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Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

federalregister.gov

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

#281

Post by dragonwriter »

techdragon wrote: post #113
yafbum wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still hoping it stays that way. That'd be a fantastic direction for works in the public domain.

Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all…

> Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright…

Detection systems for generative AI are being developed (potentially helped by generative AI systems being built with wwatermarking capabilities that are designed to be unobtrusive to humans, but detectable with tools.) Research on this (and experiments by the people selling generative AI, who also want to sell detection tools, and sell their product suite as providing “safety” because of that combination) is quite active.

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

#282

Post by dragonwriter »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #182
techdragon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all…

People might not be honest. But large organizations, oh boy. There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable. If the Copyright office's view on this stands, there will be no great disruption of the employability of creatives.

> There’s zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable.

Sure, but Disney will just not release the intermediate products that are the direct outputs of pure prompting, and make sure they are doing at least enough beyond that before they release anything that the whole is covered by copyright.

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

#283

Post by gambiting »

dragonwriter wrote: post #281
techdragon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all…

> Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… Detection systems for generative AI are being developed (potentially helped by generative AI systems being built with wwatermarking capabilities that are designed to be unobtrusive to humans, but detectable with tools.) Research on this (and ex…

I honestly think this is a fools game - maybe it will work in those very very early stages of generative AI we're in now, but there's no way this can work reliably going forward. If anything, I imagine it will soon start yielding false positives against human generated work too.

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

#284

Post by dragonwriter »

acomjean wrote: post #200
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #20

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.

No. You instructed the camera, placed it and set the angles. If a monkey steals your camera and takes a selfy you can’t copyright that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

> You instructed the camera, placed it and set the angles.

And I instructed the model, and set its tuning parameters.

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

#285

Post by mhandley »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #182
techdragon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all…

People might not be honest. But large organizations, oh boy. There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable. If the Copyright office's view on this stands, there will be no great disruption of the employability of creatives.

It will be interesting to see what position large software companies take on this. They also won't want to run the risk of losing copyright in their software, when programmers use AI assistants. Likely there's less risk here, at least at the moment, because you still need to do a lot of manual work above what AI does for you. But how close are we to the point where the corporate lawyers start to get nervous?

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

#286

Post by dragonwriter »

Retric wrote: post #183
pmoriarty wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of control that prompt crafting alone gives you. There's also the choice of which version of midjourney to use, and various meta options that it gives you. The copyright office clearly has not the slightest clue about what they're talking about when they claim that the AI is the sole creator here. AI generated content has always been a collaboration with humans, and there's always human creativity invol…

You can own the copyright to the prompt used to generate the output. But the algorithm isn’t collaborating, every possible outcome is fixed when the algorithm is finalized and users can’t actually change the possibilities. I clearly don’t own the copyright to my Google search results even if my query is quite unique.

> But the algorithm isn’t collaborating, every possible outcome is fixed when the algorithm is finalized and users can’t actually change the possibilities.

But that actually reinforces the idea that all of the creative work is in the prompt, everything else is purely mechanical process implementing the command given by the prompt. Arguably, its analogous to saying that a programmer can copyright the prompt but not the resulting image is like saying I can copyright source code, but can have no copyright on the output of the compiler.

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

#287

Post by dragonwriter »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #5
rvz wrote: 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?"

> If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know?

IF a dispute arises, it will be settled in a court of law, with the trier of fact (jury or judge, as may be) applying the civil preponderance of the evidence standard. (Tools for detecting use of generative AI models are being developed, as are systems of including watermarks that are unnoticeable by casual human inspection in the output of such systems.)

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

#288

Post by mejutoco »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #3

> 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. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's un…

> 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.

I imagine many people have a workflow where they generate images with Stable Diffusion and retouch in a painting app, do some inpainting and retouch.

It seems all of those should be covered by copyright (nothing above makes me think they won't, at least).

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

#289

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #3

> 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. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's un…

But following from that, a machine can not create a copyright violation either.

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

#290

Post by wincy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #163
famouswaffles wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't overlook the fact that agencies like the USCO are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of determining stuff like this. They move first because they're on the front lines, as it were, but they can be overruled by the courts and the courts can be overruled by congress. 100% this will be litigated and likely altered in the coming months/years.

Also don’t overlook that this is a “solely a prompt”; real non-trivial workflows for systems like SD (MJ I’ve used less) are different than “solely a prompt” and may or may not result in the same result even at the Copyright Office level.

I’ve been noticing my workflow in Automatic1111 basically always ends up taking an hour. I like to compare it to going to a weird shoreline filled with strange objects, picking out the “shells” I like the most, then taking them home, cleaning them up, and arranging them in a way I think looks pretty.

At some point I’m making something artistic. My friends think I’ve got a keen eye on what looks cool so I’ve been improving by leaps and bounds even though strictly speaking I’m not drawing anything? I’m just really good at being descriptive and inpainting the weird parts.

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