Controversial AI art piece from 2022 lacks human authorship required for registration.
Good. Maybe this could put a stop to the attempts by companies to gut their payroll and replace artists with software.
Using automation tools isn’t something new in engineering. One can claim that as long as a person is involved and guiding/manipulating the tool, it can be copyrighted. I am sure laws will catch up as usage of AI becomes mainstream in the industry.
I dont think AI is equivalent. It can create content without you being involved and in massive quantities. It is very much capable of decimating the workforce.
You have to remember that you exist in a capitalist system that would love very much to replace you with cheaper labor if it could and there is no human that can possibly work for cheaper than an appropriately trained AI.
The only way that an artist would have a chance to survive is either through maintaining the craft via the novelty of it. I.e hand drawn/painted etc. (Which would be progresssively easier to fake) Or to become one of the people that make prompts and dont actually generate the content themselves. And the latter group of people is going to shrink over time as AI gets better at making content with little input. So any precedent set now is going to cause issues down the line when the tide shifts in AI’s favor.
I agree that AI can decimate workforce. My point is, other tools did that already and this is not unique to AI. Imagine electronic chip design. Transistor was invented in 40s and it was a giant tube. Today we have chips with billions of transistors. Initially people were designing circuits on transistor level, then register transfer level languages got invented and added a layer of abstraction. Today we even have high level synthesis languages which converts C to a gatelist. And consider the backend, this gate list is routed into physical transistors in a way that timing is met, clocks are distributed in balance, signal and power integrity are preserved, heat is removed etc. Considering there are billions of transistors and no single unique way of connecting them, tool gets creative and comes with a solution among virtually infinite possibilities which satisfy your specification. You have to tell the tool what you need, and give some guidance occasionally, but what it does is incredible, creative, and wouldn’t be possible if you gathered all engineers in the world and make them focus on a single complex chip without tools’ help. So they have been taking engineers’ jobs for decades, but what happened so far is that industry grew together with automation. If we reach the limits of demand, or physical limitations of technology, or people cannot adapt to the development of the tools fast enough by updating their job description and skillset, then decimation of the workforce happens. But this isn’t unique to AI.
I am not against regulating AI, I am just saying what I think will happen. Offloading all work to AI and getting UBI would be nice, but I don’t see that happening in near future.
I don’t see the problem with getting replaced by AI or computers.
The goal should be that nobody has to work anymore. And we are free to follow our passions, instead of grinding our way through life in order to survive.
I know the idea doesn’t go hand in hand with Capitalism, but most things don’t so that isn’t unusual.
Thing is… if you are an artist that creates art because creating new things is the fun part to you, what do you do when AI can do everything you can but better and faster with no real input from you? This isnt even about making a living at that point but that the thing you chose to put all that work into, is now effectively something you dont meaningfully contribute to.
And lets be honest, this is capitalism were talking about. Do you really think the rich fucks that benefit from this are going to willingly share that extra productivity with the workers they displace? Or that the government is going to effectively handle the economic transition? Because productivity has been skyrocketing for years but wages havent.
People have this idea that AI could free us from needing to work but forget all the advances that increased productivity over and over that never lifted the burden. Back decades ago if you told someone that we were as productive as we are today, theyd expect that we worked 20 hours a week and lived luxuriously but in reality most people work at least 40 and barely scrape by. The situation is worse for anyone whose craft was made irrelevant by new technology. Good news! Your job isnt necessary. Bad news! Capitalism still expects you to “pull your weight” like it always has.
Every time something disruptive like this came about it effectively relegated whatever that was replaced to a small niche but in the case of AI, there is really nothing that you can do that it in principle cant. There isnt really a niche you will fit into at some point whether its your job or a hobby. If you are like me and enjoy creating things that have never been created before, youre done. AI can eventually create a million new things by the time you create one… that it already effectively made hundreds of thousands of iterations ago.
For AI to do what people are hoping it does, things have to play out differently this time than they have ever played out in history. The productivity gains have to match income. Inflation has to either be at or below the rate that income increases. And you have to find out how to tackle the fact that AI wont replace everyone all at once, it’ll do so sequentially. So the guy that used to be able to make a living drawing stuff, whose hobby and job overlapped, is now going to have to take out garbage instead because AI hasnt made robots cheap enough to replace them yet. Yet being the key word, eventually the only people that would have work are people that either manipulate or maintain the AI doing all of the work that remains and even that gets replaced at some point. All the while the value of peoples’ labor drops like a stone because AI can do whatever you can do with nothing more than electricity and occasional maintanence. No need for sleep, no need to eat or medical care, no family to support, no desire to travel or have recreation, the perfect worker.
