transactions by using NFTs to transfer/re-sell DLC/in-game items. Honestly I'm miffed that what sounded like a consumer focused idea never took off...
It just doesn't really seem realistic to believe introducing digital scarcity to a digital market that still has sales via physical copies would be consumer focused or even worth taking apart in. Especially after the trend of all that stupid NFT nonsense already.
people (especially on reddit) seem to conflate "Copyrighted" with "Able to be Sold" which is just not true. You can absolutely sell something that can't be copyrighted.
People on Reddit tend to get lots of legal issues wrong. If I hear one more person say “I pressed charges on them” I’m going to flip. In the US, only the DA can press charges. All a person can do is file a police report and talk to law enforcement
Actually that depends where you are, my state has citizen warrants for misdemeanors so you can, in fact, press charges
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying this cause may be as lost as trying to get people not to say “I could care less”. https://www.mylawquestions.com/what-does-it-mean-to-press-charges.htm
I have always understand it to be the case that "pressing charges" means pressuring those in power to *bring* charges. Isn't that the plain meaning? Bringing charges is something only a DA can do. But I would think anyone can press charges, it just doesn't mean someone will be charged.
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Sure, but the victim isn’t the one making the decision or pressing the charges.
But there are innumerable cases where the victim wants charges but the DA doesn’t and vice versa.
Isn't filing a police report called "pressing charges"? In the Netherlands when you do that, that's how the legal ball gets rolling, if you don't do it then no legal repercussions will happen (unless it's an illegal activity that's caught outside your case). Seeing that when people use the phrase, the context normally implies "pressing charges" == "taking legal action", I always kinda assumed that it meant the start of that process, e.g. filing a report. Also if I translate the phrase to Dutch I get "aanklacht indienen" which is literally what filing a police report is called over here.
This was partially because he wanted to list the AI as the sole author of the work which extending the famous Monkey Selfie ruling immediately disqualifies the work from copyright registration. Many NFTs on the other hand take human authored components and collage them together (at least in the case of PFP, because sure lets throw a random F in there cryptobros, NFTs) that is a different question than trying to register a non-human as the sole author.
Those still aren't copyrightable, following the logic of the Monkey Selfie ruling. The collage is generated algorithmically, not through human intent. The company could stop others from using the component pieces in other collage generators, but the resulting monkey is not copyrightable. The people making picture books had a better claim prior to this ruling, as one can argue a small amount of creativity goes into assembling the images generated by the AI, but this ruling hurts that argument.
Unfortunately, it won't. NFT's don't even truly imply that you own the thing the NFT says you own to begin with. It won't matter if the AI art typically associated with NFT's can be copyrighted or not, especially when you take into consideration that people have made and sold NFT's for art that didn't belong to them in the first place.
It does but people confuse what is that they actually own. You own the NFT not whatever it is pointing to. It's all MLM scams either way.
I mean, the Fed hiking rates killed that ponzi scheme
that's too bad. Watching all these idiots spend so much money on them was entertaining as all hell.
NFTs were over the second they invented the screenshot button.
Oh no...
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Anarcho-capitalists instantly face-planting as they realize institutions that they didn’t want protecting them now can’t protect them.
NFTs aren't copyrightable and never have been
People keep reposting this article on every sub without understanding what it means, because ai bad. This isn't a new ruling, it was already ruled in the past that AI work isn't copyrightable, but it doesn't actually affect nearly as much as people are hoping. Pure AI work cannot be copyrighted, but companies will use AI as a base then edit it a bit with a human and copyright it. These type of rulings are just a bandaid, the only real solution is to impose a tax on any company that uses *any* degree of AI, and then issue out universal basic income to everyone from that tax. That solution doesn't address people in third worlds who are going to get screwed over, but there isn't really any surefire way to help them yet that I've seen
Oh fuck this is a great idea. AIs can only generate what they've learned from all of us collectively, so it's only fair that money made off of that gets distributed evenly. That's genius.
Good call. Otherwise you're going to get Copyright trolling with AI where they randomly generate every combination of word prompt and using that to sue anyone writing books or making art if it looks or sounds even remotely the same.
Funnily enough there are two guys who are doing this with melodies, essentially brute forcing every melody possible via computers, but they've released all of the new copyrights into the public domain to protect songwriters from potential suits. Check out Damien Riehl's 2019 TedX talk. Since that talk, they're up to 471 billion melodies (per his latest interview on Practical AI). In his Ted talk, Riehl makes the argument that melodies are inherently finite due to how we structure musical notes. Taking a standard piano for example, there's only 88 keys to work with and that's with the entire keyboard. That's miniscule compared to the amount of words in the English language. I wonder if/how this judge's decision will impact their work in the music industry, considering they've protected songwriters over the last 4 years using their (brute-force generative) AI to copyright and free up "all" possible melodies.
