An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
its debatable who the artist is, however, because if you remove the ai from the picture he could never have made this, and if you remove the training data the results would also be different.
Realistically: everyone whose data this was trained on should be included as authors if its not just public domain
because if you remove the ai from the picture he could never have made this, and if you remove the training data the results would also be different.
How is this different from any other art? Humans are “trained” on a lifetime of art they’ve observed. Are they to attribute all of their art to those artists as well?
Hmmm. This comment made me realize that these ai images have something in common with collages. If I make a collage, do I have to include all the magazine publishers I used as authors?
Not defending the AI art here. Imo, with image generating models the mechanisms of creation are so far removed from the “artist” prompter that I don’t see it any differently than somebody paying an actual artist to paint something with a particular description of what to paint. I guess that could still make them something like a director if they’re involved enough? Which is still an artist?
I dunno. I have my opinions on this in a “I know it when I see it” kind of way, but it frustrates me that there isn’t an airtight definition of art or artist. All of this is really subjective
The problem is “intellectual property” and capitalism more generally. As technology makes art harder to define and control, the absurdity of violently controlling art will hopefully collapse along with capitalism in general.
Oh gee so scammers aren’t getting protection for lying? Dang what a cruel world poor him…
/s
Womp womp
If you didn’t make it how the fuck can it be stolen from you?
Machine output cannot be copyrighted. Whether prompt tweaking and the other stuff involved in making AI art is enough for something to not be considered machine output is still to be decided by the courts.
He spent weeks on fine tuning tbf
It’s like photography: Photographers often spend weeks trying to get the perfect shot, should they be allowed to copyright it?
Another thought experiment: If I hire an artist and tell them exactly what they should draw, which style they should use, which colours they should use etc does 100% of the credit go to the artist or am I also partly responsible?
Normally, if you’re commissioning a piece of art for commercial purposes, you would have some sort of contract with the artist that gives you the copyrights. Otherwise, the copyright belongs to the artist that produced the work, even if you buy the product.
Then there needs to be a copyright ownership agreement between the artist in the article and the artists’ whose work was used to train the AI…
But does the artist get 100% of the credit? Ignoring copyright for now, this is just a thought experiment, who’s getting how much credit?
It’s nothing like photography. It takes zero special training to feed an AI a prompt. Yes, photographers, who held their camera, who spent years honing their craft, learning the ins and out of the art of photography, who put their bodies in the field to capture real life, yes, they should be able to copyright their work.
It absolutely takes training to familiarize yourself with the model and get the results you want.
Copyright or not doesnt change time and effort that can be spent on prompting. Theres no reason to have an objective stance against people that want to explore it.
Yes, photographers, who held their camera, who spent years honing their craft, learning the ins and out of the art of photography, who put their bodies in the field to capture real life, yes, they should be able to copyright their work.
Pull out your phone. Open the camera app. Click the button. You just did an art.
Pull out a pen. Scribble your stick men. You just did the last supper.
If I order an art piece by someone, and reject thousands of finished pieces for it to not meet my standards, will i become an artist?
If I take lots of photos, print out and frame one of them but delete the others, will I become an artist?
you see here the thing is “I Take” you did the thing,
What about “I Generate”?
your not doing the work, you are telling the computer to do the work based on words you typed in, at best you could argue you own the copyright to the prompt you typed in, but not to what the computer generated. You did not generate, the computer generated
“you’re not doing the work, you are telling the camera to do the work based on a setting you found / created, at best you could argue you own the copyright to the setting, but not to what the camera captured. You did not take a photo, the camera took it”
How is that meaningfully different from “the camera generated”? Both result in a full image from a single input.
If I order an photograph by someone, and reject thousands of finished pieces for it to not meet my standards, will i become a cameraman?
deleted by creator
While some just snap a photo. And both are equally copyrightable
If anyone deserves copyright over an AI generated image, it’s the people that had their art used without their permission to train the AI. Then, the people most deserving of the copyright are the software engineers that developed the AI.
it’s the people that had their art used without their permission to train the AI.
This is the least coherent argument I keep seeing against AI art… Every art student in the world trains on the works of other artists. They explicitly study the works of great masters to learn their techniques. But when an “evil corporation™” does it it’s now theft.
It’s literally wanting the laws to reflect who is doing something rather than wanting them to be applied fairly.
Right, learning their techniques, not cutting out pieces of said master art and pasting it onto someone else’s work. There’s already predecent for this when that one monkey took a photo and the guy that provided the: camera, scene and direction was denied the copyright because he didn’t do the work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
If anyone deserves copyright over a picture of something, it’s the people that made that thing that had their thing used without permission to be the subject of the photograph. Then, the people most deserving of the copyright are the engineers that developed the camera.