The issue ultimately is that AI requires that we smoothly transition from a mostly capitalist system to a mostly socialist system without the zone of pain between them. And thats just the economic side of it.
That’s already the case, but also it has to be substantially guided by a human because copyright only protects human expression and elements beyond what the human intentionally expressed are not protected. (Of course studios won’t generally admit how much human involvement there really were)
Ha.
A lot of money will fly and laws and views will change like butter in the sun.
Just for once Id like to be optimistic
Pretty sure this case is dead. The copyright office did the same thing with the monkey selfies and the ai art piece from stephen thaler. That “void of ownership” is just public domain. Gonna be interesting what other kind of ai cases come up later though.
If those people have ever tried actually using image generation software they will know that there is significant human authorship required to make something that isn’t remotely dogshit. The most important skill in visual art is not how to draw something but knowing what to draw.
Then why does all AI need to harvest the work of millions of artists in order to create one mediocre painting? Millions upon millions of hours of blood sweat and tears is hidden behind that algorithm. Thousands of people starting to draw when they are 5 and never stopping in order to get as good as they are.
All big AI services refuse to disclose the training set they use and those that we know anything about absolutely uses copyrighted material from artist that didn’t consent to be part of the training set.
This is what fuels my contempt for AI. People that uses literal billions of dollars of stolen time and talent and then pretend that actually having ideas is the important bit.
I mean, I agree that the developers of these AI tools need to be made to be more ethical in how they use stuff for training, but it is worth noting that that’s kind of also how humans learn. Every human artist learns, in part, by absorbing the wealth of prior art that they experience. Copying existing pieces is even a common way to practice.
Yeah, that shrug you did about how it would be nice if AI didn’t steal art is part of the problem. Shrugging and saying joink doesn’t work when you want to copyright stuff.
Human learns by assimilating other people work and working it into their own style, yes. That means that the AI is the human in this and the AI owns the artistic works. Since AI does not yet have the right to own copyrights, any works produced by that AI is not copyrightable.
That is if you accept that AI and humans learn art in the same way. I don’t personally think that is analogous but it doesn’t matter for this discussion.
There’s a reason I said “they should be made to be more ethical” and not just “they should be more ethical”. I know that they aren’t going to do it themselves and I’ll support well-written regulations on them.
but it doesn’t matter for this discussion.
Isn’t it what almost your entire comment was about?
The argument was basically “that is how humans learn too”. I accepted that analogy because it doesn’t change my conclusion that AI can’t be copyrighted. Had the discussion been about something else I wouldn’t have accepted that argument.
To play devil’s advocate: What about artists that use assistants, is using AI not the same as using an assistant?
The difference is a human artist can then make new unique art and contribute to the craft so it can advance and they can make a living off it. AI made art isn’t unique, it’s a collage of other art. To get art from AI you have to feed it prompts of things it’s seen before. So when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
My point is that this description literally applies just as much to humans. Humans are also trained on vast quantities of things they’ve seen before and meanings associated with them.
it’s a collage of other art
This is genuinely a misunderstanding of how these programs work.
when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
Because the only art anyone has ever done is when someone else paid them for it? There are a lot of art forms that generally aren’t commercially viable, and it’s very odd to insist that commercial viability is what advances an art form.
I do actually get regularly paid for a kind of work that is threatened by these things (although in my case it’s LLMs, not images). For the time being I can out-perform ChatGPT and the like, but I don’t expect that that will last forever. Either I’ll end up incorporating it or I’ll need to find something else to do. But I’m not going to stop doing my hobby versions of it.
Technology kills jobs all the time. We don’t have many human calculators these days. If the work has value beyond the financial, people will keep doing it.
Human brains don’t have perfect recollection. Every time we retell a story or remember a memory or picture an image in our head it is distorted with our own imperfections.
When I prompt an AI to create an image it samples the images it learned from with perfect recollection.
AI does not learn the same way humans do.
This is incorrect actually. The models these AIs run from by definition have imperfect recall otherwise they would be ENORMOUS. No, that’s actually exactly the opposite of how these work.
They train a statistically weighted model to predict outputs based on inputs. It has no actual image data stored internally, it can’t.
This is incorrect actually. The models these AIs run from by definition have perfect recall and that is why they require ENORMOUS resources to run and why ChatGPT became less effective when the resources it was allocated were reduced.