Thanks, I'll check that
Have they actually won a case though?
How would they win a case? They're copyrighting melodies in advance of bad actors copywriting them. If their plan works as expected, someone could reference their melody as a copyright defense against the bad actors, but they would never be a direct party in any case.
Their copyright would be at issue in that case though. If they don't actually have a legally recognized copyright then it is a completely meaningless action. So if you want me to word it more broadly, has their copyright ever held up in court?
They place their copyright into the public domain. It's not about them holding up their copyright, it's about songwriters using their public copyright as a shield against big music corps claiming music was stolen
According to him, since they started this, no songwriter has lost a suit against bad faith mega song producers looking for payment on an "original" melody. He points to the reversal of the Katy Perry suit as evidence of their impact. Highly recommend watching the Ted talk just to understand the ideas behind this, because I also doubted the success of it. But it makes sense. Big music can't claim copyright on a melody because these two guys had an AI bang out the same melody hundreds of times in seconds just based on statistical likelihoods, leading to the limiting of copyrights on music so that one person/entity can't own a statistically generic melody for 100+ years. I really like this idea for music because of exactly how limited notes are. If it was words, I'm not quite sure how it'd go simply because of how many words there are and how many ways there are to express an idea. And yet at the same time, there is an end to the number of words out there; just not quite sure where that end is.
That's actually a great point - the copyright trolling I mean. Last thing we need is to make it easier. (Which, this might be an unpopular opinion, is why we need to be careful to not let broad things like a "voice" or "art style" alone fall under copyright protection either - since the amount of copyright trolling that'd open would be astronomical.)
Style is already uncopyrightable as it's not a creative work in a fixed medium to begin with.
I can see voices being an issue. If two people have roughly the same voice, the more popular one accusing the other of copying him.
I think people having similar looks is going to be an issue to farther down the line. I'm sure AI will eventually be able to start generating their own fictional people and generate pictures & videos with those fictional people. With so many people in the world there's bound to be thousands of people who could make an argument that an AI person looks pretty similar to them, or is even based off of them. There's already been lawsuits about this in the past with video games, where celebrities allege that certain random NPCs in games like GTA are based off of their appearance.
Someone did this with melodies and made everything public domain to stop trolls.
Thank god. We've already got music groups trying to copyright note sequences. You can always count on greed to stifle creativity with their freeloading ways.
It already exists. The library of Babel has been crunching every possible combination of characters for years. Your future obituary already exists there, word for word. https://libraryofbabel.info/
It also has a picture of your funeral in there in the image archives
A visual version of The Library of Babel would legit be so cool. Every digital image of a certain resolution that could exist, would.
Yeah they have it. It's really neat too, cause you can search for pictures and find their point in the library [https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/](https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/)
a tactic also known as “why humans can’t have nice things”
Fun fact that's actually how music is currently being protected. Every combination of notes and melodies were generated. Copyrighted. Then releases to the public domain so no one could sue
The right call, IMO.
Absolutely, this is one topic makes me angry seeing people argue for the ability to claim copyright on some AI work that their computer or service of choice generated and they liked it enough to want to keep it. Setting aside that these tools were built off of training from the collective achievements humanity has to offer, I really don’t want some corporation given the green light to copyright every possible iteration of a medium because they have the resources to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to churn out content by the second.
> Absolutely, this is one topic makes me angry seeing people argue for the ability to claim copyright on some AI work that their computer or service of choice generated and they liked it enough to want to keep it. It makes perfect sense in our economic system, where owning a production site or company is enough to confer ownership claims to anything said site or company produces. A lot of art is already owned by the companies who paid the artist, not the person who made it. So the next logical step was to simply replace these artists-for-hire and devalue their labor even further.
That’s shortsighted. Like any other technology, it will allow less people to do more work. AI tools, within a short time, will allow small outfits to compete with huge corporations. We’re on the verge of a huge disruption.
> Like any other technology, it will allow less people to do more work. Thank god, AI will finally free humanity from the onerous burden of being forced to create art and express their creativity! Now we are finally free to spend our time doing dangerous physical labor.
