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Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

federalregister.gov

181–190 of 415 posts

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

#181
post #89
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…

And it doesn't matter because anyone can use the AI to produce thousands of similar images with little effort. All those tools have randomization so they don't produce the exact same image for the exact same prompt. The value of an image produced by AI is very low because the cost to produce it is very low. No point in committing federal fraud by falsely claim you made them. > no one can dispute that Of course I can…

The courts are not going to be able to stop the flood of AI generated images.

Even now, when it takes a lot more human effort to generate an image because It has to be done by a human, the courts are ineffective at stopping the rampant and blatant copyright infringement that happens daily on a truly massive scale on the internet.

Now that the floodgates of creativity have been opened by AI, the amount of content being generated is going to exponentially increase, and all the laws and courts in the world are not going to be able to even slow it.

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

#182
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…

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.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do most of that with prompting and tools like control net in stable diffusion as well. And then take it into photoshop and do changes, feed it back into img2img and inpaint until your hearts content. One can spend multitudes more time than it too to tap the shutter button on an iPhone. In Midjourney of course, you have far less control.

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.

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

#185
post #97

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”.

That is the "sweat of the brow" copyright argument, and it has been rejected in by US courts.

The parent is complaining of amount of effort put into the work but should be justifying that each of those steps was a creative decision by a human which contributed to the end result.

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

#186
post #90
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.

As an AI artist who's been selling digital art, it really depends on whether you really care about "protecting" your work. I've seen my stuff stolen all over the place, NFTs minted, etc. Most sites will take the copycats down. Lack of copyright protection doesn't necessarily supersede individual marketplace policies.

"I've seen my stuff stolen all over the place, NFTs minted, etc"

The overwhelming majority of artist do not have the resources, time, or inclination to constantly chase down copycats and copyright infringers.

Copyright law is just ineffective at stopping or even penalizing most of the infringement that goes on in the digital era.

It's a relic of a past when making copies was hard.

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

#187
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would argue that location and angle to film are analogous to specifying that you want a poem (as opposed to an essay) about copyright law (as opposed to quantum mechanics) in the style of William Shakespeare (as opposed to John Milton). Basically, those are very broad parameters specified, and the machine is the one that decides to produce the output. You aren't even picking the timing or the subject or likely even…

It’s not just location and angle but where to aim the motion capture sensor, what if any bait to use etc. There’s effectively infinitely many possible ways to set of these things.

With chat bot’s every possible response is predetermined when the algorithm is setup. Saying you should get copyright is like saying you should own the results of a search engine response to your query.

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

#188
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.

Digital art as a whole has already been made worthless by the creation of diffusion models, whether there is copyright on them really doesn't matter at that point, because pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute.

"pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute"

That's overstating it a bit.. but it is likely we'll get there within the next decade or so.

Currently there's still a lot of art that's hard for AI to mimic effectively, and only certain types of art can be created quickly and without much effort using AI.

The above is based on my experience of creating well over 5000 images in Midjourney, and keeping a close eye on AI generated art created by others.

It's amazing tech that's close to magic, but it still can't do everything.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rights are consequences of valie decisions that cannot be deduced from facts, so there are only a priori rights.

They're only consequences in the sense that definitions are consequences, because that's pretty much what a "right" is: a definition. They don't exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence.

> They’re only consequences in the sense that definitions are consequences,

A priori truths are, exactly and only, those things that are true by definition (and only exist within a particular axiomatic framework.)

You’ve described exactly why rights can only be a priori, but used it to deny that they are.

> They don’t exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence.

If things exist before they are defined by humans and human knowledge of them comes as a result of experience with their existence, that knowledge is a posteriori. You’ve marshalled a cogent explanation of why rights cannot be known a posteriori, but then presented as an argument for why they cannot be a priori.

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

#190

> 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…

Is the lack of human authorship the gist of the argument? Can you claim copyright on the output from a compiler? Or is this like work for hire, where you just give instructions to the creative professional?
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