Your argument is erroneous. You’re equating photography to AI art creation. That was your first error. Attempting to make my argument seem ridiculous by reappropriating my sentence structure and offering no real counterpoint was your second error.
That douche punched a sentence into a computer and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become.
Dude just pointed a camera, pressed click and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become. We could take that train of thought all the way to “if you’re not grinding up your own pigments and painting on cave walls you’re not really an artist”.
AI is a tool. I don’t have an issue with someone using AI and calling themselves an artist, as long as they’ve generated the AI model based on their own previous art. You teach a machine to mimic your brush strokes and color palette and then the machine spits out images as you taught it. I don’t see an issue there because you might as well have painted them yourself, it just saves time to have AI do most (if not all) of the work.
Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?
People absolutely did rag on people like Turner for using pre-mixed paints. People absolutely did rag on photography.
Only the names have changed.
I don’t have an issue with someone using AI and calling themselves an artist, as long as they’ve generated the AI model based on their own previous art.
That’s, uh, not what happened here. And I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Anyone with the skill to draw the kinds of pictures they want would simply draw the kinds of pictures they want instead of putting in tons of effort to get an AI to do it worse
Prompting an AI is not making art
That’s, uh, not what happened here.
I agree. He shouldn’t own that image.
And I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Anyone with the skill to draw the kinds of pictures they want would simply draw the kinds of pictures they want instead of putting in tons of effort to get an AI to do it worse
I think that’s a matter of time until it becomes the norm. There was a time we painted literally everything and then photography came along. You could make the same argument against photography because back then photography needed setting up, the images were black and white and you could arguably do a better job painting it instead. However photography took over because you could spend the next how many hours or days painting something or you could go click and have the photo that isn’t as “high quality” but is close enough.
I think in the future artists will use AI to quickly prototype through ideas and when they get roughly what they originally envisioned, they take the AI image as a canvas and touch it up a bit. Sure they could paint it themselves and spend the next week prototyping all sorts of ideas before creating the final image, but would you really do that when you could spend maybe a day prototyping with AI and then another day to fix up the image? Maybe the image doesn’t even need fixing up, maybe the AI generated exactly what you imagined?
I think the statement “then photography took over” is doing a lot of work here. It’s incredibly inaccurate to say that photography took over as the primary means of visual creativity.
Photography took over as the primary means of capturing a moment. Sure it’s used artistically sometimes, but primarily it’s used for subjective reality. I would argue that painting, and especially digital painting, is at an all-time high due to the ease and relatively low barrier to entry.
I think that most artists would still prefer to paint something that they can consider “their art”, over typing a sentence and getting back a result. Sure, it’s neat, but it will never be anything more than a novelty, or a shortcut to generic results. The process of creation is only really 50% the final result, and the process itself is an important aspect and not just a means to an end.
Using AI just feels like a weird commodification of art - like using only pre-made Unity assets for a game and nothing else, and then having someone else make it for pennies.
I’ve seen so many bizarre “AI artists” cropping up, especially online, who legitimately try to sell AI art online for hundreds of dollars. I think the reasons people buy art can usually be put into three buckets: they appreciate the process that went behind it, they like the style of the artists or that painting in particular, or they find some meaning in it. If you wanted to buy AI art why not just prompt it yourself. What process, or artistic style, or meaning is even in AI art?
It’s not even like AI can be trained on an artist’s own works. It takes millions of samples to train AI, which a singular artist would never be able to produce. So, at some point, that model will have had to have stolen the content of its results from something.
I think the statement “then photography took over” is doing a lot of work here. It’s incredibly inaccurate to say that photography took over as the primary means of visual creativity.
I think my context there was pretty obvious so it’s somewhat disingenuous to take it out of context. Photography has largely taken over portrait paintings. I think photography has also largely taken over scenic paintings. I never said it completely replaced painting, it became a tool in the hands of artists the same way AI art can become a tool.
I think that most artists would still prefer to paint something that they can consider “their art”, over typing a sentence and getting back a result. Sure, it’s neat, but it will never be anything more than a novelty, or a shortcut to generic results. The process of creation is only really 50% the final result, and the process itself is an important aspect and not just a means to an end.
And I think artist will use AI to come up ideas for their art and use the output as a canvas.
Using AI just feels like a weird commodification of art - like using only pre-made Unity assets for a game and nothing else, and then having someone else make it for pennies.
Because that’s the current use of AI. It doesn’t mean AI will stay this way.
I’ve seen so many bizarre “AI artists” cropping up, especially online, who legitimately try to sell AI art online for hundreds of dollars.
I’m not talking about those people and I’ve already mentioned elsewhere that their “work” can be considered questionable.
I think the reasons people buy art can usually be put into three buckets: they appreciate the process that went behind it, they like the style of the artists or that painting in particular, or they find some meaning in it. If you wanted to buy AI art why not just prompt it yourself. What process, or artistic style, or meaning is even in AI art?