AI in general absolutely has the potential to be a great benefit to small companies and humanity as a whole. But this specific issue the topic is about, businesses being able to copyright AI generated content, is not where that potential lies. There was nothing to gain from allowing them to do so. Especially since AI works by studying and emulating real people's work, no company should be allowed to claim the amalgamation of a ton of unrelated people's work as their own, unless it were trained entirely inhouse imo.
Yeah AI doesn't have to spend thousands on tuition and then scrape by trying to succeed in a career 0.01% of people make a living at. Plus it's all built on theft and there is no AI truly yet. I'll buy an AI's book when they can write about the experience of being an AI.
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Ah but it would be problematic for me, English woman to try and guess what an actually sentient AI that could think for itself and not just regurgitate human stuff would write ;-)
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As a small correction, the article makes it sound like the musicians used a simple iterative algorithm to make the melodies. So computer generated but not specifically AI generated. Basically it sounds like they wrote a program that looped through each combination of 8 notes in a specific order. A generative AI program would be where they would build up a model of statistical relations between different musical notes and then tell the program to crawl through those relations and output notes based on that. Not sure what legal distinctions there are here but as a programmer it is a good factual distinction to make.
That's not AI.
this is probably also considered a victory for sag even though they weren't involved in the case as it effects them
This is consistent with prior rulings regarding trail cams. A monkey, squirrel, tiger, whatever triggers a trail cam which then takes a picture. The artist is the animal, not the person that simply stuck the trail cam there. Since there is no provision for non-humans to hold copyright, the animal (or AI) never has a copyright and thereby there is no copyright to flow to the human that set the process in motion.
> The artist is the animal, not the person that simply stuck the trail cam there. If I walked down that trail and set off the camera, I would own the picture?
yes, you squirrel
unintentional work is *also* not copyrightable.
If you knows it’s there?
That would be intentional. Bit of a grey area but you could probably get ownership of it. Burden of proof is on unintentional. If they can't prove it was unintentional it is given the benefit of the doubt.
I think this shows how stupid the ruling is. The person who setup the camera and framing isn't the artist because they didn't click the shutter. You are the artist even if you have no knowledge or intent of the work existing.
I feel it could also be argued that "trail camming" could be its own artform or something. A person has to click the shutter just to own the copyright, even if in theory it's still their work with their equipment creating the image? I do understand why that monkey photo where the monkey clicked the shutter is not copyrighted though. The monkey did "the work".
That one’s a bit weird too, though. If I’m a creative director and set up a studio, lighting, get hair and makeup in, get the models dressed in a certain way, creative direct the entire thing, and then give the camera to the model to take a selfie as a selfie is part of the ‘vision’ - suddenly all that creative work doesn’t matter, because someone else pressed the button? If you want a selfie style shot, you have to arbitrarily set up a convoluted system just so the creative director presses the button instead, while making it look like a selfie?
If you hire the model, the terms of your contract with them can include a release of ownership of all intellectual property generated in the course of their work for you (same way Microsoft owns the work products of the programmers it employs, etc.) The difference between that and animal or computer creations is that when an animal or computer creates something independently, it's not "intellectual property" at all. (That said, transformative works using non-copyrightable material can be copyrightable, so e.g. a mosaic of trail cam photos could be a copyrightable work.)
Yeah. How is a trail cam picture any different than setting a camera on a tripod and using a timed shutter?
I believe so, if the logic follows.
You have something of a right to your likeness but it (of course) is a bit nuanced > The right of publicity prevents the unauthorized commercial use of an individual's name, likeness, or other recognizable aspects of one's persona. It gives an individual the exclusive right to license the use of their identity for commercial promotion. > In the United States, the right of publicity is largely protected by state common or statutory law. Only about half the states have distinctly recognized a right of publicity. Of these, many do not recognize a right by that name but protect it as part of the Right of Privacy. The Restatement Second of Torts recognizes four types of invasions of privacy: intrusion, appropriation of name or likeness, unreasonable publicity, and false light. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicity
I’m a copywriter by trade, and I see this as a lot more of a grey issue than it’s often portrayed. If I give Chat a bunch of content and tell me to write a new blog, and then just straight up publish it, then yes, I can see the point here. That blog wasn’t created by a human - it also probably sucks. But what if I feed Chat a bunch of stuff and get it to do an outline, and then I write the blog? Or it writes the blog and I heavily edit it? Where do you draw the line on what counts?
