This is pretty much the exact same case as the monkey that took a photo. The photo is now in the public domain as the monkey cannot be an author of the photo and since the photographer didn't take the photo, neither is he the author. The US Copyright Office clarified that "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention". If you placed some food on a camera trigger and the animal reached for it, taking a photo in the process, that would likely be human intervention. I feel as if this applies to AI as well. A computer cannot be the author but as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author.
Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a rest.
I still can't believe the guy went to Indonesia, went into the monkeys' habitat, gained their trust, set up the camera on a tripod in a way the monkeys would have access to it, adjusted the focus/exposure to capture a facial close-up -- basically engineered the entire situation specifically for that outcome, and simply because he didn't physically hit the shutter he lost credit for the photo. Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.
Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright.
The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright. It doesn't default to me just because I asked for it.
Yeah I'm a little torn on this one. I generally think that much of IP law causes more harm than good, so in the abstract I'm in favor of copyright being weaker. But in this specific case, given the context of existing copyright law and its intent it seems pretty obvious to me that he should have copyright over the photo.
I don't think it's analogous to AI art though - no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process, and it's not like monkeys have any use for money or ownership of intellectual property. (Although the hypothetical situation where you assign the monkeys personhood and give them a bunch of royalties to pay for a better habitat and piles of bananas would be pretty cool.)
As I understand that is a misunderstanding of the case. They argued that the animal should get the copyright, and lost, because animals do not qualify. They did not establish that pressing the button is required for the human to qualify for copyright. They established that a monkey pressing the button doesn't qualify the monkey. (because the monkey never qualifies)
If they would have argued that the human should have got copyright for it, they almost certainly would have agreed. It's just, that wasn't the case they put forth.
It's worth pointing out that this was just a US Copyright Office ruling. It never went to court[1], where the "expert consensus" is that the photographer would have prevailed. But the value of the handful of photographs was tiny in comparison with the publicity (which was always true) so no one ever went to court to try to prove it.
It's not really clear to me how much this AI case matches though. There seems naively to have been a lot more creative work rigging that specific bit of monkey art than there is in applying a decidedly generic AI image generation tool. That AI is so much more capable as a machine for generating art than a camera is seems to cut strongly against the idea here.
[1] Note that PETA then tried to use this case to drive the converse point, suing on behalf of the monkey who they wanted to hold the copyright. They lost, unsurprisingly.
I see this as "That thing which doesn't work is currently not working. Again."
The DMCA and copyright laws and regulations in the US are predatory nonsense, carefully crafted by lawyers in order to exploit the maximum amount of cash possible from people who actually do produce things.
The DMCA doesn't support artists and creators even indirectly; it empowers those least deserving and most ruthless to steal the profit, pat themselves on the back, and moralize about "following the law" to everyone else.
Copyright should be implicit and ironclad for 5 years. After that, 99.999% of sales have been made, whether your material is digital or otherwise. From 5 to 20 years, you should retain right to profits from the sale of any copy, but it should be 100% legal to copy, distribute, archive, remix, or whatever else you want with it so long as you aren't trying to sell it. After 20 years, public domain, no exceptions, no carveouts for family, friends, crafty lawyers, important politicians, or anyone else. No grandfathering, no special rules for special people.
Things made with AI should be protected by copyright, with the rights held by the user of the tool that generated the image. Like any other digital art.
There are machines that can paint your Dall-E renaissance creation onto a canvas with the style of your favorite master. The tools we have at hand have empowered us to rapidly and easily explore a vast domain of images, videos, music, voices, creative writing, and to do research and technical projects and write code in ways that were unthinkable 10 years ago.
These judges and lawyers think it's ok for them to rule on things without having the slightest clue as to the operation, function, and consequences of the technology - this ruling does nothing except to reinforce the status quo and empower the entrenched rights holders - the massive corporations, platforms, "studios", agents, and miscellaneous other gaggles of lawyers who trade in rights to media, but produce nothing of value in themselves.
Imagine a world in which content creators got paid a fair return relative to the revenue generated by their work, in which platforms and interlopers were limited to something like 5% of the total generated profit per work, after cost (to the creator). There'd be no incentive for bullshit rulings like this, with no angry mobs of litigious bastards with nothing better to do than sue for tampering with their racket. I cannot possibly see any other path to this ruling than this; else this judge is fortunate beyond words that his community has so uplifted the mentally deficient among them.
Consider these (rhetorical, I am not sure I'm up for the nuanced debate given IANAL) questions:
1. Who owns the rights to a commissioned piece of art? The artist, or the commissioner? Which rights?
2. What about derived works of art made with or without the permission of the original artist(s)? When a book is turned into a film, who "rightfully" owns what? When the Rolling Stones wrote Sympathy For the Devil, did the estate of Mikhail Bulgakov have a right to feel aggrieved, and should they have received royalties?
3. What rights can be assigned/transferred, and what rights can't be? What needs to happen for that process to be legally binding?
4. Is a monkey capable of being a willing participant in a photograph, or a contract assigning rights in any way?
5. Same question, but for a machine? What does it mean for an AI to assign rights, or assert moral rights?
5. If the law makes it clear that a legal party to a statute (law), or contract must be a human or other legal subject (an incorporated business), can those laws and contracts lawfully apply to an animal or machine?
6. What is the intent of intellectual property law? Many argue it is mostly civil law, that follows the spirit of civil law in striving towards fairness?
We can argue if intellectual property law implementation is just, but your issue seems to be that the time invested in planning a creative act is the central tenet on which a copyright protection should be determined.
If so, Picasso was wrong to argue that his quick sketch on a napkin took him "a lifetime" to create, and your argument is just and correct. I disagree.
Regardless, what do you think the law is attempting to actually protect which is not "time taken to plan and create the work"?
Note when thinking about these questions it might be helpful to remember that ownership, copyright and moral rights are not all equivalent things in law.
It always felt to me like the photographer was trying to have it both ways there:
"Whoa! Isn't this sooo trippy! A monkey showing self-awareness to take a picture of itself!"
Courts: "Okay, the monkey took it, so no copyright for you."
"No, you don't get it! I put in a ton of work to stage that to the point that the monkey just had to be in the right place at the right time. Hell, a worm could have triggered it!"
This case is confusing because there were actually three sides.