Let’s say the artist trains an AI model solely on their own previous art and then releases some of those AI generated images. The person who likes the style or a particular painting, do they care it was made by AI? Doubt it, because it’s in the artists style. The person who appreciates the process that went behind it, is “I put my previous works into an AI model and the model generated this image based on what I imagined this image should be” really that much less impressive than “I imagined what this image should be and so I sat behind my drawing board and drew it”? As for meaning, the artist still chooses what to release. If they release something it must have a meaning. I think it would be extremely disrespectful towards an artist to claim the art they chose to release has no meaning.
It’s not even like AI can be trained on an artist’s own works. It takes millions of samples to train AI, which a singular artist would never be able to produce. So, at some point, that model will have had to have stolen the content of its results from something.
I thought we were talking about it from a philosophical point of view. I’m not about to predict the future and claim it could or couldn’t be done, but let’s say it could be done. Would that change your opinion?
Ahh yes, the camera bullshit. Here we go…
Yes a photographer is an artist. They need to know light diffusion, locational effects, distance and magnification, aperture, shutter speed, and have a subject prepped and able to take direction. They also have to have an insane understanding of post process editing.
They don’t simply type a sentence into a computer and get beautiful photographs.
A child can produce the exact same image by simply typing the exact same sentence into a computer.
A child cannot be given a camera and be tasked to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer- and succeed.
So stop with this bullshit comparison. It’s apples and oranges.
A child cannot be given a camera and be tasked to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer- and succeed.
Um. A macaque did. And every photo a child takes with a smartphone is considered to be sufficiently creative as to be a copyrightable work. It doesn’t need to be “good” to be art.
“What is art” can be a difficult question. But “how difficult was it to create it” is not the answer.
If a skillless child can reproduce it with no training but a command of their language of origin, it’s not art. You can give a child a camera but they’re not gong to be Ansel Adams. Yet you can give a child a computer and voilà! You have Stable Diffusion.
I’m not arguing this with you any further.
Did you read the rest of the comment or did you stop after the first sentence?
I didn’t need to. The moment photography was brought up as a comparison, that’s all I needed to know.
AI is not art. Period.
Let’s say I’ve been an artist for 10 years. I take all my work and stick it into an AI model. That model starts generating images based on the art I’ve created in the past 10 years. Have I stopped being an artist because I put down the brush and picked up a keyboard?
How would a child produce the exact same image if they don’t have my AI model?
You did not stop to be an artist, you just stopped to make art and every kid is able to recreate what you did, because all it have to do is type your name in prompts.
More than that, every kid drawing with a crayons on papers or on tablet is more creative than you this time.
How would a child produce the exact same image if they don’t have my AI model?
That assumes you have a big enough data set to even make anything useful with just your art. And we know that that was not the case here
That’s not the case here and I think the artist in the article has no claim to that image. I’m against the general idea that using AI instantly disqualifies someone as an artist, which is what the other person believes.
The moment your art was run through AI, it was no longer yours, and no longer art.
I’m done talking about this. I stated my point, my opinion, and I have no intention to change it. AI is garbage.
If you want to be the old man yelling how the world is changing for the worse, go ahead. You are entitled to your conservative opinion.
You teach a machine to mimic your brush strokes and color palette and then the machine spits out images as you taught it. I don’t see an issue there because you might as well have painted them yourself
This artist didn’t “teach” the AI anything though. No more than I “teach” my computer something when I do file search using operands like “+” and “-”
oh look, someone who knows nothing about the topic spewing shite again!
I’ve covered this specific multiple times already. My point was more against the general idea that anything AI related is not art.
Firstly, I agree with most of what you’ve said. However…
Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?
Is there anything in the world that isn’t a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn’t influenced by something you’ve heard, read, seen? Feeding art to AI is no different than a student walking a gallery and learning the styles of the masters. Is the AI better at it? Sure. But it’s still doing the same thing. If someone with eidetic memory paints like Picasso, are they not an artist?
To really drive home the point, if I have a friend that is an artist, like, a really good artist, and I ask them to paint something for me, say, a field with wildflowers in the snow, and they come back with something that looks just like Landscape With Snow by Van Gogh, does that mean my friend isn’t an artist? If I ask AI for that, and they come back with something like what my friend painted, how is it any different? We call them “learning” models, but we refuse to believe that they “learn”. Instead we call it “theft”.
Is there anything in the world that isn’t a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn’t influenced by something you’ve heard, read, seen?
Yes, i have made something that wasnt influenced by anything else
I mean, I don’t believe you?
I didn’t say I’m completely against imitation. I more or less implied that’s where lines start to blur. If someone spends their entire life learning Picasso and can perfectly imitate Picasso then I don’t consider that to be not art. Similarly if someone did that and fed it into an AI model that then imitates them imitating Picasso I think that’s still fine.