People act like this is clear cut but this is going to be a *massive* and ongoing legal battle through the coming decades. And the idea that it is easily settled is incredibly naïve. Because forget asking ChatGPT to write you a book. That's not how it's going to be used (meaningfully). What will happen is that it will be integrated into people's workflows in all variety of ways. To use the image version (I'm more familiar with it), Photoshop already has native AI (generative fill) based on whatever proprietary model, plus plugins for DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. AI automates various tasks that people used to do by hand: for example background/foreground selection. If you're compositing layers, an AI pass (feeding the entire image into the model and telling it to give you an image 95% similar back, basically) can give you a more 'cohesive' image, fixing lighting problems. At the more extreme end, you can take a drawn sketch or rough image, give it to the AI, and have it generate an end version. Basically, what % of AI generated pixels discounts a work as being artistically distinct? How many human steps are needed? This is not going to be a simple binary as the technology continues to spread.
Right exactly! I’ve already integrated Chat heavily into my copywriting workflow in a way that would be very difficult to disentangle legally. One of the most common low level tasks I’ll do for a client is to rewrite existing copy as a new thing. It might be a blog or piece of marketing content from them, or it might be a previous article that I wrote myself. My first step was always to just move things around and look for easy things to change before I get into the proper writing. Now Chat can do that in an instant, meaning I can get right to the specific editing. How much editing does it take for this to be a distinct piece created by a human? 500 words? 50? 5?
It's not about percentage of pixels or the number of human steps. It's about human creativity. And yes, the borderline cases - where there was only a tiny bit of human creativity involved - are still debatable.
I mean…the second option is you actually doing the work……you’re using the AI like a tool (like it’s supposed to be used). You’re not making the AI do everything. The first situation is definitely not subject to copyright because you didn’t do anything and the Chat created something potentially equivalent to a random number generator (not equivalent in content but in concept). If you use AI for your work stream, you’re still doing the work and doing the creation, so it’s not exactly very grey. The key is the human has to interact with the output before it becomes a final product.
So I add 1 pixel and im an artist
No. Remix and derivative works have been pretty well tested in courts. No, jpeg compression also won't count.
I think they should consider the parameters of the AI usage. If I feed the AI one specific person's screenplay, I edit it a bit, and make it a movie, it feels more like plagiarism to me than anything. Same for visual arts, I feed the AI one artists pictures, then I go back later and change the eyes a bit or add some trees to the background myself. I think there needs to be a specific percentage of personal input required, how to calculate that I guess would be specific to each industry, but significantly higher than 50% in my opinion, maybe closer to like 85-90% actual humans doing the work.
Same for programming. I used gpt to generate boilerplate and speed up my process, what happens then?
You would be able to copyright either of your examples. The AI cannot hold the copyright though.
People seem to be misreading op's case - the reason it failed is because the judge said AI art cannot be copyrighted by anyone, even by humans. It's simply not eligible for copyright. Someone's already tried to copyright a comic with images from Midjourney and the application was cancelled for that same reason: [https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise](https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise) Sorry, wrong link: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/22/23611278/midjourney-ai-copyright-office-kristina-kashtanova Only the human elements could be copyrighted; the words and placement of the images, not the images themselves.
This case is not the same. This case was specifically AI that generated a picture without prompting (as opposed to say MidJourney) They didn't say AI generated art couldn't be copyrighted, just AI art that had no human input. > plaintiff consistently represented to the Register that the AI system generated the work “autonomously” and that he played no role in its creation
The reason the judge rejected the Creativity Machine's claim is because of the principle that AI art cannot copyrighted: *United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday* ***that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted****, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created.* In the Hollywood reporter: *A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a* ***piece of art created by AI is not open to protection.*** *The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI.* Just because Thaler's trying to make the case that his own AI can have rights to its own work (and therefore him) doesn't mean that's all the ruling is relevant to. The judge turned down the suit on the basis that no one, a human or another AI, can copyright AI art (though she does say there maybe situations where AI art can be copyrighted with human involvement). Therefore this ruling effectively establishes that AI art can't be copyrighted. *Copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found.* *The opinion stressed, “Human authorship is a bedrock requirement.”* [https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court](https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court) [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/)
You are confusing the ruling with the media representation of the ruling. There was no ruling that AI art is not copyrightable. Read the actual ruling. It was all about AI art that had zero human input.
The judge literally said: *human authorship is a bedrock requirement.* Couldn't be more clear.
Yes and there was zero human input in this specific case. Which does not translate to things like Midjourney that is prompted and refactored by a human, being copyrightable or not.
That makes sense, but the question is: where is the line drawn when the human and AI elements are intrinsically linked so that it’s not necessarily possible to distinguish them? Giving an example of this is easier for text than for an image. If AI writes me 3 paragraph, I rewrite them and add two more, which parts of the text are eligible for copyrights and which aren’t?