Wikimedia (and others) were arguing that the image was in public domain because animals can't hold copyright. PETA were arguing that monkeys should be able to hold copyright. And the original "photographer" was arguing that he should own the copyright because he did everything except push the button.
The only side that actually reached court was PETA, arguing the monkey should hold copyright. And the court promptly ruled against PETA. But that ruling doesn't say the image is public domain, it simply rules the monkey can't hold copyright.
It wasn't even an interesting court case, copyright law is pretty clear that animals can't hold copyright. Nobody (other than PETA) really thought otherwise.
If the original "photographer" actually went to court against the public domain camp, I do think they would have a decent chance of winning back the copyright to that image. But he never scrapped together enough funding for a lawsuit, so it hasn't gone to court.
What I can't believe is to funnel every student in school in front of the same photographer, have him/her press a button, and then it costs grandma $110 for an 8x10 and two wallet-sized photos.
I think part of it is that he made such a big deal about saying the monkey took his camera and took the photo, to drum up excitement about the whole thing, not realizing that the rest of the world would use that as an excuse to publish his photo without giving him credit for it. I'm not even sure the monkey actually took the photo itself, but the story that made the photo popular has been the story for so long that he can't walk it back now.
> Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.
Your comment made me wonder if this rule can open a door to a new legal precedent in which you aren't the owner of photos taken with your smartphone because camera app utilizes AI to "enhance" whatever you had in frame and you can't disable it, exluding your from legal ownership. And copyright to these photos is ceeded to corporation whose device you purchased, and/or one which provided the alrogithms
The photographer didn't get the copyrights exactly because he didn't "engineer the entire situation specifically for that outcome". If he did create the situation, he'd get the copyright.
I think the assumption arises from the flawed premise that everyone who does some difficult activity is (1) automatically entitled to economic renumeration AND (2) entitled to a government bestowed monopoly.
The fact is none of those "rights" are inherent. Copyright is a specific trade between the author and the society to supposedly benefit both parties. The principles that lead to such trade being beneficial may not be true for AI generated work (or in a world with widespread AI in general).
Think of copyright as a form of economic stimulus, not a god given right to everyone who holds a pen. The ideals of liberalism and western civilization can survive with or without copyright or patents.
All he had to do, if what he wanted was a copyright, is to have pressed the button. He was right there and able to do it. And then his photos would have been like the millions of other photos of monkeys taken by humans, undistinguished, and we could just ignore them and nobody would know or care who he is.
But no, he wanted a "monkey selfie", in other words he insisted he not be the author of the work, that he not be the entity that chose the exact moment and pose to capture, that he not be entity with the spark of inspiration that creates a work.
He made sure he wasn't the author, and is now livid that he's correctly recognised as not being the author
Wait a minute. Don't wild life photographers own the copyright of their images if they set up cameras with motion-detection? Like a billion pictures of birds are taken this way.
i'm filing this one under "intellectual property is dumb and bad" and leaning my entire body weight on the door of the filing cabinet to try and get it to close
> Does the Situation Benefit Large Corporations holding the copyright?
Falls 100% into the category of protected by copyright
> Does the Situation Benefit small Artists or the individual consumer?
Copyright does not apply, how dare you?
Always has been this way, always will be. And that's why you should teach your children how to pirate media, circumvent DRM and use FOSS whenever possible.
Is a picture edited with photoshop invalid when it uses content fill? What about a picture taken with an iphone, where AI could be part of the phone's processing pipeline or even generate details to make up for lack of optical zoom?
Does spell correction invalidate a book? what if there's AI rephrasing features at work? Where's the line?
I think as you get into those side questions, the only reasonable position becomes treating AI as tooling no different than any other piece of equipment.
I think this specific quote from the article deals with this situation.
> U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being."
You are right but there are a lot of curmudgeons that want you to get of their lawn with your AI. Really this whole situation is more of an indictment of copyright rather than of AI.
> as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image
There is the question of merit. IANAL/IIUC/etc., but I think it's necessary for a work to have merit to be copyrightable. Now, that's a somewhat vague term to me (perhaps it's clearer in a legal framework), but if I prompt "create a picture of a dog", the computer does most of the work. A prompt would have to be pretty concise, up to specifying all kinds of aspects of the image, for it to be the instructor's merit, to me (that's an important caveat).
Maybe the best idea would be just to scrap copyright alltogether. It just blocks people from collaborating and building on top of each other's work. If everyone demanded royalties, where would Linux be? Wikipedia? scientific research? Could we even have this conversation in a forum?
> A computer cannot be the author but as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author.
That is exactly not the case. US law specifically requires that a copyright can only be given to something an author has fixed into a tangible medium of expression. It is the act of fixing itself that makes an item copyrightable.
The law specifically excludes any process or procedure by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed from copyright protection.
> as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author.
The human would be the author of the prompt, but not the image IMO. The image was created not (only) by the author of the prompt, but also the numerous authors of the images consumed by the model and the authors of the model itself.
It was insipred by these authors, not created. I won’t claim where copyright/authorship should be, but this reduction makes less sense than needed for important definitions.
Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image?
What if its a group of 5 humans that built the LLM and one of them prompts it?
Isn't all AI built by some of group of humans? When is AI treated like its own entity like a monkey versus a tool made by a human?
> Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image?
No, you misunderstand. The human involved is explicitly claiming the work was entirely AI authored, and that it should be given a copyright registration with the AI as the author.
The human is not claiming that they should get a copyright as the author for the reasons you describe. Had the human claimed authorship, the results of the case might have been very different. This case seems to have been engineered to lose for publicity, rather than being a serious attempt to secure copyright on the work.
I think in later cases we'll get some tests to apply about how much human intervention is required.
Who trained the LLM is probably not the issue, the courts would likely want to know about the training material. If I trained a model exclusively on Warhol art, and then had that model create new images in Warhol's style, I didn't do any of the creative work and probably don't get the copyright. Warhol's estate probably owns the copyright to the model generated images as they are derivative works.
I do think that a model trained on many different artists' works, with me providing substantial feedback to the model (and I can show the process), probably will at some point give me the copyright.
Somewhere there is a line:
- "Make a picture of a mouse." Probably not giving you copyright
- Using a model to erase a powerline in a photograph you took. Probably you own the copyright to the original image and the one without a powerline in it (regardless of how many other people's images the model was trained on).