-ChatGPT
I’m pretty sure that the way they constantly fuck up hands is a solid demonstration that these AI tools do not have a perfect recollection
The reason they fuck up hands is because hands are usually moving during pictures and have many different configurations compared to any other body part.
So when these image AIs refer back to all the pictures of hands they’ve been fed and use them to create an ‘average approximation’ of what a hand looks like they include the motion blur from some of their samples, a middle finger sticking up from another sample or extra fingers from the sample pictures of people holding hands etc and mismatch them together even when it doesn’t fit in the picture being created.
The AI doesn’t know what a hand is. It is just mixing together samples from its perfect recollection.
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I agree. Well, that is assuming there’s no human editing of the results of the AI tool afterwards. There was heaps of it in the piece referenced in the article, and there usually is if you want to get something actually good. The piece referenced was entered in to a photomanipulation and editing category too, which seems like it’s very much in keeping with the spirit of the competition. But the reason I said that was because the comment I was replying to wasn’t about who has the copyright of the tool’s output, it was about the value of the output and tools in general
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Well, that is assuming there’s no human editing of the results of the AI tool afterwards. There was heaps of it in the piece referenced in the article
If there was, then the artist should have discussed those heaps of human editing that went into the creation of this piece of art, and he would have been granted a copyright.
The fact that he refused to disclose what - if anything - was done after the AI spit out the result is what resulted in him not being granted copyright.
Copyright just isn’t compatible with AI, we need to abolish it.
If a picture gets generated, who is the owner? The one writing the prompt? The AI that generated it? The researchers that created the AI? The artist on which the picture is based?
How about none of them? It is a picture, a piece of information. It doesn’t need an owner.
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What? Humans don’t learn to paint by looking at paintings, most people learn by just painting. Humans can also draw art without having ever seen any. AI on the other hand can only draw from other people’s works, it has no creativity of its own.
It is funny how that “one mediocre painting” won the award while the human art did not.
All those artists did the same thing, they’re also only able to pursue art because the work of so many people before has made a world in which we’re so surrounded by luxury that they don’t need to work the fields just to survive.
As the famous meme so rightly states, we live in a society. I get that a lot of modern artists don’t want to help build a better society for all because they want to protect their privileged position in capitalism but that’s not really an option, you live by the sword of capitalism you die by the sword of capitalism.
Artists. Famously part of the ruling class.
You can have a privileged position in capitalism without being the ruling class, beside we’re not talking about all the artists because a huge amount do art because they love creativity, expression and visual beauty - the ones who wage this absurd battle against emerging technology are either in a privileged position or who envision themselves in that privileged position in the future.
Jesus, you AI people are idiots.
And you haters have nothing substantial to say beside screaming that the whole world should stop just so you don’t have to adapt to a changing world
The funniest thing is the current system isn’t even very good for artists, you’re fighting to protect capitalism when capitalism is shitting all over you but because you can imagine a situation where you’re slightly higher up the stack than other people you’re fighting desperately for your chance to shit on people below you. It really is shameful tbh.
I don’t hate ai assisted technologies. I just think it’s hilarious that you’ve been ranting and raving about how artists are the true ruling class and ai is our how we break the chains of their oppression.
You see these technologies as somehow a means of democratizing all creative endeavors. I see these technologies, as they stand, as just the latest in the attempts of those who own the tech and data to siphon even more control, autonomy, and wealth from the rest of us
But yeah dude, have fun typing in prompts and feeling like you did something cool.
No one said they’re the true ruling class, the fact you have to purposely missrepresent what I’m saying to attack it makes it pretty clear your arguments hold no worth.
You say that AI is an attack on your wealth and autonomy because you see Art as nothing but a way of making money, from your comment about doing something cool you maybe have a vague notion that being an Artist confers higher higher status. You want to protect your status and earnings and that’s all you think about, I totally understand that but I think it makes for a very poor position to argue morality.
I personally think art is more than just a way to make money, there is great utility in the visual image practically, emotionally and socially. It didn’t kill art when people could cheat with Photoshop, it didn’t kill art when people could cheat with cameras, it didn’t kill art when people could cheat with quick drying paints… Giving people free access to diffusion based image generation isn’t going to kill art either and it’s certainly not going to limit anyone’s creativity or put restrictions on their freedom.
Sorry bout you were never the keeper of a forbidden jitsu, me being able to generate some images for my open source project isn’t taking away your special role in society or robbing you of your glory - you never had it to start with, it never existed anywhere but your delusions. The visual image is a utility which can be used for many useful purposes, why shouldn’t anyone with a story be able to tell it? Why shouldn’t anyone with a vision be able to depict it?
