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Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

federalregister.gov

61–70 of 415 posts

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#61
post #40

It's all well and good that the copyright office deems that protection only applies to the parts of the work where a human was in control of the traditional elements of authorship, and that there is a duty to disclose the use of generative technologies ... but now one can plausibly assert that they are the sole author of a work which was produced by one of these models, and be 100% confident that no one can dispute t…

For a single work, yes. If they turn it into a high-volume business, it might become more difficult to maintain the plausibility in the long run, and they could be asked to put their claimed artistry to test in a controlled environment.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#62
post #2

The human authorship requirement still stands: > If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. [0] Even with that, applicants now must disclose the inclusion of AI generated content and highlight which parts are human authored vs AI generated: > Consistent with the Office's policies described above, applicants have a dut…

If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know? It's already not completely obvious with the current state of the art in at least some domains. What happens when the tech moves from "Not completely obvious" to "Impossible to tell?"

Watermarking seems like a possible solution: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/17/business/ai-t...

I think that OpenAI et al are incentivized to pursue watermarking. If someone uses GPT to write a best-selling novel or a blockbuster movie script, OpenAI would want a piece of the action.

Similarly, publishers/distributors of creative works are incentivized to use any available detection tools because they don't want to be surprised when someone comes along and says, "Actually, you owe us a boatload of cash for that work."

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#63
post #53

So this effectively destroys any concept of AI digital art for sale. If there’s no way to protect it then there’s really nothing to own. It would be like trying to sell someone public domain content.

There's plenty of copies of public domain works available for purchase on Amazon. It does mean that AI digital art will fetch commodity prices, but not that it won't be sold.

Sort of like hotel art.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#64
This announcement has immediate, significant practical impact for creatives.

The most important document a creative had, up until today, was their portfolio -- typically, a look-book of finished pieces.

Now, that portfolio needs to include, for every piece, proof-of-work -- snapshots of the whatever-it-is in various states along the road to completion, in sufficient quantity to dissuade any legal claim that the work was AI-produced.

At the limit, those aim to sell organic-certified free range content will want to surveil themselves during the entire creative process, and associate that recording indelibly with the created work.

That's a whole lot of extra work and a whole lot of extra privacy violation, but the alternative will be to devalue one's own work: for to the extent to which it may have been produced by AI, it will be a liability to downstream consumers.

For example, a film director might commission a score from a composer, but unless that score comes with timestamped, SHAsummed video of enough of the composition process to preclude invalidating the broader claim to a copyright (and thus salable work), that composition becomes a financial risk for the director.

The consequences of not doing so are severe: At minimum, if the score cannot be copyrighted, then it can be borrowed, free-of-charge, by another film director, and at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film (IANAL; am I getting this right?)

"Creative" just became the most surveilled job on the planet.

We also may have just found the first agreeable use for blockchain -- an indelible public record of organic artistic creation, bearing SHAsums associated recorded twitch and youtube streams (along with logs of workstation network traffic) permanently with the finished work.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if AI copyright law saved crypto?

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#65
post #58

The U.S. Copyright Office seems to be living under a rock and completely unaware of how much creative work goes into prompt engineering, as well as selecting the subsequent image and applying variations to it until it meets the human's creative desires.

If there is substantive work in the development of the prompt, then the applicant can submit the prompt for copyright.

The finding seems pretty reasonable, if the machine is doing the work then the machine can claim authorship. Otherwise, we would say that the Pope was the author of the Sistine Chapel as they prompted Michelangelo to paint "a large curve display of heaven including with clouds and pictures of angels triumphant".

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#66

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

You might be able to copy-write the method by which you generated something, but not the thing generated itself. Although even the former act might be too far, it's like saying that you fooled around with the parameters on a computer for 8 hours before it started working, and now you want to copy-write the operation of the computer: the computer is doing what it was intended to do, you just needed time to figure out how to use it. You could copy-write a training manual for how to ride a bike, but not bike riding itself.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#67
post #36

> For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. But I can certainly specify those things i…

> And anyway how would you know whether or not and how much I was assisted by the AI.

Because in a lawsuit you would have to reveal that info.

You can't just sue someone and not answer questions pertinent to your claim.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#68
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on this reasoning, does that mean that you could not claim copyright over a picture captured by a motion sensor camera. Basically you instructed it to capture when it determined movement and the camera determined how those instructions are implemented in its output.

Timing is only one aspect of creativity. In most settings a video camera’s output is copyrighted because of how you select the location and angel to film. Motion capture has all of those elements, and simply doesn’t capture 99.9% of the possible images. ie: Someone picked a log crossing the river as a place where something interesting will happen and they setup the shot to look interesting. Which is the general argum…

How is setting up a motion camera on a log not similar to setting up a prompt for ChatGPT?

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#69
post #53

So this effectively destroys any concept of AI digital art for sale. If there’s no way to protect it then there’s really nothing to own. It would be like trying to sell someone public domain content.

Not quite; having it exist is something that may be worth paying for, even if it's equivalent to public domain.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#70
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I understand it was out of the scope of this article. I’m just saying, these are the easier questions to answer.

That’s why they are being answered first. The others take more time.

A lot of these things are already addressed on USPTO’s FAQs and these answers are the same but “with AI” tacked on.

eg: “only human works are subject to copyright”, “the work must be an original work of authorship”, etc.

It’s just disappointing that they haven’t produced anything helpful yet. I suspect that the result will end up being permissive because there will be a big industry built up around people just kicking the can down the road by the time anyone authority issues a more specific opinion.

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