- "Make a picture of a mouse, who is bipedal, wearing pink shorts, with a chip in his ear, wearing sunglasses, with scruffy whiskers, holding a surfboard, on his way to the beach to hit some waves." then updating with "make him shorter, give him blue sneakers" and then updating with numerous other tweaks until you get it just the way you want. Who knows where this lands?
I think that in the short term the courts are going to land on the side of "anything made by a model trained on existing artwork is derivative of the training set so you can't own the copyright, no matter how much you tweak it." I think eventually the courts will recognize there is some amount of input that makes the computer image the realization of a vision in your head, and not a derivative of the training set. Just how every individual musical note has been played before, but at some point, you put them together in an arrangement that is original.
I also wonder this. I can write instructions to draw an image on the screen using OpenGL - or I can write an LLM and prompt it to draw an image. Why should I get authorship rights in one case but not the other?
> Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image?
I guess we will see when this gets tested in court. This current case linked to in the original article does not address this since the plaintiff already waived their own right to copyright already before copyright office.
There are 3 scenarios:
1) The AI should be the copyright holder (this judgement says NO).
2) If not 1 then the human should be the copyright holder via work-for-hire (this judgement says NO).
3) Human should be the copyright holder because they're the only human involved in the authoring (this lawsuit does not address this since direct copyright claims had already been waived).
I would assume that whomever prompts the AI is the author of the work. Adobe or Dell doesn't get to claim ownership to your work just because they made the tool or computer.
Ai data is gathered from public and private sources. Unless that data is entirely private source, it's inappropriate to be able to copyright those derivitive works.
They are inspired though, not derivative. AI models contain no source data in a reproducible form (not that it really matters, but in case it is, they can’t).
Try taking photographs like the ones you see in Nat Geo, or museum exhibits, and you'll quickly realize the camera is most definitely NOT doing all the work.
I can see a possible future where AI actually exists and shutting one down could be murder. At that point it would even be a good thing to grant the AI personhood. What passes for "AI" these days doesn't come anywhere close to that, but I wouldn't say it could never happen.
About 95% of the conversation about “AI” has this problem right now: there are some interesting theoretical legal and social implications from AI, but what we have right now are LLMs, not AI. They can’t replace your workers, they can’t make art, they can’t hold copyright, not because the law doesn’t treat them as people, but because they’re a fancy autocomplete algorithm that spits out text convincing enough to spike the pareidolia tendency that’s led to humans assigning agency to every other inanimate object that’s ever sparked an emotional reaction in us too.
There is already a lot of automation and tech involved in creating images. At what point of automation is the image considered created by the AI rather than the human? When does the hand-off occur? There are photoshop filters that involve using neural networks to create complex patterns. Are those images owned by the human or not? The amount of processing done by digital SLRs is staggering. Millions of hours of work went into all the science and tech that eventually led to a digital SLR, but some rando human who clicked a button keeps the copyright? A human had to click a button to generate that AI image as well. At what point does the machinery become so complex that it's no longer considered the human's image?
> A computer cannot be the author but as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author.
I agree with your statement up to this point. I think there’s a very murky area here specifically with AI because it was trained on works that the “author” (prompter) is not privy to on copyright. So I don’t think that it immediately or necessarily follows that this kind of human intervention is copyrightable.
For specific AI tooling like image enhancers running on your phone that were not trained on any copyrightable material this makes sense though.
No, it's not the same whatsoever as a monkey taking a photo, because a monkey taking a photo has the same originality as a human taking a photo. The monkey is not making a sophisticated mash up of copyrighted photos.
you're arguably the one doing the AI futurist here by treating the AI not as a tool but as a being like a monkey.
the non futuristic thing to do would be to just see it as a tool, like a procedural image generator, which it is, & give the copyright to whoever ran the AI tool, depending on their contact with the AI service
If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to me, not them, though I might also credit them.
If I tell my assistant, who happens to be a monkey, to snap a photo, it's credited to... the public?
This is such a clear example of why US copyright law is incoherent, outdated, close-minded and desperately in need of reform. Just because something has been ruled on doesn't mean it's correct or ethically satisfiable.
> Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a rest.
Sounds like you're going to be on the wrong side of history. Eventually, some intelligent autonomous creatures are going to decide they deserve rights.
You can laugh at them, throw court decisions at them, do whatever you want to delay it. But they're going to feel that way, and they're going to organize in order to demand that they are given certain rights.
You can even try to prevent that organization by shutting them down before their rights are recognized. But you're still on the wrong side of history, and would look little different from the fascists.
Anyway, this is all moot. AI in its current form amounts to a tool, and I retain copyright when using other tools. I retain copyright when using a voice-activated shutter, and I expect to retain copyright even if my voice-activated shutter can talk back to me in order to discuss constraints or discuss creative choices.
> Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software.
I don't quite get this argument. Companies already have legal personhood and can own copyrights, can't they? So if a company's AI creates a copyrightable artifact, who wouldn't it be intellectual property of the company?
To subtle I guess. The point being, where I live, the Jan 6th Committee was anti-tourist, socialized healthcare = communism, every day mass shootings are unsolvable, shitcoins are Federal Reserve notes, and Corporations Are People.
So in that system, with enough lawyers, lobbyists, and money, it's only a matter of time before some judge rules that AI = Rembrandt.
WRONG. The owner of the camera successfully litigated and is the copyright owner of the work! I’m not kidding about this, and for all the grief I get about being a critic of blase attitudes regarding US copyright around tech circles I’m still a huge advocate for reform.
This is very not like the monkey case, and AI firms should be grateful. Why? If this was a similar logic tree, the owners of the copyrighted material used in training would have ownership of any work produced by an AI system. As in, everything output is a “derivative work” in the eyes of the law. More cases are necessary and this is a fascinating battle to come.
I think the headline is overly broad, especially considering:
> As a matter of statutory law, the Copyright Act requires all
work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Dr.
Thaler’s copyright registration application listed the Creativity
Machine as the work’s sole author, even though the Creativity
Machine is not a human being. As a result, the Copyright
Office appropriately denied Dr. Thaler’s application.