But if you throw in all the famous artists and have the AI generate an image could you really imitate it? Not only would you have to imitate how all of them paint and what colors they use, you should also be able to tell the difference which part of the painting was influence by which artist so you could imitate it correctly. And if we factor in that AI can blend brush strokes it becomes even more harder to actually imitate. That’s so muddy water it’s easy to make arguments for and against.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that because AI can blend together the works of hundreds and create something unique, that it is bad?
I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m saying claiming it as your own original work becomes very questionable. If you want to claim AI art as your own work you have to use only your own artistic expressions in the AI model.
That douche punched a sentence into a computer
The jokes write themselves, folks.
Yeah, the joke is that someone thinks they can call themselves an artist by typing a sentence into a prompt on a computer. I get that you’re trying to call me out, but the failure in your joke is that I’m not claiming to be an artist. That douche is.
You’ve got nothing.
I mean, everyone knows writing isn’t art. It takes no skill to make something meaningful out of words.
Keep trying, you’ll get there one day.
You’ve got nothing.
That’s a matter of perspective.
Imagine thinking this is a salient point, lmfao. “oh, you criticise people writing text prompts on large learning model tools to generate art based on an amalgamation of everyone else’s stolen art, for claiming to be artists, AND YET, here you are writing text.”
it’s so fucking stupid. a work has to be actually creative and novel to be protected by copyright, most AI prompts would not meet the threshold of creativity and originality to benefit from protection.
Ah, I remember this image. It received some kind of award or something and created a stir when it was revealed to be AI gen. I can see why that would be incentive to want copyright.
I play with AI image generation all the time. No way do I see that as my work, there’s no skill other than positive and negative prompts, maybe feeding it a a starter image set or something.
Where it might be more concerning is if you use AI gen to create an 2D example of something, then an artist creates a 3D physical representation of the thing. Who owns it? AI famously is not good at creating “whole” things, but one can certainly interpret that image to make a whole of it.
I play with AI image generation all the time. No way do I see that as my work, there’s no skill other than positive and negative prompts, maybe feeding it a a starter image set or something.
I play with image editing software all the time. There’s no skill other than adding or changing marks, maybe using a reference or something.
I guess no one owns it, it’s like in the common societies mind or something, especially if it’s an ai model trained on free stuff found in said society.
Like a chair; paint it, draw it, build it, cannot copyright it but you can’t make an exact copy of someones fresh creation either.
Super interesting. The guy claims is wasn’t just ai, that he performed alterations as well. If that’s true but he still gets shot down it might pave the way for AI being much more shunned in the world out of IP concerns on the output side rather than the training data.
You can’t copyright that music, game, book, screenplay or video because AI made some contribution.
I’m claiming copyright over Back To The Future because I edited out Power of Love and replaced it with Party All The Time.
I can’t see how any judge or arbitrator could see “alterations to something someone else made” as a viable defense.
Nah, that won’t work. As soon as corporations get involved they’ll carve out exemptions for themselves.
Corpos are involved.
AI Prompt User is complaining people stealing their artwork? Well that’s new.
“”“Artist”“”
My thoughts exactly.
You have to be the creator of the work in order to copyright it. He didn’t create the work. If the wind organized the leaves into a beautiful pattern, he couldn’t copyright the leaves either.
Couldn’t you take a picture of the leaves and copyright that?
Yes, you could. BTW I just took a screenshot of your comment so it’s mine to copyright.
I mean, literally yes, though?
Like, it’s not meaningful at all, but yes, it’s copyrightable.
Exactly my point, copyright law is ridiculous.
Weirdly enough the monkey selfie probably establishes some precedence here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
You could copyright a photograph of that leaf pattern though, couldn’t you?
but its just a photocopy of the leaves, not the actual leaves. And to photograph something, you capture it according to your will. What will be the light situation, from which angle, at what focal length,… so many options.
This is getting weird.
If I would generate an image with an AI and then take a photo of it, I could copyright the photo, even if the underlying art is not copyrightable, just like the leaves?
So, in an hypothetical way, I could hold a copyright on the photo of the image, but not on the image itself.
So if someone would find the model, seed, inference engine and prompt they could theoretically redo the image and use it, but until then they would be unable to use my photo for it?
So I would have a copyright to it through obscurity, trying to make it unfeasible to replicate?
This does sound bananas, which - to be fair - is pretty in line with my general impression of copyright laws.
Copyright covers your creative expression.
For example, you draw a superhero named “LemmyMan” and post it online. All of your creative choices are protected. If someone made another LemmyMan with a different caption, they would be violating your copyright because you created everything about LemmyMan, not just the caption in your drawing.