So yes when I make cool things using modern technology I will enjoy that feeling, it’s sad you’d try to take that away from me rather than celebrate others joy with them but it’s the capitalist mindset, you want to create artificial scarcity for your own personal profit, you feel that even something as pure as joy must be hoarded and that if others feel it then it devalues yours.
And I know it must seem I have something against you but honestly I just feel sorry for how deeply the brainworm of greed has poisoned your vision of the world, you fight for a system that only hurts you because you’re so focused on being a rung up from the bottom that you can’t even imagine anything but that fight for dominance which consumes you. All I hope is that you don’t get in the way of the better world that’s coming, because it won’t stop for you.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
You’re making a lot of declarative statements about what I think and why I might think those things without me ever having stated any of those things.
You’re fabricating these hallucinatory talking points, which you’re ineffectually arguing against, in your own head.
See ya in 10 years, friend. We’ll revisit this conversation.
If I took a few hours to make an impressive AI generated price of art, that’s still %0.0001 the amount of time an actual a real artist would’ve spent developing the skill and then taking the time to make the peice. I get to skip all that because AI stole the real artists’ works.
What about photographers?
I don’t think “amount of work” is a good measurement for copyright, if you scribble something in 2 seconds on a piece of paper you still own the copyright, even if it’s not a great piece of art.
I’m pretty specifically trying to bring to mind the time it takes to hone the skill. Photography is similar in that it takes many many hours to get to the point where you can produce a good work of art.
If an artist (or photographer) spends a couple hours on a peice, that’s not the actual amount of time needed. It takes years to reach the point where they can make art in a few hours. That’s what people are upset about, that’s why nobody cares about “it took me hours to generate a good peice!”, because it takes an artist 10,000 hours.
What AI art is doing is distilling that 10,000 hours (per artist) into a training set of 99% stolen works to allow someone with zero skill to produce a work of art in a few hours.
What’s most problematic isn’t who the copyright of the AI generated age belongs to, it’s that artists who own their own works are having it stolen to be used in a commercial product. Go to any AI image generator, and you’ll see “premium” options you can pay for. That product, that option to pay, only exists on the backs of artists who did not give licensing for their works, and did not get paid to provide the training data.
People have made millions off of photographs despite having zero training and only casually snapping the photo. You can get lucky, or the subject of your photo might be especially interesting or rare (such as from a newsworthy event).
I think we need something more nuanced than ‘effort input’
Photographers must have downvoted you. You don’t have to be skilled to take a really good photo. You do have to be skilled to it regularly, though.
The law is about human expression, not human work. That which a human expressed (with creative height) is protected, all else is not
So if I tell someone else to draw something, who gets the copyright?
Depends on your agreement.
I think by default if there’s no contract saying otherwise, the copyright stays with the original artist.
I would argue that the artist produces the copyright and transfers it to you. If the artist isn’t human and cant produce copyrights then it cant sell it to you. A lot of argumentation here is that we should treat AI like we treat a human artist. That is an insane line to go down because that would make any AI work effectively slavery.
Hahaha, hahaha, no. That is absolutely NOT the default arrangement. Unless otherwise negotiated in the contract, the artist retains the copyright for the produced work and is free to use it as they please, including putting it in their portfolio, making further edits to the work, reusing it for other purposes, etc. The commissioner gets a copy of the finished product, but by default has few rights to use it themselves. Technically, I’ve personally infringed an artist’s copyright by cropping a work I commissioned from them to use as an icon. However, the vast majority of artists don’t typw enforce this aspect of their IP rights, due to a lack of resources and also because it would shred their reputation and kill their business.
Explicit transfer/licensure of copyright can be negotiated, but the most artists charge an extremely hefty fee for transferring the full copyright, often double or triple the price of the work itself. Most individual commissioners don’t bother as a result, but commercial organizations looking to reuse the commissioned work must negotiate a license for the work in order to avoid a nasty infringement lawsuit.
I don’t know where the “Hahaha, hahaha, no” comes in. Everything I said is supported by what you said. What part of my comment isn’t true?
The way your response was worded came across as saying that the default arrangement is the commissioner receiving the copyright for the art unless otherwise specified, not the artist. My apologies if I misinterpreted your post.
If someone is doing work for you, you get the copyright. That’s how it always worked
This isnt always the case. Tattoos for example, are commissioned and paid for but the actual copyright often resides with the artist not the person that paid for the work.
Yes, the artist must agree that copyright transfer is part of the agreement. By default ownership is with the artist.