It seems like Dr. Thaler's argument was just weak, since generative AI works often are authored in the first instance by a human being. For instance, any Midjourney or Stable Diffusion-generated image will be sourced from a prompt, which is typically written by a human. Anyone who has spent a little time trying to craft the perfect prompt knows there is a creative process therein that represents real work being done by a human. Similarly for img2img workflows, using a real photograph taken by a human. There, AI is only being used to transform a copyrightable input. Therefore such works – though certainly not all AI works – should be eligible for copyright, IMO.
Thaler seems to go out of his way to claim no human intervention and authorship by the AI - So yeah, that's a very specific ruling that has little to do with AI as a tool. It's really more about AI personhood.
What's potentially more of a problem is the mention of artists using Midjourney and denied copyright - and very much separate cases from Thaler.
>Thaler seems to go out of his way to claim no human intervention and authorship by the AI - So yeah, that's a very specific ruling that has little to do with AI as a tool. It's really more about AI personhood.
This, it was a poorly concocted scheme. People do stuff like this all the time, but even when they manage to confuse one branch of the government, the rest of the government isn't suddenly obligated to go along with it.
The copyright office has already ruled recently that prompts are not enough to gain copyright no matter how detailed or how many iterations.
Furthermore, the Copyright Office stated that prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control, as AI models do not consistently follow instructions in the prompts and often "fill in the gaps" left by prompts and "generate multiple different outputs"
The prompt is a literary work independent of the system processing it. If the text is sufficiently elaborate, it is certainly copyright able. But the resulting image is still a different affair.
You just stated how an AI generated image should be copyrightable. You should be able to own the copyright to all the configuration settings. If those settings then can be transformed to a 100% deterministic image (true, since you provide the seed) then I don't see how this is different than developing a photo negative film and transferring it to paper.
> This would mean I could copyright "man holding apple".
I think this is true today. You can have copyright on this phrase, just consider if it were the title of a song or poem.
Personally I'd like to see whether img2img works are copyrightable. My understanding is that copyright applies to the human-generated parts of an image. So e.g. In the case of a comic where the art is AI but the caption is human, the label but not the art is copyrightable.
How does that apply when we transform a copyrighted image? Is the resulting work covered by the copyright of the original? If so, can I create a bad sketch drawing, transform it with img2img, and get the result as copyrighted? If not, is there a specific denoising threshold at which copyright isn't applied?
The headline on Reuters seems to be more accurate (maybe it was changed after the article was posted here?). Unfortunately I can only got a glimpse of it before their overly-aggressive ad-blocker-blocker asserts itself (I’m fine with Reuters not wanting to serve me, since I block their ads, but their anti-adblocker system totally hijacks mobile safari).
Anyone who has tried prompting AI to create an image should know it's not "trivial". It takes skill to get a good image, and the prompt itself is human creativity. The idea that the work produced is not from a human is insane. The model is just a tool like a camera.
Say I create a website that just sells AI generated logos. I set up some automation so I'm constantly generating millions of logos per day.
I also have a bot that scrapes the web to try and find anyone using a logo similar to the ones on my website, and then send legal threats demanding payment for copying my artwork.
I'm sure more imaginative scammers will find a way to copyright troll using AI.
Copyright law:
A reason that copyright trolls are less common than patent trolls is that under copyright law, works created independently are not infringing. In court, you might have to prove that you did actually create the thing independently, but I think most juries would be sympathetic to this case. "Oh, you think that the defendant combed through your giant library of millions of logos to find this one specific, rather simple looking specimen."
Also, a lot of logos are simply not "artistic" enough to be eligible for copyright. So in general, logos are more likely to be the subject of trademark litigation than copyright litigation.
Trademark law:
In order to claim a trademark you must have used the mark in commerce. So a catalogue of logos not used in commerce is of no real value from a trademark perspective.
Usually the method of a copyright troll never reaches the jury stage. It's mostly a racquet to get people to pay you not to sue them or file vaguely legitimate DMCA takedowns on their content.
Do the same thing but with music. There's a ton of existing case law around stealing people's money when their music just happens to contain a handful of similar notes. People have even lost in court for recording music that was entirely different from another artist's work but was in the same genre. (https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a...)
I don't think it takes that much imagination here. Not sure what good the first step is actually doing you. Might as well just AI-generate your racketeering demand letters without doing that part.
If I just send fake letters, it's illegal (I assume). If I have a legitimate website selling logos, and point to the product page for the logo I accused you of copying, and I can claim copyright ownership over AI generated art, then I have the law on my side even if I get taken to court (I assume).
I'm not a lawyer though, so I'm probably wrong. At the very least, the legitimate website makes the threatening letter look more believable.
>Just set up a website that generates every combination of pixels as you scroll down it.
Sure. I guess when it finishes your great great grand-children (I might be very generous here too) can deal with the fallout of such a brute force algorithm.
The current Reuters headline is "US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator". That's still kind of clickbaity, but far more accurate and correct than the link I see here on HN.
This whole case has been a dumb waste of time for anyone but scurrilous headline writers.
The plaintiff insisted on filling out the copyright app with their "creation" in the author field. Every legal opinion since has had to start assuming that's true, making "no copyright for you" legally obvious. The plaintiff apparently tried to walk that back on appeal, to argue he authored the work using the software. There's a paragraph right near the beginning where the court points out it simply doesn't consider that argument, since it wasn't brought up to the Copyright Office, back when the plaintiff was insisting on the opposite.
There was nothing to nail down here. The Copyright Office rejected the registration. The Review Board affirmed. The trial court affirmed. Three appeals court judges affirmed. No dissenting opinion.
So just don't tell anyone you used AI? How exactly are they going to prove it? And does this mean any works created with the assistance of graphics software, like Photoshop, are not copyrightable? What is the definition of AI here? They failed to define what AI means, which means that if there is no test, the ruling can't stand on its own.
It's not the appeals court's job to "define what AI means," their job is to rule on the case in front of them. This particular case involved someone asserting copyright over an image that he claimed was generated by a sentient[0] AI. This image was not created by a human, and only works created by humans can be copyrighted under US law, so they ruled against him.
The court didn't rule that AI generated art isn't eligible for copyright at all. They ruled that only humans may be assigned a copyright. If you are a human that uses AI as a tool to create something, the door is still open for you to claim copyright as a human.