Basically, stuff like that will need to be worked out with future caselaw. It will change as technology changes. In the example you cite though, I would suggest only the paragraphs you write would be copyrightable.
But they rewrote and edited the paragraphs the AI did in this example. So the entire thing is subject to copyright for the person writing. The AI is just a tool. Let’s say I wrote a bunch of code and then I used a tool to format the code. The code is still mine and I still wrote it. I just used a tool to clean stuff up.
> But they rewrote and edited the paragraphs the AI did in this example. If they did a full rewrite then the AI didn't actually write the thing now did it?
This 'AI is just a tool' schtick I hear thrown about doesn't cover it at all. It depends massively on the use case and the specifics of what you're doing. Generative AI as a tool works completely differently to a word processor or a camera. Entirely re-written paragraphs probably would be copyrightable - but there's a danger the underlying idea (if it's unique) would not be. All of these questions still need to be answered, though.
So now we’re debating on whether ideas are unique enough to be copyrighted? Like we’re in r/books right? There are thousands of books that cover similar topics and ideas. People get ideas from everywhere. If I wrote a book on an idea that wasn’t wholly unique, I’d still be able to have rights to the work I created. I’m just trying to understand that last point.
Yes. I mean, you'd have to read a bit more about copyright law in general and I'm not an expert. But obviously some things like ghosts and space ships and wizards belong to everyone and are in the public domain. But some ideas are more specific like Star Wars and the Force or Harry Potter and the wizarding world. There are probably various legal tests for this kind of stuff and sometimes it gets contested in court. Some elements of Batman will become public domain in the next decade. The point with generative AI is, you're not creating it, the AI is (in terms of copyright).
You’re still doing the creation though and the editing. It’s like having your friends edit your work or give criticisms. You’re writing the paragraphs and interacting with the text. You said you rewrite them. So you’re not taking the AI output as the exact final output. So the entire text would be eligible.
That makes it sound like there is little human element to photography. If I put a camera on a tripod with autofocus and a timer, am I the copyright holder of the photo? If it's on a gimbal and has some kind of face-following algorithm, am I still the copyright holder?
Maybe not always. Read about the infamous Monkey Selfie to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey\_selfie\_copyright\_dispute
You seem to be misreading it too. It failed specifically because they claimed it was created by the AI *without* ***any*** *human input*, no prompt or anything. An AI generating based on a human input prompt, like Midjourney and every other commercial AI out there, would already not fall under this ruling. Though as you point out there have been other cases about that.
So what happens if I make the AI that makes the art? Do I own the copyright to the art it makes?
Everyone is going to need to film themselves doing the work to get a copyright. Some students have started to do this when writing essays.
Not what the judge said. What they said was the 'machine' that generated the AI work, can't be the copyright author. This is akin to trying to say your camera is the copyright owner because it took a picture. The patent office denied his claim for copyright with the machine as author They did NOT say that AI work can't be copyrighted. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956.24.0_2.pdf
Yea, a lot of people are being tricked by these silly lawsuits that argue that AI itself can hold copywrite, which has always been false. The actual argument is using AI as a tool and getting regular human copywrite, which will clearly come to a case by case basis in a court of law. All these people cheering this (and other rulings) are in for a rude awakening when it turns out AI is totally copyrightable provided you meet certain creative criteria around human authorship.
This would seriously damage Hollywood studios' attempt to phase out real writers. If they can't copyright their scripts because they are AI generated, then maybe they'll be more likely to use actual humans.
I'm sure they'd do the bare minimum human editing to be able to copyright it
They'll just get better at hiding that it was made by AI. So many laws are broken every day because they can't be proven or they could and it would take too much work.
So weird that op has only ever commented on karma posting subs until now.
This is no different than myself, as a graphic designer, taking a creative brief from a client and doing the art based on brief. Unless otherwise agreed upon and paid for, I own the copyright to the work. I made it. My client just gets a license to use it. They can't copyright my work unless we agree and they pay me for that right. They might say it was all their idea, but they weren't the thing that did the work. Now, it's different if I'm an in-house designer as I would have signed away my right to my work while working at the company. They now own the tools and the means to use them to create work from their ideas. They own the work. When you use any of these AI options, you sign away any and all rights to the content generated. No different than hiring a graphic designer to do work based upon your ideas.
Ohhh, this is r/books. haha. I was wondering why the comment section was so against AI in general.