Now suppose you take a photo of Mount Everest. Mount Everest is not your creation, but the choices of lighting, foreground, and perspective are. Someone could not copy your exact photo, but they could take a different photo of Mount Everest making different creative choices.
The same is true of taking a photo of work in the public domain, like the Mona Lisa. If you make no creative addition to the Mona Lisa in your photo, then you have no copyright at all. If you put some creativity into your photo, like some interesting lighting, then those creative elements are protected. But anyone else could still take a photo of the Mona Lisa with different lighting, the subject itself is not under copyright.
Now suppose you tell an AI, “Draw me a superhero”, and it outputs ChatMan. If you make no further creative additions, then you have no copyright at all. But suppose you add a caption to it. Then the caption is your creative expression, so that is protected. But the rest of ChatMan is not, it’s in the public domain just like the Mona Lisa. Anyone else can make their own version of ChatMan that’s exactly the same minus your caption, because the underlying subject is not protected.
You just inadvertently explained why copyright doesn’t cover training. Thanks.
Depends on the training and the output.
Just like if you photographed the Mona Lisa in such a way as it recreated the piece as if it wasn’t a photograph, a model sufficiently trained that can reproduce the original training data, you have copyright issues.
Problem is that many models can do this, but it’s a mathematically improbable occurrence.
If I make a stamp that’s made of 1 billion exact copies of different copyrighted photos and cut it infinitesimally small, and mixed it up, the problem that it can produce the original work that it was made from still becomes a copyright issue.
You’d have to prove the opposite, in fact. That it’s mathematically impossible for your model to reproduce the copyrighted content for it not to be an issue
Copyright doesn’t cover the output of training. But AI companies are being sued over training input.
If you want to download a bunch of images from the Getty catalog, you need permission from Getty. If you don’t have their permission and download them anyway, you can be sued. It doesn’t even matter whether those images are used for training or some other commercial purpose unrelated to AI.
It’s human expression that is protected by copyright. Creative height is the bar.
If you’ve done nothing but press a button there’s often no copyright. Photography involves things like selection of motive, framing, etc. If you just photograph a motive which itself doesn’t have copyright, then what you added through your choices is what you may have copyright of. Using another’s scan of a public domain book might be considered fair use, for example (not much extra expression added by just scanning)
Independent creation is indeed a thing in copyright law. Multiple people photographing the same sunset won’t infringe each other’s copyright, at least not if you don’t intentionally try to copy another’s expression, like actively replicating their framing and edits and more.
Doesn’t modern art include works that are simply paint streaks left on canvas from someone quickly swinging a brush with paint on it at a distance?
Why is the phrase used by an AI prompt not considered more effort than that? The former requires no thought, only movement. The latter requires an understanding of language, critical thinking and the ability to envision an end result that isn’t just a paint splatter.
Indeed. ‘Fountain’ is widely recognised as a major landmark and it’s just a urinal in a museum.
Because in a Jackson Pollock painting, the artist was in complete control of his paintbrush as it swung through the air. Not to mention the choice of brush, the amount of paint, the color, etc. If there is a blue streak in the upper left, it’s because Pollock wanted a blue streak in the upper left.
An AI prompt is more like handing your camera to a passerby in Paris and saying, “Please take a photo of me with the Eiffel Tower in the background”. If your belt is visible in the photo, it’s because the passerby wanted it there. That’s why the passerby, not you, has a copyright over the result.
Your first paragraph is just nonsense. Please go try to swing a paintbrush and get every drop exactly where you want. It’s not possible. It’s literally why pollock painted that way.
No they weren’t. Their brush was being influenced by every piece they had seen before. None of those arguments are any different than the resin was in control of the prompt when they requested the image. This is nothing more than human/biological exceptionalism.
You can copyright a combination of words, though, and it was his unique combination that created the art. The artist doesn’t copyright the palette, and the shop that sold the pigments holds no ownership over the painting. If the art is created with paint, pixels, or phrase, the final product belongs to the artist, and so should be protected by law for them.
If I use a combination of words to commission an artist to paint a picture, I don’t own the copyright on that picture.
If it’s a commission, you might. Depends on the how the contract is worded.
Okay, let’s see the contract in this AI case that grants this man the copyright.
The contract is set by the company, let’s say Midjourney, which passes ownership to the person who generate the “art.” What needs to be defined is if ai generated art is art? So far, no one seems to have a definite answer. I come down on the side of yes, but there are a lot of others that say no.
Which company passes the ownership to the person in its contract? Midjourney does not, I just looked:
By using the Services, You grant to Midjourney, its affiliates, successors, and assigns a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicensable no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Content You input into the Services, as well as any Assets produced by You through the Service. This license survives termination of this Agreement by any party, for any reason.
https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service
They make it clear that you do not own the copyright on the images you create. Did the artist suing the copyright office use this company?
irrevocable copyright license
A licence isn’t a copyright, though?
https://help.midjourney.com/en/articles/8150363-can-i-use-my-images-commercially
reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Content You input into the Services, as well as any Assets produced by You through the Service.