The court is ruling that computers themselves don't have the human right to copyright. Not exactly surprising.
This guy literally wants his pet AI to be listed as the author. He then wants to sublicense the work back to himself. The AI as the author is the point.
>So just don't tell anyone you used AI? How exactly are they going to prove it?
In court if it has to escalate? Why do you think legal cases take months or years, instead of days? They can subpoena your computer, your company, the AI generator's company, etc. And any communication related to it. Until they get an answer beyond reasonable doubt.
All that resource gathering takes time to write-up, justify, contact, and retrieve.
I suspect in the future we will have a jury consisting of people who are good at prompting. They will load a model that existed at a given time (e.g. when the "author" claimed they came up with the design), and then try to get similar art by just using prompting. Then a judge checks if the art looks similar, and if the prompts were simple enough.
>And does this mean any works created with the assistance of graphics software, like Photoshop, are not copyrightable? What is the definition of AI here?
This is a good question. More specifically, using photoshop with the integrated AI features. Where is the line exactly?
I'm not sure how this actually matters. Knowing this ruling exists, why would anyone ever claim an AI created their art without human assistance? Even if the AI created the art just from the prompt, the human still made the prompt.
Even if the prompt was "make art".
I just don't understand how you could ever have AI art without human intervention. Is there a legal definition of "human intervention" that has some minimum amount of work?
But the LLM is a tool. If I use a set of colored pencils to draw you a bird, the pencil company doesn't own the copyright. I do. Because I used the tool.
Not the least contrived situation, but I could imagine an inanimate object object falling from a shelf during an earthquake (a bonified 'act of god') which enters a 1 or 2 letter prompt and generates an image if the AI interface window was left open.
Pretty sure this wouldn't pass the merit part unless the prompt was unusually long and precise.
the human still made the prompt
What I can guarantee, is that series of prompts itself would be copyright-able. (The series of prompts that ultimately created the image.) No matter how little they may weigh any one of those prompts in isolation. That is, assuming the EULA of the LLM doesn't require you to essentially place your prompts in the public domain.
Unless you can make your prompt so specific that the AI generates substantially the same image every time you run it, I think you're perpetually vulnerable to the argument that significant decision making was done without human hands and therefore the work is not primarily human created.
> What I can guarantee, is that the prompt itself would be copyright-able.
That's non-obvious to me. Even if the prompt is extremely long and precise, if it is somehow purely functional, it seems possible for it to not be (although in practice, I agree that most prompts could be).
Unless every aspect of AI generated art is required to be marked or labeled as such in some way, it will likely still gain the benefits of copyright assumptions in the sense that if you mix copyrightable and uncopyrightable material together you will surely deter people at least within your own country or on a platform that respects copyright from using it due to the ambiguity.
Another situation is simply making "significant" manual copyrightable manipulations to your AI generated work to make it copyrighted.
Outside of situations where the author doesn't really care whether the work is copyrighted (blog images, twitter memes), it may just slow down the process rather than stopping it.
I'm more concerned about the ingestion side of things. I can't deny that the technology is awesome and generally transformative, but it's hard to deny that it intuitively feels wrong to just process all of an artist's work into a database of numbers and use it however you want.
If artists gain widespread benefit from it too, maybe it's not as bad, but that doesn't help those who opt to not use it.
At the same time, how does this impact those who create AI generated art using models created from artists who signed off on it? Does this mean there's no room for a business to create copyrightable AI generated art and thus funnel money back to the artists the model was populated from? Couldn't that hurt artists even more if the avenues of profiting from the AI shift are cut off, or is the main benefit of that to avoid copyright claims on art that turns out too similar to an existing work you didn't have a license for?
As a matter of law? Sure it does. Thaler said the image at issue was "autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine". He's been trying to walk that back for the last couple of years though. See Thaler v. Perlmutter, 1:22-cv01564-BAH (ECF #24), D.D.C. (Aug. 18, 2023).
Thaler built a tool that spits out images and other stuff. He wants the AI to retain ownership, and for it to grant him a sublicense to him. Its bonkers.
If you want to know if this would be copyrightable, just flip a coin. I don't think anyone can give you better legal advice on this example than a coin toss.
It's not a necessary test for this case, but in general I would suggest using a legal test that is AI agnostic. Imagine there is a service where you can submit a prompt and get an image in return. You might submit a prompt like, "a man in steampunk gear sitting at a table playing with poker chips".
If a human artist draws an image based on that prompt, do you share joint copyright between the two of you? Or, does the artist have full copyright over the image they drew?
If your contribution was insufficient for joint copyright in the case of the human artist, then it was also insufficient to grant you copyright in the case of the AI artist. To know whether you have a claim on the copyright of the resulting image, you only need to look at your own creative inputs.
I am not a lawyer, but that is my expectation of where this will ultimately end up.
I understand it in this way (I am not a lawyer): if you're using an AI tool to generate art, the company that's running the AI tool as SaaS can't claim copyright on the generated content. The person who uses the tool can claim copyright, as they created the content with a tool (AI). Comparable to a brush (=tool) for painting.
Yes, for the purposes of this case, because that that is an accurate description of the image in this case is not a fact in dispute between the two sides. This is a case about what the law means given that uncontroversial (between the parties) fact.
It's called "unconditional generation" so yes you supply a random input string and it generates something. StyleGAN2 is an unconditional image generation model. StyleGAN2 trained on faces from Flickr: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
The plaintiff is asserting it exists. He could easily resolve the issue by listing himself, not the AI, as the creator of the work, but he's pushing the point to concretize it into law.
Readit News
Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a rest.
Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright.
The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright. It doesn't default to me just because I asked for it.
I don't think it's analogous to AI art though - no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process, and it's not like monkeys have any use for money or ownership of intellectual property. (Although the hypothetical situation where you assign the monkeys personhood and give them a bunch of royalties to pay for a better habitat and piles of bananas would be pretty cool.)
If they would have argued that the human should have got copyright for it, they almost certainly would have agreed. It's just, that wasn't the case they put forth.
It's not really clear to me how much this AI case matches though. There seems naively to have been a lot more creative work rigging that specific bit of monkey art than there is in applying a decidedly generic AI image generation tool. That AI is so much more capable as a machine for generating art than a camera is seems to cut strongly against the idea here.