That’s only with the artist’s agreement though isn’t it? Usually because you’re paying them. In this case the artist isn’t a person so can’t grant you the copyright (I think)
Yes, in practice this would be a contract with the artist deciding whether the copyright is transferred or not.
Because by default, if you commission someone to draw something for you, they keep the copyright.
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Yeah it’s called work for hire, if you’re employed to do something then you have to agree who gets the copyright before you do the work.
AI art isn’t copyrightable because it’s the output of a mathematical equation and most sane places decided your can’t copyright math - imagine if Microsoft had been able to lock down percentages and no one else was allowed to use them, or of if every bit of electronics had to use sub-optimal voltage values because apple were sitting on a patent blocking people from using the most efficient options.
Copyright was only really invented so the rich can block people from expressing themselves and allow them to manipulate society, it so goes back to when queen Elizabeth decided that her friend should be the only person allowed to make money from salt, a commodity we’d been using for tens of thousands of years at that point. It’s all rent seeking and attacks on the poor.
Look, if I train a monkey to draw art, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting art is, I don’t own that art, the monkey does.
As non-human animals cannot copyright their works, it then thusly defaults to the public domain.
The same applies to AI. You train it to make the art you want, but you’re not the one making the art, the AI is. There’s no human element in the creation itself, just like with the monkey.
You can edit or make changes as you like to the art, and you own those, but you don’t own the art because the monkey/AI drew it.
Does my camera own my art, and not me?
No, because there’s a fundemental difference between a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do, and an independent thing that acts based on your instruction.
When you take a photo, you have a direct hand in making it - when you direct an AI to make art, it is the one making the art, you just choose what it makes.
It’s as silly as asking if your paintbrush owns your art as a response to being told that you can’t claim copyright over art you don’t own.
you control the seed, control the prompt — you can get the “AI” to produce the very same image if you want. so yes, you do have
a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do
That’s like saying you can control the sun for a photo because you can predict where it will be at a given time.
The fact that an AI can be deterministic, in that the same “seeds” will generate the same images, doesn’t at all invalidate my point that it is still the one interpreting the “seeds” and doing the actual image generation.
That’s like saying you can control the sun for a photo because you can predict where it will be at a given time.
You’re the one gatekeeping work. Don’t make a dumb argument against your own dumb argument.
If the argument against AI is that it’s too little work, then Photography neesds to step it’s fucking game up.
If the argument against AI is that irrelevant companies get to profit off of others’ work, then say that. Don’t make stupid arguments.
Edit: Do I have direct control of the LLMs that Samsung uses to sharpen the photos on my phone? Do I not still own them? You’re yelling at clouds.
I think it’s very hard to make the argument that photography is “real art” AND that the output of a diffusion model is never.
You’re the one gatekeeping work. Don’t make a dumb argument against your own dumb argument.
What I said was hyperbole, but it isn’t invalid. You’re claiming direct control over an independent process simply because it happens to be deterministic for any unique set of prompts.
But honestly, my arguement isn’t that complicated…
If the argument against AI is that it’s too little work, then Photography neesds to step it’s fucking game up.
When you take a photo, you’re the one taking the photo. You physically go to the location, you frame the shot, you’re the one who has to make sure the lighting is right, even that the camera is set properly.
When you draw a art, whether paint or digital, you’re the one doing each and every brushstroke, deciding each and every detail as you draw.
There’s a clear human creative element not just deciding what to photograph/draw, but in how every part of it is done.
There’s a reason most people hire a photographer for special occasions like weddings, and not just Bob down the road with his IPhone - good photography takes skill.
Whereas for AI art, all you’re doing is providing instruction to the AI, that then goes on to make all these decisions. It connects the dots between your prompts, it decides where everything goes, what brushstrokes to make. It draws the art, it generates the image.
If the argument against AI is that irrelevant companies get to profit off of others’ work, then say that. Don’t make stupid arguments.
That is a valid argument, and one I actually have made before. If you don’t own your training data, then how can you possibly claim ownership of anything that comes out of the AI, since it’s not just inspired by that data, it is working/pulling directly from that data. But, that is not the argument I’m making.
Edit: Do I have direct control of the LLMs that Samsung uses to sharpen the photos on my phone? Do I not still own them? You’re yelling at clouds.
Now that is a stupid arguement. Having an AI sharpen an image you already took and own is not the same as having it generate the entire image for you by instruction and then claiming that as your own.
You could transform that AI work into something you own and claim copyright over that transformative work, but the original work the AI made isn’t your’s to claim.