In no way does Midjourney own the image, they only have the ability to “reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute”.
The article makes that perfectly clear.
It has to be fixed in a tangible medium.
In this case they’re not “fixing” their words and the final art is the created expression. Yet in this case their created expression wasn’t created by them but the program.
In this case their combination is the palette and paint but the program “interpreted” and so fixed it.
For example you can’t copyright a simple and common saying. Nor something factual like a phone book. Likewise you can’t copyright recipes. There has to be a “creative” component by a human. And courts have ruled that AI generated content doesn’t meet that threshold.
That’s not to say that creating the right prompt isn’t an “art” (as in skill and technique) and there is a lot of work in getting them to work right. Likewise there’s a lot of work in compiling recipes, organizing them, etc. but even then only the “design” part of the arrangement of the facts, and excluding the factual content, can be copyrighted.
In general these art pieces are not created simply with words. Users control the output using ControlNet which allows drawing on the image to force regeneration only to specific areas. It seems that if your only logic around it being non-copyrightable is due to them using words and that the program “does it all”, but that’s just not how it works.
I’m not in favor of copyrights for stuff like this, but you have a terrible misunderstanding of how these art pieces are created and it’s affecting your argument negatively.
Using stuff like controlnet to manually influence how images are shaped by the ML engine might count, there’s some great examples here (involving custom Qr codes)
It has to be fixed in a tangible medium.
Hard disks are pretty tangible.
But if they are not as you suggest, does this mean all digital photography is not copyright able?
So many arguments as to why this shouldn’t be subject to copyright seem to fail simple questions of logic.
If the output of ML isn’t copyright able, then the inputs should not be subject to copyright either. The whole system is broken and only serves to enrich the few at the expense of the many. It doesn’t protect the small time artists, only the exceptionally wealthy ones who earn more than the typical worker will make in many lifetimes.
Here’s more if you’d like to read about it.
https://www.copyright.gov/engage/visual-artists/
I remember when the DMCA was introduced and all the various issues arising from what and isn’t copyrightable when it comes to digital vs physical copies, etc.
Again I’d like to recommend Leonard French (Lawful Masse) on YouTube and Twitch for a copyright lawyers breakdown of these kinds of issues.
You cannot copyright a recipe, but you can copyright the product it produces, as evidenced by the wealth of food and drinks that are protected by law from being copied.
Can a person who works with wood and creates something unique from the wood then copyright their design crafted from the wood? What makes it art and not just glue, iron nails, and dead trees? This is what needs to be defined with AI. Right now everyone is so happy to jump on the anti-AI bandwagon that they blind themselves to issues regarding the law by claiming the art is lawless at best and stolen at worst, when in fact it is simply a new tool and a new medium.
Did authors who used typewriters rail against the new word processor? What about the editor that checked for grammar and spelling? Did they try to burn down spell and grammar checks in microsoft word? Is the art any less art if it has been created with a tool that allows for more ease than has been available in the past? Should we boycott the bakers that do not mill their own wheat? Or does the sourdough bread belong to the wild yeast cultures, and so owed recompense for all we have taken from it?
The argument can be made until the universe burns out, or we can accept that art is made by sentient life, and any tool used in the production of it cannot be considered an owner of that art, and if the only sentient lifeform involved in the creation of that art wishes to claim it as their own, then they should have the right to protections for their work.
you can copyright the product it produces, as evidenced by the wealth of food and drinks that are protected by law from being copied.
No, you can neither copyright a recipe nor the food or drink it produces.
Food and drink is only protected by trademark law. You are free to make a burger that tastes exactly like a Big Mac, you simply can’t call it a Big Mac.
And you can take a photo of some natural rock formations on black and white film stock, but you can’t take Ansel Adam’s photo of natural rock formations on black and white film stock. This is what the artist is suing for. He wants to claim ownership of his work, which I believe falls under copyright law, just like Ansel Adam’s photos.
Ansel Adams has a copyright because of the creative control he had over his photos, such as in lighting, perspective and framing.
Artists generally cannot copyright AI output because they do not have a comparable degree of creative control. Giving prompts to an AI is not sufficient.
Ok, I controlled the lighting, perspective and framing. Can I copyright now?
I’m not Anti AI. I have fun making stuff with it.
But the copyright laws as they are don’t apply. And if they did it would open a can of worms legally.
The recipe can’t be copyrighted. The cake produced can’t be copyrighted. But the packaging or style of a cake with your brand could be trademarked which is a different legal ball of wax entirely
What is the limit to the number of words that can be copyrighted?