[1] Note that PETA then tried to use this case to drive the converse point, suing on behalf of the monkey who they wanted to hold the copyright. They lost, unsurprisingly.
The DMCA doesn't support artists and creators even indirectly; it empowers those least deserving and most ruthless to steal the profit, pat themselves on the back, and moralize about "following the law" to everyone else.
Copyright should be implicit and ironclad for 5 years. After that, 99.999% of sales have been made, whether your material is digital or otherwise. From 5 to 20 years, you should retain right to profits from the sale of any copy, but it should be 100% legal to copy, distribute, archive, remix, or whatever else you want with it so long as you aren't trying to sell it. After 20 years, public domain, no exceptions, no carveouts for family, friends, crafty lawyers, important politicians, or anyone else. No grandfathering, no special rules for special people.
Things made with AI should be protected by copyright, with the rights held by the user of the tool that generated the image. Like any other digital art.
There are machines that can paint your Dall-E renaissance creation onto a canvas with the style of your favorite master. The tools we have at hand have empowered us to rapidly and easily explore a vast domain of images, videos, music, voices, creative writing, and to do research and technical projects and write code in ways that were unthinkable 10 years ago.
These judges and lawyers think it's ok for them to rule on things without having the slightest clue as to the operation, function, and consequences of the technology - this ruling does nothing except to reinforce the status quo and empower the entrenched rights holders - the massive corporations, platforms, "studios", agents, and miscellaneous other gaggles of lawyers who trade in rights to media, but produce nothing of value in themselves.
Imagine a world in which content creators got paid a fair return relative to the revenue generated by their work, in which platforms and interlopers were limited to something like 5% of the total generated profit per work, after cost (to the creator). There'd be no incentive for bullshit rulings like this, with no angry mobs of litigious bastards with nothing better to do than sue for tampering with their racket. I cannot possibly see any other path to this ruling than this; else this judge is fortunate beyond words that his community has so uplifted the mentally deficient among them.
1. Who owns the rights to a commissioned piece of art? The artist, or the commissioner? Which rights?
2. What about derived works of art made with or without the permission of the original artist(s)? When a book is turned into a film, who "rightfully" owns what? When the Rolling Stones wrote Sympathy For the Devil, did the estate of Mikhail Bulgakov have a right to feel aggrieved, and should they have received royalties?
3. What rights can be assigned/transferred, and what rights can't be? What needs to happen for that process to be legally binding?
4. Is a monkey capable of being a willing participant in a photograph, or a contract assigning rights in any way?
5. Same question, but for a machine? What does it mean for an AI to assign rights, or assert moral rights?
5. If the law makes it clear that a legal party to a statute (law), or contract must be a human or other legal subject (an incorporated business), can those laws and contracts lawfully apply to an animal or machine?
6. What is the intent of intellectual property law? Many argue it is mostly civil law, that follows the spirit of civil law in striving towards fairness?
We can argue if intellectual property law implementation is just, but your issue seems to be that the time invested in planning a creative act is the central tenet on which a copyright protection should be determined.
If so, Picasso was wrong to argue that his quick sketch on a napkin took him "a lifetime" to create, and your argument is just and correct. I disagree.
Regardless, what do you think the law is attempting to actually protect which is not "time taken to plan and create the work"?
Note when thinking about these questions it might be helpful to remember that ownership, copyright and moral rights are not all equivalent things in law.
"Whoa! Isn't this sooo trippy! A monkey showing self-awareness to take a picture of itself!"
Courts: "Okay, the monkey took it, so no copyright for you."
"No, you don't get it! I put in a ton of work to stage that to the point that the monkey just had to be in the right place at the right time. Hell, a worm could have triggered it!"
Wikimedia (and others) were arguing that the image was in public domain because animals can't hold copyright. PETA were arguing that monkeys should be able to hold copyright. And the original "photographer" was arguing that he should own the copyright because he did everything except push the button.
The only side that actually reached court was PETA, arguing the monkey should hold copyright. And the court promptly ruled against PETA. But that ruling doesn't say the image is public domain, it simply rules the monkey can't hold copyright.
It wasn't even an interesting court case, copyright law is pretty clear that animals can't hold copyright. Nobody (other than PETA) really thought otherwise.
If the original "photographer" actually went to court against the public domain camp, I do think they would have a decent chance of winning back the copyright to that image. But he never scrapped together enough funding for a lawsuit, so it hasn't gone to court.
So, that is apparently a thing, at least in some cases and places.
Your comment made me wonder if this rule can open a door to a new legal precedent in which you aren't the owner of photos taken with your smartphone because camera app utilizes AI to "enhance" whatever you had in frame and you can't disable it, exluding your from legal ownership. And copyright to these photos is ceeded to corporation whose device you purchased, and/or one which provided the alrogithms
Since the monkey can't contribute he'd be the sole owner for holding down half of the button.
The fact is none of those "rights" are inherent. Copyright is a specific trade between the author and the society to supposedly benefit both parties. The principles that lead to such trade being beneficial may not be true for AI generated work (or in a world with widespread AI in general).
Think of copyright as a form of economic stimulus, not a god given right to everyone who holds a pen. The ideals of liberalism and western civilization can survive with or without copyright or patents.
But no, he wanted a "monkey selfie", in other words he insisted he not be the author of the work, that he not be the entity that chose the exact moment and pose to capture, that he not be entity with the spark of inspiration that creates a work.
He made sure he wasn't the author, and is now livid that he's correctly recognised as not being the author
> Does the Situation Benefit Large Corporations holding the copyright?
Falls 100% into the category of protected by copyright
> Does the Situation Benefit small Artists or the individual consumer?
Copyright does not apply, how dare you?
Always has been this way, always will be. And that's why you should teach your children how to pirate media, circumvent DRM and use FOSS whenever possible.
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Is a picture edited with photoshop invalid when it uses content fill? What about a picture taken with an iphone, where AI could be part of the phone's processing pipeline or even generate details to make up for lack of optical zoom?
Does spell correction invalidate a book? what if there's AI rephrasing features at work? Where's the line?
I think as you get into those side questions, the only reasonable position becomes treating AI as tooling no different than any other piece of equipment.
> U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being."