By your definition, you could copyright a screenshot from Google streetview without doing anything transformative to it because you prompted Google where to take you, and decided where to screenshot.
It’s actually gotten significantly easier, which makes this artist’s work even more impressive. There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month, and sure, I can just take the first thing midjouney throws at me and be satisfied with 80% accuracy, or I can work and rework, each generation with diminishing returns, until I get to 98% accuracy and just accept that it’s not capable of 100% yet.
There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month
… you’ve never actually made art, have you? The sort of stuff that you enter into contests takes months to make, from the actual painting to rough sketches to reference gathering, and that’s just the basics
Clicking a button a thousand times isn’t really comparable
I’m not at all disagreeing with the overall sentiment here, but having given it a go, I will say AI image generation is a very tedious endeavor many times.
It’s not just clicking a button. It’s closer to trying to Google some very specific, but hard to find medical problem. You constantly tweak and retweak your search terms, both learning from what has been output so far and as you think of new ways to stop it from giving you crap you don’t want. And each time you hit search the process takes forever, anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours.
I don’t really feel like this constitutes skill, but it does represent a certain amount of brute force stubbornness to try to get AI image generation to do what you want.
Ok using your Google analogy - there’s a reason why “librarian” is a job and “Googler” isn’t. One requires years of skill and practice to interpret a request and find the right information and do all sorts of things, and the other is someone kinda bashing keys to make Google give them what they want. You wouldn’t put them in remotely the same class
Software Engineers have entered the chat
I assume you’re joking, but I’m software and I would not classify these the same.
… you’ve never actually made art, have you?
I drew a pony when I was 6? Does that count? Or does gatekeeping art go that far?
Maybe if you spent some of that time you spend tweaking settings on midjourney practicing art, you’d make something worthwhile and not just generated content slop. :)
Yeah, or I could continue doing what I enjoy in the way that I enjoy it, and you can fuck off with your judgemental comments.
Enjoy adding negative value to the world
You making up a To-Do list of things you’ll try to accomplish today?
If you compare the AI image that was used with the image that one the price after the artist enhanced it to that level you could argue that paintings from sketches are not copyright-able
Well if the sketch was made by the artist then no you can’t, and if the sketch wasn’t then the copyright board has a right to know, and he didn’t disclose the original image.
Idk if he has shown the ai image (which isn’t copyright-able) but it was discloed that AI was used in the process
We’re gonna have some juicy legal battles when Hollywood start leveraging generative AI more and more
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Because Mr. Allen is unwilling to disclaim the AI-generated material, the Work cannot be registered as submitted," the office wrote in its decision.
In this case, “disclaim” refers to the act of formally renouncing or giving up any claim to the ownership or authorship of the AI-generated content in the work.
In August 2022, Artist Jason M. Allen created the piece in question, titled Theatre D’opera Spatial, using the Midjourney image synthesis service, which was relatively new at the time.
The image depicting a futuristic royal scene won top prize in the fair’s “Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography” category.
In his appeal, Allen claimed that “the Office is placing a value judgment on the utility of various tools” and that denying copyright protection for AI-generated artwork would result in a “void of ownership.”
More recently, it also denied copyright registration for an image that computer scientist Stephen Thaler claimed was autonomously generated by his AI system.
The original article contains 536 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Why do photographers get copyright over their pictures then?
They’re just pointing a camera at something and pressing a button.AI is a tool like any other.
Because photographs don’t require other people photographs to work. It just requires the labour of the engineers at Nikon and you payed them by buying the camera.
Use an AI algorithm with no training set and see how good your tool is.
What if I used an open source algo with my own photographs as a dataset 🤔
Then absolutely go ahead. That isn’t what the guy in the post did tough.
I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to keep copyright then. Everything involved would have been owned by you.
That is a big difference to how other generative models work though, which do use other people’s work.
Because you would have to prove that the AI only learned from your work and it’s my understanding that there is no way to track what is used as learning material or even have an AI unlearn something.
The people that is stealing art designed their algorithm to not contain proof that they stole art. If they are legally required to prove what training data they used in order to get a copyright then they will design the AI around that. That would immediately disqualify most of the current AIs because they have all been fed stolen art but I am sure they have the tech and capital to start over. And you know, Fuck em.
Did you know that it is illegal to take a photograph of the Eiffel tower at night? France lacks the right of panorama, and the lighting system was designed by someone still living. So photographs do require violating copyright law sometimes.
no no. You are not REQUIRED to break other peoples copyright in order to produce something with a camera. It is something you CAN do if you want to. AI literally cant function without a library of other peoples photos.
