Jason Allen, the AI “artist” whose image he created with Midjourney won a fine arts competition two years ago, is still mad that the government won’t let him copyright his opus — and, in an amazing lack of self-awareness, is also crying that his work is being stolen as a result.
The prizewinning image, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” was deemed to not wholly exhibit human authorship because a significant amount of it — as Allen himself disclaimed — was AI-generated, the US Copyright Office said in a ruling last September. As such, Allen could only claim credit for specific portions of the image that he created with Photoshop — not the thing as a whole.
Now he’s making another appeal, Creative Bloq reports, complaining that he’s losing money to the tune of “several million dollars” because, without a copyright, his work is being used without his approval. Does this argument ring any bells?
Yeah I’d argue that creativity starts after the idea, when you roll your sleeves up and see it through to completion. Ideas are easy. Everyone has them. Doing the work by using your skills and tools is the actual creative process. Everything else is mindless ideation.
Or to put it another way, imagine a high-level executive telling the art department to come up with something cool for the next product line. He fires an email off, waits for the result, maybe sends a couple notes back. When he unveils the product, he says “look how creative and artistic I am.” Is he? I’d argue he isn’t. He just had the idea. Other people executed that idea. The best you can say about him is he guided the process along, but nobody in the art department needs him to be there.