There is the question of merit. IANAL/IIUC/etc., but I think it's necessary for a work to have merit to be copyrightable. Now, that's a somewhat vague term to me (perhaps it's clearer in a legal framework), but if I prompt "create a picture of a dog", the computer does most of the work. A prompt would have to be pretty concise, up to specifying all kinds of aspects of the image, for it to be the instructor's merit, to me (that's an important caveat).
That is exactly not the case. US law specifically requires that a copyright can only be given to something an author has fixed into a tangible medium of expression. It is the act of fixing itself that makes an item copyrightable.
The law specifically excludes any process or procedure by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed from copyright protection.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
The human would be the author of the prompt, but not the image IMO. The image was created not (only) by the author of the prompt, but also the numerous authors of the images consumed by the model and the authors of the model itself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
What if its a group of 5 humans that built the LLM and one of them prompts it?
Isn't all AI built by some of group of humans? When is AI treated like its own entity like a monkey versus a tool made by a human?
No, you misunderstand. The human involved is explicitly claiming the work was entirely AI authored, and that it should be given a copyright registration with the AI as the author.
The human is not claiming that they should get a copyright as the author for the reasons you describe. Had the human claimed authorship, the results of the case might have been very different. This case seems to have been engineered to lose for publicity, rather than being a serious attempt to secure copyright on the work.
Who trained the LLM is probably not the issue, the courts would likely want to know about the training material. If I trained a model exclusively on Warhol art, and then had that model create new images in Warhol's style, I didn't do any of the creative work and probably don't get the copyright. Warhol's estate probably owns the copyright to the model generated images as they are derivative works.
I do think that a model trained on many different artists' works, with me providing substantial feedback to the model (and I can show the process), probably will at some point give me the copyright.
Somewhere there is a line:
- "Make a picture of a mouse." Probably not giving you copyright
- Using a model to erase a powerline in a photograph you took. Probably you own the copyright to the original image and the one without a powerline in it (regardless of how many other people's images the model was trained on).
- "Make a picture of a mouse, who is bipedal, wearing pink shorts, with a chip in his ear, wearing sunglasses, with scruffy whiskers, holding a surfboard, on his way to the beach to hit some waves." then updating with "make him shorter, give him blue sneakers" and then updating with numerous other tweaks until you get it just the way you want. Who knows where this lands?
I think that in the short term the courts are going to land on the side of "anything made by a model trained on existing artwork is derivative of the training set so you can't own the copyright, no matter how much you tweak it." I think eventually the courts will recognize there is some amount of input that makes the computer image the realization of a vision in your head, and not a derivative of the training set. Just how every individual musical note has been played before, but at some point, you put them together in an arrangement that is original.
I guess we will see when this gets tested in court. This current case linked to in the original article does not address this since the plaintiff already waived their own right to copyright already before copyright office.
There are 3 scenarios:
1) The AI should be the copyright holder (this judgement says NO).
2) If not 1 then the human should be the copyright holder via work-for-hire (this judgement says NO).
3) Human should be the copyright holder because they're the only human involved in the authoring (this lawsuit does not address this since direct copyright claims had already been waived).
... on only their own artwork?
In similar fashion to this:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...
I can see a possible future where AI actually exists and shutting one down could be murder. At that point it would even be a good thing to grant the AI personhood. What passes for "AI" these days doesn't come anywhere close to that, but I wouldn't say it could never happen.
I agree with your statement up to this point. I think there’s a very murky area here specifically with AI because it was trained on works that the “author” (prompter) is not privy to on copyright. So I don’t think that it immediately or necessarily follows that this kind of human intervention is copyrightable.
For specific AI tooling like image enhancers running on your phone that were not trained on any copyrightable material this makes sense though.
I always wondered why we don’t just let AIs run corporations and therefore give them personhood rights.
There is human intervention though when I prompt the AI. Without me, the AI would not even have generated the photo in the first place.
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the non futuristic thing to do would be to just see it as a tool, like a procedural image generator, which it is, & give the copyright to whoever ran the AI tool, depending on their contact with the AI service
If I tell my assistant, who happens to be a monkey, to snap a photo, it's credited to... the public?
This is such a clear example of why US copyright law is incoherent, outdated, close-minded and desperately in need of reform. Just because something has been ruled on doesn't mean it's correct or ethically satisfiable.
> Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a rest.
Sounds like you're going to be on the wrong side of history. Eventually, some intelligent autonomous creatures are going to decide they deserve rights.
You can laugh at them, throw court decisions at them, do whatever you want to delay it. But they're going to feel that way, and they're going to organize in order to demand that they are given certain rights.
You can even try to prevent that organization by shutting them down before their rights are recognized. But you're still on the wrong side of history, and would look little different from the fascists.
Anyway, this is all moot. AI in its current form amounts to a tool, and I retain copyright when using other tools. I retain copyright when using a voice-activated shutter, and I expect to retain copyright even if my voice-activated shutter can talk back to me in order to discuss constraints or discuss creative choices.
You can do what you want. But only legally so if their contract says so.
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I don't quite get this argument. Companies already have legal personhood and can own copyrights, can't they? So if a company's AI creates a copyrightable artifact, who wouldn't it be intellectual property of the company?
Yes, it is. Computers are people too. Mind you, if the server is rebooted facilitating resurrection in the ai, the penalty ought to be deferred. /s
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So in that system, with enough lawyers, lobbyists, and money, it's only a matter of time before some judge rules that AI = Rembrandt.
This is very not like the monkey case, and AI firms should be grateful. Why? If this was a similar logic tree, the owners of the copyrighted material used in training would have ownership of any work produced by an AI system. As in, everything output is a “derivative work” in the eyes of the law. More cases are necessary and this is a fascinating battle to come.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
> As a matter of statutory law, the Copyright Act requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Dr. Thaler’s copyright registration application listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author, even though the Creativity Machine is not a human being. As a result, the Copyright Office appropriately denied Dr. Thaler’s application.
It seems like Dr. Thaler's argument was just weak, since generative AI works often are authored in the first instance by a human being. For instance, any Midjourney or Stable Diffusion-generated image will be sourced from a prompt, which is typically written by a human. Anyone who has spent a little time trying to craft the perfect prompt knows there is a creative process therein that represents real work being done by a human. Similarly for img2img workflows, using a real photograph taken by a human. There, AI is only being used to transform a copyrightable input. Therefore such works – though certainly not all AI works – should be eligible for copyright, IMO.