Someone else brought this up in this thread and it is the only circumstance should be able to copyright an AI artwork. If you own the copyright to every single piece of art in the training data. If I take 10.000 photos that are mine and feed them into an AI that produces more photos that are entirely based on my work then it should be copyrightable.
Everything in this world is owned by someone, either privately or by the government. (Well, astrophotography is an exception, but I did say ‘in this world’) You CANNOT take a photo without pointing it at something that is owned by someone. Is photography theft then?
Owning something and owning the copyright to something isn’t the same. You cant just make insane claims about something and expect me to engage with it. You are fully capable of taking photos that you own with the current copyright framework or photographers wouldnt be a profession and nothing would have pictures of anything.
And, as you said, you are fully capable of taking images that you own with the current copyright framework and creating legal AI images. If you don’t see the parallel between the two concepts and instead revert to insults and name calling, well, then I think I’ll just invoke “don’t feed trolls” and move on.
What insults and name calling? Shit, If I had known that you were this fragile I wouldn’t have bothered to respond properly and just called you retarded.
Let’s break down some of the confusion you’re experiencing.
- When it comes to buildings there is indeed copyright on the building itself. The question is did you get a usage license from the owner to photograph the building for your purposes? For example if I were to get a written usage license for the lighting of the Eiffel Tower at night, and a location permit from the city I would be able to photograph it. This is common in commercial photography with contracts known as property releases.
- Theft in regards to photography usually means taking photographs of classified or trade secrets. General photographing of buildings in public spaces would not qualify as theft but copyright violation as per the previous example.
If you want to learn more you can google “photography usage rights” or “photography license agreement” and deep dive the untold number of blog posts about it. You can check out this blog post for a crash course if you need good starting point.
If books are more your fancy there’s Nancy Wolff’s The Professional Photographer’s Legal Handbook and the American Society of Media Photographer’s Professional Business Practices in Photography; both are pretty old but a very easy to understand. John Harrington’s Best Business Practices for Photographers also goes into detail and is more recent, but very broad in what it covers. Technically, there’s the demo for fotobiz X which will let you make a sample contract from their templates.
I’m sure you’ll find more resources but these books were my go-tos when I was working as a photographer. If you feel like socializing you check out your local APA (American Photographic Artists) or ASMP (American Society of Photographic Artists) chapters. Not sure if membership is still a requirement for attending events but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Because the human element is in everything they had to do to set up the photograph, from physically going to the location, to setting up the camera properly, to ensuring the right lighting, etc.
In an AI generated image, the only human element is in putting in a prompt(s) and selecting which picture you want. The AI made the art, not you, so only the enhancements on it are copywritable because those are the human element you added.
This scenario is closer to me asking why can’t I claim copyright over the objects in my photograph, be
This scenario is closer to me asking why I can’t claim the copyright of the things I took a photograph of, and only the photograph itself. The answer usually being because I didn’t make those things, somebody/something else did, I only made the photo.
Edit: Posted this without realising I hadn’t finished my last paragraph. Oops
It’s honestly pretty much the same with ai, there’s lots of settings, tweaking, prompt writing, masking and so on… that you need to set up in order to get the result you desire.
A photographer can take shitty pictures and you can make shitty stuff with AI but you can also use both tools to make what you want and put lots of work into it.
The difference is it’s not you making the art.
The photographer is the one making the photo, it is their skill in doing ehat I described above that directly makes the photo. Whereas your prompts, tweaking, etc. are instructions for an AI to make the scenery for you based on other people’s artwork.
I actually have a better analogy for you…
If I trained a monkey to take photos, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting photo are, I don’t own those photos, the monkey does. Though in actuality, the work goes to the public domain in lieu as non-human animals cannot claim copyright.
If you edit that monkey’s photo, you own the edit, but you still don’t own the photo because the monkey took it.
The same should, does currently seem to, apply to AI. It is especially true when that AI is trained on information you don’t hold copyright or licensing for.
Actually… If an animal you own/trained makes art… you did get to have the copyright to the art, until recently with these same legal developments. Now it’s less clear.
I also agree more with the other posters interpretation in general. We copyright art made by random chance emergent effects (Polluck et al.), process based art (Morris Louis et al.), performance art (so many examples… Adrian Piper comes to mind), ephemeral art, math art, and photography, as the poster says. None of those artists are fully in control of every aspect of the final project- the art makes itself, in part, in each example.