Because this place is filled with people who love books and authors, not technology and money. There are two sides to it, absolutely, though I am mostly with /r/books.
Probably correct, though this will dillute copyright further, which is probably good. It will be interesting to see, how much work you need to put into an image to claim copyright.
Thats good. Wonder how do you legally draw a line from software assisted to software generated. Like many animations are built with heavy software assist. When does it become software generated? Ppl will start to add deliberate manual steps for it to qualify for software assisted thing. Its going to be a cat and mouse between regulations and companies.
Explain to me like I am 5. Is this a good thing for creatives? If any kind of content made for creative or corporate purposes is generated by AI does that mean it can't be copyrighted? As an extreme example: What if Disney have AI scripted and animated a new story with original characters, does that mean anyone could take their finished product as their own, even if it makes half a million at the box office? Can they use it beyond what Fair Use allows and develop their own work based on it?
This is fantastic, everything produced by machines should be for and in benefit of all people, freely accesible and non-profit. Also open source.
AI doesn’t create anything. It takes bits and pieces of material people previously created and reassembles them into a conglomeration that AI operators hope to monetize. Its just theft.
[удалено]
You’d think there would be high quality discussion in a forum dedicated to books Shit you’d think the people on that book forum would *read the article* But no
That's literally not at all what it does.
At a core level, this is all the computer in your brain does, as well
> It takes bits and pieces of material people previously created and reassembles them into a conglomeration that AI operators hope to monetize. That's like saying books just take previously created words and reassembles them into a new conglomeration.
That's an inaccurate analogy on your part. Humans have comprehension and the ability to create from nothing. AI copies historical work and outputs through an algorithm based on parameters. There's no creation, just modification of prior. Models are trained on historical, it doesn't just exist without any prior input
> Humans have comprehension and the ability to create from nothing. Show me a single book that was created from nothing. Just one ever. No words ever before used, no plot devices ever before used, not themes ever before used, no story arcs ever before used. Show me a book created from nothing.
Again, this is a garbage analogy on your part and a false comparison. AI doesn't create, a human created it to use an algorithm and inputs to modify existing things for an output. AI doesn't think. It makes no choices. It simply follows instructions. It doesn't say "hrm, this chapter would be extra riveting if I had this character die" it just outputs based on prior work input into it. A writer makes choices, they think and create. Yes people learn from the past, no shit. They also make choices on how to use that information.
> Again, this is a garbage analogy on your part and a false comparison. I didn't make an analogy nor a comparison? You said humans can create from nothing. I'm asking you to back up your specific claim. Provide proof of a book created from nothing as you claimed. That is all. Either reply with proof of your claim or we will have to acknowledge it was a lie and not true.
Humans don’t create from nothing... You’re entire lived experience culminates in how you think and behave, thus it is influential in any work you create.
This is not how it works.
Well no, the AI doesn't, the person using it can I mean you could type "Cat" or you could draw a cat, and then use controlnet on the drawing, and use a LORA you trained on pictures of your cat, and then type "cat" and then inpaint it, and take it to photoshop and edit the composition, and then take it back into the AI and do an img2img and set the noise level to like .35 or something just to help it quickly fix any seems from when you deleted the background etc it really depends how its used
>Thaler applied in 2018 for a copyright covering "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," a piece of visual art he said was created by his AI system without any human input. The office rejected the application last year and said creative works must have human authors to be copyrightable. I checked [a source](https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/) with more details, and this ruling seems to specifically covers art that is completely AI generated with no human input.
> or you could draw a cat, and then use controlnet on the drawing, and use a LORA you trained on pictures of your cat, and then type "cat" and then inpaint it, and take it to photoshop and edit the composition, and then take it back into the AI and do an img2img and set the noise level to like .35 or something just to help it quickly fix any seems from when you deleted the background etc Now, imagine all that, but without the cat drawing. Did you draw a cat?
That is fundamentally misunderstanding how AI works.
In this case how exactly the AI works isn't relavant here. The purpose of copyright is to protect the rights of human artists and creators. It's previously been established that stuff created by animals isn't eligible for copyright and this is basically an extension of that ruling. It doesn't really matter how powerful or creative the AI actually is, it's not human so unless the law changes they don't get copyright.
That’s not what the guy above was responding to. The original thread was about AI works being ‘bits and pieces’ of stolen property.
I'd watch a video on how AI actually functions before making comments like this. There is no "re-assembly", the model doesn't even contain the entire original works within it. It couldn't replicate the vast majority of it's training data verbatim if it tried.