For sale,
baby shoes,
never worn.
Can I claim that as my own? Is six words the lowest? Four? Where is the line? What makes it art vs. instruction? If Hemmingway had said those words to his publicist and asked that they be published instead of writing them himself, would he still own them?
And therein lies the rub. When it comes to copyright every infringement case has to be adjudicated by a judge (assuming they have filed a copyright)
I can definitely recommend Leonard French’s (a copyright lawyer) channel Lawful Masses on YouTube and Twitch for a more in-depth breakdown of copyright cases. How it works, the rights that copyright holders have, etc.
You can copyright a combination of words, though, and it was his unique combination that created the art
so its literature, then?
The artist doesn’t copyright the palette, and the shop that sold the pigments holds no ownership over the painting.
Sure, the artist doesn’t copyright a palette, or the shop does not hold ownership of pigments. But Companies do patent pigments.
If the art is created with paint, pixels, or phrase, the final product belongs to the artist, and so should be protected by law for them.
If you commission an Art piece, with a detailed description of what it should display. The artist comes back to you with a draft, you tell them to adjust here and there, and you finally after several rounds of drafting got the commissioned art piece. Did you draw it?
Thats what LLMs do and nothing else.
Is the diction of the buyer to the artist in the final paragraph of your argument make the painting a novel? You have you answer.
Yes, companies can copyright specific pigments, but that doesn’t give them ownership over the paintings created by them, only protect for their own IP vis-à-vis the pigments. In the same way, the company that created the LLM may protect their work but hold no ownership on the art it produces.
Who drew the art is of no import when the artist isn’t a sentient lifeform. By your definition, a photographer cannot own a picture because the camera captured it.
Yes, companies can copyright specific pigments
No, you cannot copyright a pigment. Companies can use colors as trademarks, but that just means that competitors can’t use the color in a way that would confuse customers. For example, you can’t start a courier service with vans that are the same color as UPS vans, because that might confuse customers.
You are still free to use that color in ways that are unrelated to UPS, for instance as an eye shadow.
Patents are another matter entirely. You don’t patent the color, but you might be able to patent the media (e.g. a new formula for quick drying paint).
In the same way, the company that created the LLM may protect their work
What does the company protect here? The system, or the model? Which the latter being ill-gotten by scraping already copyrighted content?
Who drew the art is of no import when the artist isn’t a sentient lifeform
It was an allegory. The supposed artist is the commissioner and the LLM being the artist. And since you can’t copyright something you didn’t made, well tough luck getting copyright on AI slop.
By your definition, a photographer cannot own a picture because the camera captured it.
No, because as a photographer you hold the tool in your hand. You can adjust everything, even the subject. And its all in your own control and it takes your skill in managing it to shoot the perfect photo.
If we would take your interpretation of my definition, then nobody can own anything since they always have to use a tool to create something.
It’s a good analogy but one thing to consider is that the artist is the copyright holder.
The company that directed it only has the copyright either by explicit contract transferring rights or because it’s a work for hire where the employee’s copyright work is “automatically” transferred to their employer.
Some interesting case law on that from Disney artists, comic book authors, etc
What does the company protect here? The system, or the model? Which the latter being ill-gotten by scraping already copyrighted content?
That depends on what is proprietary to the company. If they have created the system and the model, then both.
The supposed artist is the commissioner and the LLM being the artist.
That is a highly subjective point of view. Let’s look at music. If a musician loses their arms and can no longer play an instrument, but instead dictates the chords to someone else to play, who is the artist? Who can claim ownership of the piece?
No, because as a photographer you hold the tool in your hand. You can adjust everything, even the subject. And its all in your own control and it takes your skill in managing it to shoot the perfect photo.
Spoken like someone who has never used an LLM before and thinks it magically produces exactly what you want on the first time, every time.
If we would take your interpretation of my definition, then nobody can own anything since they always have to use a tool to create something.
No, that’s everyone else’s argument. Mine is that the tool is the LLM, and that when art is created with it, it should be open to copyright.
Let’s look at music. If a musician loses their arms and can no longer play an instrument, but instead dictates the chords to someone else to play, who is the artist? Who can claim ownership of the piece?
Then that musician becomes the composer who can copyright the sheet music. The one who plays the chords becomes the performing artist and can copyright the performance.
Spoken like someone who has never used an LLM before and thinks it magically produces exactly what you want on the first time, every time.
I have used LLMs extensively, several versions and types. I know how that shit works. And no I do not think that its results are deterministic and accurate.
Mine is that the tool is the LLM, and that when art is created with it, it should be open to copyright.
The LLM is the “artist” as it produces the image. And you can’t claim copyright for someone else.
Then that musician becomes the composer who can copyright the sheet music. The one who plays the chords becomes the performing artist and can copyright the performance.