If a human uses a math equation for the geometric output of a printer, and they tweak the variables to get the best looking output, we consider that art by law. Ai is exactly the same.
It’s funny, I find that illustrators hate ai art, but “studio” artists (for lack of a better term) usually adore it
Actually… If an animal you own/trained makes art… you did get to have the copyright to the art, until recently with these same legal developments. Now it’s less clear.
If you’re referring to Wikimedia’s infamous Monkey Selfie Dispute, which is the case I’m most aware of, then the reason its less clear is because its hard to determine the sufficient amount of human creativity required to render a human copyright over an animals work.
I’d argue that last bit doesn’t apply to the AI, because while you do provide inspiration in terms of your prompting, tweaking, etc., it is ultimately always the AI that interprets those prompts and creates the artwork. Supervising an AI is not the same thing as setting up and taking a photograph, or drawing a painting.
We copyright art made by random chance emergent effects (Polluck et al.), process based art (Morris Louis et al.), performance art (so many examples… Adrian Piper comes to mind), ephemeral art, math art, and photography, as the poster says. None of those artists are fully in control of every aspect of the final project- the art makes itself, in part, in each example.
If you’re going to cite artists, it would be a good idea to at least link their work for context for those who aren’t in the know… As I don’t know these artists, I can’t make an informed response, so I’ll move on.
If a human uses a math equation for the geometric output of a printer, and they tweak the variables to get the best looking output, we consider that art by law. Ai is exactly the same.
There’s a big difference between a human designing a math formula to output a desired geometry, and a human instructing an AI to do the same.
By having the AI do the artistic work, it’ll always be the one making the artistic choices based on your instruction, and therefore the art is not yours to own.
Actually, that’s a really good analogy, and it helped me think about this in a different way.
What if the monkey is the camera in this situation, and the training the monkey part is like designing the sensor on the camera. You can copyright the sensor design(AI Model), and the photo taken using the sensor (output), so the same should apply to AI art, shouldn’t it?
You’re losing the analogy here because these things aren’t analogous. You can only copyright what comes out of the sensor because you took the photograph. Not everything that comes out of a camera sensor is copyrightable, such as photos taken by non-humans.
There’s a fundemental difference between a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do, and an independent thing that acts based on your instruction. When you take a photo, you have a direct hand in making it - when you direct an AI to make art, it is the one making the art, you just choose what it makes.
When you take a photo, you have a direct hand in making it - when you direct an AI to make art, it is the one making the art, you just choose what it makes.
I understand what you mean, but you’re still directing the Camera; you’re placing it, adjusting the shot, perfecting lighting etc. Isn’t AI art the same? You have a direct hand in making what you want; through prompting, controlnet, Loras and whatever new thing comes along.
The camera simply puts what you see through the viewfinder into a form that can be stored, you’re the one who decides everything about the shot.
Whereas no matter how good your prompting is, it is ultimately the AI who interprets your parameters, who creates the images for you. It is the one doing the artistic work.
Do you not notice the difference? As I said in my last reply, your camera is a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do. An AI acts independently of you based on your instruction. It is not the same thing.
Also, I absolutely agree with @Eccitaze
No, because the human involvement in creating AI art is so little that it’s considered de minimis --i.e. so minimal that it’s not worth talking into account. All you’re doing is putting a prompt into the generator–regardless of how much time and effort you put into crafting the prompt, it’s the AI interpreting that prompt and deciding how to convert it into an image, not you. In comparison, when you take a photograph, you’re interpreting the scene, you’re deciding that the object you’re photographing is interesting enough for a photo, you’re deciding what should and shouldn’t be in the shot, you’re deciding the composition of the shot, and you’re deciding what settings and filters to use in the shot.
It’s like the difference between someone taking a sketch of a model and making 20 revisions/alterations to the sketch before inking/coloring it, and a picky commissioner paying an artist to draw something and asking the artist to make 20 revisions before approving color/lines.
The scene isn’t copyrighted, anyone could go to the scene (theoretically) and take their own photo from a different angle. What’s copyrighted is the expression that went into staging the shot.
An AI tool is the one doing the creative expression when generating its images is the argument. The prompt is where the creative expression of the user ends, and copyrighting just a phrase seems ridiculous. I tend to agree with these sort of arguments, especially when models like this are often trained on other people’s copyright work.
Am I the only one that think the longue they reject it, the more it will participate to it’s story behind, and make it worth more and more, and make it more and more “outrageous” and continue etc to make it have more worth?
Cool. Ugly ass Ai trash
US has a shitty copyright system. Got it.