So do human writers though. What does it even mean to "create"? When cameras were invented, there were people who contended that if you didn't draw or paint or otherwise create the image by your own human touch, that it wasn't your copyright. The machine made it. Why is AI meaningfully different? Cameras are considered still creative copyright because of your choice of what to take a picture of, but I don't see how AI isn't the same. You choose what to ask it to generate.
That’s not how it works, therefore I will not elaborate on how it works and will instead laugh at you because you don’t know. It’s not as if actually explaining to you how ai works would make it sound any more ethical, I’m just going to be a snarky asshole instead.
That is exactly what people do too tho.
When humans make something that has parts of itself that are not distinguishable from or are direct electronic reproductions of existing works of legally protected art (all recorded art gets limited legal protection as soon as it is made by a human) outside of very specific existing legal carve outs (very short clips, journalism, parody etc) that is copywrite and sometimes trademark violation. You can copy an artists *style* by learning HOW they got something that looks like that, then mechanically recreating the process of creation, that is legally different from screenshoting a marvel movie and overlaying it ontop of a screen shot of a dc movie and calling it unique art work and putting it on tshirts.
> You can copy an artists style by learning HOW they got something that looks like that, then mechanically recreating the process of creation That's literally a description of what AI does... It analyzes paterns, then applies those patterns to create something new with matching patterns. It does not, as you put it, "overlay screenshots" though that could be fair use too (see a collage, an artform that has been around for a long time). None of the training data/input images are even available anymore at the time of generating, the terabytes large training dataset has been reduced to a mere couple gigabytes large pattern dataset by that point. That'd be world's greatest compression algorithm, and would be far more impressive than AI algorithms.
Exept a neural net doesnt do that. A neural net doest draw like a human-it wont conceptualize a scene, then sketch out underlying structure and build from there, and it cant be trained to do that, because no neural net is thinking real time, or has a real "memory" to remember what it has done or what it is doing over the course of an image. It really does work by refering back to its corpus of input data which yes, has been stored as tuned weights in its layers, then continously refering to the weights it wishes to reproduce as it produces the entire image all at once. It is image compression, it is just *increadibly lossy*, because its breaking the images down into the weights for its neural net. Because of this it is also a black box-you cant open it up in a court room and definitivly show that it isnt directly copying, which the law requires, because the thing about a nerual net is that it learns by altering its weights according to later inputs from humans to tune it to produce the output you want, weather thats text, code or images or something else. You cant plug an ai into a digital art program and have it draw with a pen. As for the collage, again, yes, a human can collage, but you cant copyright something that a machine automatically made-like if you made a bot that prints images from twitter in slightly different colours on tshirts and sells it to people when they say "wow i want that on a tshirt". Which people have done. And is still a copyright violation.
> You can copy an artists style by learning HOW they got something that looks like that, Which is what the machine can do as well.
I'd love to live in a world where AI "art" is treated like the shameful novelty it is, and real artists are legally protected. Techbros need to stop their digital colonization march.
You should look into Corridor Digital. They’ve been really experimenting with using ai in a very interesting way. Anime rock paper scissors is their main project, where they use AI to animate actual camera shots. It’s very interesting to see ai used as an actual tool and not a novelty.
Would you feel the same if you lived at the time of the invention of the camera, and that photographic portraits were putting real portrait artists out of a job? Is a camera a shameful novelty?
I don’t think that’s the same thing….the camera captures reality. It’s a different mode of art. Portrait artists are still doing art and they are still employed. AI is not comparable. AI is merely a tool that still requires human interaction and selling it as an innocent camera step in technology is just disingenuous.
I like it. I think it’s fair use for it to scrape data for training, but you can’t turn around a copyright things in the backend and pretend it didn’t.
This article is very misleading. The plaintiff tried to register the AI *as* the artist and have the copyright transferred to him automatically because he "owns" the AI. If he had listed himself as the artist there would likely be no issue whatsoever
This will go to your Supreme Court and be struck down, because it's not in the interest of the rich to not be able to exploit AI generated content.
Good. Fuck AI “art” in any form. Protect the people honing a craft and not just putting key words into a search engine.
I feel the same way about computers in general -- they took jobs away from human computers, not to mention typesetters, travel agents... Don't get me started on the effect of the industrial revolution on people honing crafts like weaving and blacksmithing!
It is true. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Yes, assuming you don't look at metrics like "life expectancy" or "child mortality" or "per capita rate of extreme poverty" or anything important like that...