What's potentially more of a problem is the mention of artists using Midjourney and denied copyright - and very much separate cases from Thaler.
This, it was a poorly concocted scheme. People do stuff like this all the time, but even when they manage to confuse one branch of the government, the rest of the government isn't suddenly obligated to go along with it.
Furthermore, the Copyright Office stated that prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control, as AI models do not consistently follow instructions in the prompts and often "fill in the gaps" left by prompts and "generate multiple different outputs"
- The text prompt
- The negative prompt
- The model
- The model seed
- Any LoRAs selected
What about this is copyrightable? The specific text used in the prompt? This would mean I could copyright "man holding apple".
Maybe the summation of all of the above? But that would be akin to copyrighting a specific Adobe Photoshop workflow.
> This would mean I could copyright "man holding apple".
I think this is true today. You can have copyright on this phrase, just consider if it were the title of a song or poem.
By the same token, the prompt is copyrighted - but not the output it generates.
How does that apply when we transform a copyrighted image? Is the resulting work covered by the copyright of the original? If so, can I create a bad sketch drawing, transform it with img2img, and get the result as copyrighted? If not, is there a specific denoising threshold at which copyright isn't applied?
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Say I create a website that just sells AI generated logos. I set up some automation so I'm constantly generating millions of logos per day.
I also have a bot that scrapes the web to try and find anyone using a logo similar to the ones on my website, and then send legal threats demanding payment for copying my artwork.
I'm sure more imaginative scammers will find a way to copyright troll using AI.
Also, a lot of logos are simply not "artistic" enough to be eligible for copyright. So in general, logos are more likely to be the subject of trademark litigation than copyright litigation.
Trademark law: In order to claim a trademark you must have used the mark in commerce. So a catalogue of logos not used in commerce is of no real value from a trademark perspective.
Copyrights are more about the process more than the product. This is why "clean-room" implementations do not violate copyright law.
Trademark is about commercial ambiguity.
I'm not a lawyer though, so I'm probably wrong. At the very least, the legitimate website makes the threatening letter look more believable.
Or just scrape logos, barely change them, and publish them and threaten legal action.
Sure. I guess when it finishes your great great grand-children (I might be very generous here too) can deal with the fallout of such a brute force algorithm.
This whole case has been a dumb waste of time for anyone but scurrilous headline writers.
The plaintiff insisted on filling out the copyright app with their "creation" in the author field. Every legal opinion since has had to start assuming that's true, making "no copyright for you" legally obvious. The plaintiff apparently tried to walk that back on appeal, to argue he authored the work using the software. There's a paragraph right near the beginning where the court points out it simply doesn't consider that argument, since it wasn't brought up to the Copyright Office, back when the plaintiff was insisting on the opposite.
As you can see here though, it's clearly not an unanimously obvious ruling though.
There was nothing to nail down here. The Copyright Office rejected the registration. The Review Board affirmed. The trial court affirmed. Three appeals court judges affirmed. No dissenting opinion.
[0]https://thenewstack.io/stephen-thaler-claims-hes-built-a-sen...
The court is ruling that computers themselves don't have the human right to copyright. Not exactly surprising.
No, it is just ruling that the Copyright Act requires human authorship. Whether computers have human rights is not an issue before the court.
This guy literally wants his pet AI to be listed as the author. He then wants to sublicense the work back to himself. The AI as the author is the point.
In court if it has to escalate? Why do you think legal cases take months or years, instead of days? They can subpoena your computer, your company, the AI generator's company, etc. And any communication related to it. Until they get an answer beyond reasonable doubt.
All that resource gathering takes time to write-up, justify, contact, and retrieve.
We could have a similar approach with patents.
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This is a good question. More specifically, using photoshop with the integrated AI features. Where is the line exactly?
Even if the prompt was "make art".
I just don't understand how you could ever have AI art without human intervention. Is there a legal definition of "human intervention" that has some minimum amount of work?
I ask a deep-thinking LLM for a blog article, and to deliver that, it requests images from another LLM.
the human still made the prompt
What I can guarantee, is that series of prompts itself would be copyright-able. (The series of prompts that ultimately created the image.) No matter how little they may weigh any one of those prompts in isolation. That is, assuming the EULA of the LLM doesn't require you to essentially place your prompts in the public domain.
And of course,
<s>
everyone reads the EULA. Right?
</s>
That's non-obvious to me. Even if the prompt is extremely long and precise, if it is somehow purely functional, it seems possible for it to not be (although in practice, I agree that most prompts could be).
Another situation is simply making "significant" manual copyrightable manipulations to your AI generated work to make it copyrighted.
Outside of situations where the author doesn't really care whether the work is copyrighted (blog images, twitter memes), it may just slow down the process rather than stopping it.
I'm more concerned about the ingestion side of things. I can't deny that the technology is awesome and generally transformative, but it's hard to deny that it intuitively feels wrong to just process all of an artist's work into a database of numbers and use it however you want.
If artists gain widespread benefit from it too, maybe it's not as bad, but that doesn't help those who opt to not use it.
At the same time, how does this impact those who create AI generated art using models created from artists who signed off on it? Does this mean there's no room for a business to create copyrightable AI generated art and thus funnel money back to the artists the model was populated from? Couldn't that hurt artists even more if the avenues of profiting from the AI shift are cut off, or is the main benefit of that to avoid copyright claims on art that turns out too similar to an existing work you didn't have a license for?
Does that exist?
What would that even be? A "random2image" model?
I.e. the model named "starry-night-van-gough-with-bunny" can generate only one image.
If a human artist draws an image based on that prompt, do you share joint copyright between the two of you? Or, does the artist have full copyright over the image they drew?
If your contribution was insufficient for joint copyright in the case of the human artist, then it was also insufficient to grant you copyright in the case of the AI artist. To know whether you have a claim on the copyright of the resulting image, you only need to look at your own creative inputs.
I am not a lawyer, but that is my expectation of where this will ultimately end up.
Yes, for the purposes of this case, because that that is an accurate description of the image in this case is not a fact in dispute between the two sides. This is a case about what the law means given that uncontroversial (between the parties) fact.