That is if they actually composed the music. In the case of someone saying I want a song that is ABAG, and they ask that it be written down because they cannot write it down themselves, the person who writes down ABAG isn’t the composer, they are an extension of the pen that writes the note–they have become a tool.
The LLM is the “artist” as it produces the image. And you can’t claim copyright for someone else.
The LLM gives you what you ask for based on a random seed and keywords in your prompt. It has no will of it’s own. It cannot exert its will over the image. It simply outputs. As I’ve said in another part of this thread, if I tie a bucket of paint with hole to a rope and sling the bucket of paint over a canvas, does the bucket of paint get credit for being the artist? Does the rope? No. They had no will. Even though my input was minimal, and the results most assuredly random, I am still the artist by all accounts, and as such may copyright my random sprays of paint should I deem them worthy. My intent has created the art–my desire. The machine cannot create because it cannot exert its will. It simply does what it is asked and outputs.
the final product belongs to the artist, and so should be protected by law for them.
Then the real artist, the AI, should request the copyright. And sue the charlatan that tried to take its work and claim all credit.
And the camera owns the photograph, and Photoshop owns the digital image, and Final Cut Pro owns the film? The tool owns nothing. The tool is incapable of ownership
And how do you define a tool?
Thus the value of the art is reduced to an idea and the human labor invested. The labor is practically zero and an idea is worth nothing. That means there is nothing worthwhile to copyright
Wow.
If I made an image in photoshop, the computer made it, I just directed it.
How is AI different?
What are you talking about? The computer didn’t make it. That’s like saying a paintbrush made a painting.
That is not even close to AI image generation.
And that’s why I make art completely without instruction or man made tools. I actually independently developed cellphones and English purely to dunk on people on the internet.
Funny but that is kind of my point, where is the line and why?
We could explain it to you, but you’re not interested in understanding.
I’m being honest, I get that they are not the same, I just don’t understand why the line is drawn with AI, Why wasn’t it drawn with photoshop?
It’s been used many times before, but I like the analogy of ordering food. If I go to a restaurant and order risotto, I haven’t made the dish, I’ve only consumed it. I want you to focus on that word “consume”, it’s important here.
Another idea I’ve seen recently that I like was a summed post something like this:
- People use AI to write a 4,000 word article from a 15 word idea (introduction of noise)
- Others then use AI to summarize the 4,000 word article into a 15 word blurb (introduction of more noise)
I know I’m using a lot of analogies here; from food to writing and now the visual medium - but stick with me. Completely sidestepping any lofty notions of soul or humanity, let’s look strictly at what’s being communicated in a visual piece of art generated by AI. It’s an idea, one containing neither your specific style (the creative process) or vision (the final product), though you may feel you get a close approximation after several iterations and a detailed/complex enough prompt. If you wanted to convey the idea of “eagle perched in a tree”, you’ve already done so with that phrase (or prompt in this respect). By providing an AI-generated image, you’ve narrowed my own ability to interpret down into the AI-generated noise now taking up space between us.
The reason you’d use AI-generated art is because you need to fill space, like the thumbnail to go with an article. An empty space to dump things into. While I can’t ever claim enough authority to define what exactly art is and is not (nobody can), I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how far the tech evolves, to me PERSONALLY, AI will only ever generate content, not art. There is already more art in the world than I could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes, I neither want nor need this garbage.
They tried to draw the lines with Photoshop, and with cameras, and with pre-mixed pigments, and probably more.
because it was an expression of his creativity.
yeaaaah no chief, that ain’t it.
Fun idea: let him copyright his prompt, if he’s so particular about his “creativity.”
“put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
This is an Onion article, right? No one can be this deliberately and hilariously ironically. Fuck AI, and fuck these techbros.
boo fucking hoo. If you want to copyright your painting, learn to fucking paint.
It also sucks and is just another shitty AI generated image full of weird nonsense.
Just because he duped a bunch of idiot judges doesn’t mean his art or his arguments have any merit.
Can’t be that shirty if it won an art competition.
This hasn’t been reported on much, but I actually checked what that “competition” really was, back when the image won the prize. It was some local festival in Bumfucknowhere, USA, which among various other events (sport events, food tasting, that sort of stuff) included an art competition. I doubt the jury was made up of highly experienced art critics.
And besides, people should trust their own eyes. If you like the picture, you like it, and if you don’t, you don’t. Appealing to the critics as a source of objective artistic judgment is naive, and I say that as someone who has published some art criticism myself.
Art competitions can be insanely pretentious, throwing some vaguely pretty shit can win over the judges sometimes. My town hosted a art show competition thing where they had a judged award and a voted award. The judges granted it to some dude who made a purposefully pretentious painting to see if he could get the award, the general vote award went to a hand forged bronze axe based off of Minoan double headed axes.
