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AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

processmechanics.com

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Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#11

Post by andrekandre » 

  > First, that's not the right legal standard. The standard is whether there is a "modicum of creativity," not whether Kris could "predict what Midjourney [would] create ahead of time." In other words, the Office incorrectly focused on the output of the tool rather than the input from the human.
if the input is a prompt that anyone can write.... for example if i wrote "elephant with blue skin" into midjourney and someone else also did, and we get exactly the same image or a totally different image, it doesnt matter does it?

how does "elephant with blue skin" or any other prompt meet the criteria of 'modicum of creativity'?

in the end, its the tool that is doing the heavy lifting and being able to copyright its output sounds against the spirit of copyright (allow a human to get proper compensation for their creative work and incentivize creativity) imo.

is there something obvious i am missing?

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#12

Post by gwern »

mjr00 wrote: post #5

> I have come to the conclusion that that almost every work created by an AI tool should be copyrightable, even without the iterative refinement and post-processing that Kris performed. The more I search, the more I see similarities with photography and the long copyright battles over what minimum amount of creativity is needed to support the copyright in a photograph. I think this is shortsighted; this opens up a sp…

> I think this is shortsighted; this opens up a space for "AI copyright trolls" who generate images for popular prompts in an automated fashion to get copyright, then go after people using AI art who happened to hit the same seed and prompt.

That seems extremely unlikely to make any sense given that the random seeds in question would be, what, FP32 or FP64 by default? So that's 4 billion random seeds per prompt. Better hope your GPUs are really cheap and you're targeting a really popular prompt+model+everything-else...

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#13

Post by tantalor »

andrekandre wrote: post #11

> First, that's not the right legal standard. The standard is whether there is a "modicum of creativity," not whether Kris could "predict what Midjourney [would] create ahead of time." In other words, the Office incorrectly focused on the output of the tool rather than the input from the human. if the input is a prompt that anyone can write.... for example if i wrote "elephant with blue skin" into midjourney and some…

The prompt is not a creative expression, it's more like a cooking recipe, hence is not copyrightable.

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#14

Post by stale2002 »

andrekandre wrote: post #11

> First, that's not the right legal standard. The standard is whether there is a "modicum of creativity," not whether Kris could "predict what Midjourney [would] create ahead of time." In other words, the Office incorrectly focused on the output of the tool rather than the input from the human. if the input is a prompt that anyone can write.... for example if i wrote "elephant with blue skin" into midjourney and some…

> if the input is a prompt that anyone can write

Pressing the button, on an already setup camera, is something that anyone can do as well, and they will get the exact same camera output as anyone else.

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#15

Post by rcme »

mjr00 wrote: post #5

> I have come to the conclusion that that almost every work created by an AI tool should be copyrightable, even without the iterative refinement and post-processing that Kris performed. The more I search, the more I see similarities with photography and the long copyright battles over what minimum amount of creativity is needed to support the copyright in a photograph. I think this is shortsighted; this opens up a sp…

The USCO also gave their justification: not enough human input in the process of creation to justify a copyright. After all, what is the point of copyright? To protect the interest of human creators. Human creators get exclusivity on their own ideas in exchange for sharing them with the world. This deal breaks down if there is no effort involved in creating the works.

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#16

Post by natch »

Very odd to read such a writeup that while seemingly pretty comprehensive, nevertheless completely misses mentioning of alternative tools like InvokeAI (yet another wrapper around Stable Diffusion) that allow, at least in the web GUI version, significantly more granular control over the output by the human artist.

Good article, but the landscape is a lot bigger than what this article would suggest. And, even more obviously, constantly growing.

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#17

Post by xp84 »

I don't know how I feel about the main question of AI copyright-ability*, but do disagree with the idea that if the outputs of a tool used by the artist are very random, it means the end product is not creativity.

The Jackson Pollack example cited in the article is apt. Lots of artists use randomness-infused techniques, and select their final product from among many random versions based on what came out the best.

*However I am pretty confident that the result will eventually land on "Works created by big media companies, even done entirely using AI, are fully copyrightable."

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#18

Post by aiappreciator »

mjr00 wrote: post #5

> I have come to the conclusion that that almost every work created by an AI tool should be copyrightable, even without the iterative refinement and post-processing that Kris performed. The more I search, the more I see similarities with photography and the long copyright battles over what minimum amount of creativity is needed to support the copyright in a photograph. I think this is shortsighted; this opens up a sp…

Is a photograph of a painting itself copyrighted? Img2img or controlnet can basically do that, in less than 30 seconds.

Even as someone extremely pro-AI art, I don't think AI-generated content should have copyright in the usual sense. Every art model was trained on massive amounts of copyrighted data, it would be very hypocritical to suddenly claim strong copyright on the output of AI generated items.

I think AI generated copyright should be 'pay-to-register', people can pay say $5 per image to register their image, if they believe it to be valuable enough to be copyrighted. In this sense, its more like trademarks, rather than the automatic moral right of copyright.

Your average AI art (which is worthless) will not be copyrighted. The ones with significant amounts of attention, post-editing, and economic value, the AI artist can simply register at the copyright office.

The extra funding for the copyright office, will also give them more staffing to deal with the torrential tide of AI-related copyright issues, and encourage them to build a healthy ecosystem where manual art and AI art co-exists.

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#19

Post by hatsunearu »

mjr00 wrote: post #5

> I have come to the conclusion that that almost every work created by an AI tool should be copyrightable, even without the iterative refinement and post-processing that Kris performed. The more I search, the more I see similarities with photography and the long copyright battles over what minimum amount of creativity is needed to support the copyright in a photograph. I think this is shortsighted; this opens up a sp…

I think someone made an automated database of musical riffs of a certain length--all possible riffs. And put it on a hard drive.

AFAIK the opinion was that that doesn't count as copyrightable art.

Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office

#20

Post by yegortk »

I think this is most significantly a policy issue. Under the existing US law, minor human input could be enough to make AI copyrightable through the "modicum of creativity" argument. However, if this allows for massive amounts of content to be generated (semi-)automatically in much shorter amount of time and with much less effort than what was possible before, it seems strict and generous copyright protections granted to creators of such works by society through the current law are no longer really warranted. In the end, copyright exists to provide motivating reward for creative effort - if such reward is no longer really necessary to enable close-to-infinite creative image generation, the law really may need to be altered to prevent copyright trolls and other nastiness of that nature.
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