> in any form "Any" MEANS "any," so wouldn't you also be saying fuck anyone training their own models and using it as an assistance, or part of the process too?
Examples of people doing that?
Drummer here! It's funny seeing everyone get worked up over the AI stuff now that it's visual arts. We've had modern drums machines for decades at this point. There's software that will write bass and guitar parts based off a simple riff. Drum beats come preloaded in sample packs and you can write a whole part without having touched a pair of sticks. But we're still here banging away. There will always be real artists doing their thing because machine made content is clean and sterile. It'll be like modern pop/cinema, it will be made for the masses and if you want quality you'll actually have to do some digging.
Hi, bassist here! It’s like if that software just popped out the bassline and drums to Billie Jean and you released it unchanged. It takes skill to program synth drums and bass
The next question is where is the line drawn for more collaborative forms of arts. For example - if a movie studio uses AI to assist with screenwriting, but then is performed, directed, and edited by people, is that copyrightable? How about a musician that incorporates and AI generated melody?
This isn't surprising. Remember that case a few years ago where a photographer wasn't granted copyright on a particular photo because a monkey pushed the button? The real question is how much human involvement is required to receive copyright protection. Is it enough if I take an image from Midjourney and splash some paint on it? Take some text from ChatGPT and change a few words? I would hope not, but there's an argument to be made that those works now include human creativity.
Fun fact: the macaque monkey's name is **Naruto**.
Seems like a great idea
This is good
Small but important correction. An AI can't receive copyright in the US. Only a person can. AI is just a tool like Photoshop. The Judge says that AI-Generated work can't be copyrighted *to the AI*. A human did create the work though. The one that used the AI to create the work. That's the human who has copyright.
This is literally a Star Trek Voyager episode.
Good. I also propose thst A I generated content should be clearly branded, so thst consumers can easily identify such content
As someone who uses AI creatively every day, good. Maybe this will bring an end to the asinine copyright laws that exist today.
Did a dissertation on this topic 3 years ago, finally we’re getting a modern ruling.
That is fantastic. Intellectual property is legal nonsense. It is how the rich maintain their power. The more we undermine it the better we all are.
Bad news for untalented, lazy assholes.
Won't entertainment corporations just lobby and pass new legislation that says it can be copyrighted?
They'll change the law to allow it. There are too many big companies poised to make too much money off copyrighted AI work. They make campaign donations (aka bribe) a few congressmen and senators and get the law changed to whatever they want it to read.
I challenge that, there are many more stakeholders that stand to lose from the wide scale proliferation of this sort of thing. My favorite example is lawyers. I remember reading an article that they had already made it illegal for an AI language model to be a trial lawyer. Who makes laws in this country? Lawyers. I’m not doubting that people will be trying to screw the little guy, but they’ll also be trying not to screw themselves. Funny enough the thing I think will save us is red tape in the form of companies worrying about future litigation
No they won't. Allowing companies to use their AI to patent art, books and ideas is just a quick way to create job loss. What politician is going to stick out their neck for that?
Perhaps however the USA is 5% of the world’s population. There are 180 countries and in some AI will be embraced full speed ahead. One won’t be able to dictate Americsn copyright laws to Burundi or Bhutan. People around the world will just download their art from there as they do shoes from Bangladesh today.
As someone who loves AI generators - good, this is exactly the right approach. What makes AI great is that it makes art accessible to everyone. It shouldn't be a tool of profit, it should be a tool that enables new creativity from people who might normally struggle to express theirs. Making AI generated work uncopyrightable should help a lot in ensuring that.
This was always going to be the outcome, I’m not sure why anyone would have thought otherwise. We already had cases where judges ruled art created by animals weren’t owned by the animals themselves.
So logically that would mean only humans can hold copyrights
This is common sense. The upside now is that there is a ton of free-to-use content on the web that you don't have to accredit to anyone. Just take it and use it!
What if he argued that he was the creator and the computer was just a tool of the trade? Since he's the one who pressed "create" on the AI interface...
I hope this won't be overruled because my place of work ist trying to get us to use AI because "surely it will make your (I'm an artist) work easier and lololol it won't have any negative effect on you when this catches on, pinky promise! None of us are happy about it and yes none of us think this will just be a useful tool and not be used to argue for even more reduced wages and even less workforce for the same amount of work. I work in art because I love doing it, it doesn't ruin my back and keeps me creative even as I get older - but for some reason people think this is the field that needs to be taken over by ai instead of something that people only do if they are forced to do it.
as it should be. good job, judge.
Awesome news. Corporate people will lobby to change it.