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US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

reuters.com

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Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#251

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

quadragenarian wrote: post #31
wildzzz wrote: post #21

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…

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…

> if a single human creates an AI model and trains it

... on only their own artwork?

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#252

Post by parsimo2010 »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #198
parsimo2010 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probabl…

> 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. If I watch exclusively Warhol images for years and then paint something similar I get copyright. There needs to be a gray are, because usually art is not done in a vacuum?

> If I watch exclusively Warhol images for years and then paint something similar I get copyright.

Not necessarily. If you copy one of Warhol's works but "change it a little" then that is a derivative work, and the copyright belongs to Warhol's estate. Depending on how close of a copy it is, you would have a tough time defending your claim to copyright in court. The advantage an offending artist has in court is that they can claim "inspiration" as long as they don't admit to copying.

For a computer model the difference maker is that the court can probably obtain records of a training set, so if the training set is exclusively Warhol works it is probably easy to get a court to side on "derivative" and assume the computer does not possess inspiration.

Courts have basically baked in "gray areas" in copyright cases. The historical copyright tests are all written as to sound like mathematical formulas but everything is kind of subjective.

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#253

Post by [deleted] »

tantalor wrote: post #92
mikehearn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not difficult to understand. 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…

[deleted]

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#254

Post by johnnyanmac »

iamleppert wrote: post #34

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.

>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.

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#255

Post by johnnyanmac »

jedberg wrote: post #208
jachee wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I prompt you to draw me a bird, I can’t claim copyright on the bird you draw. (At least not with a contract of some sort, of which you are party.)

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.

It's not black or white (you're using colored pencils, after all). A part of what is copyrightable is based on merit and effort as well as your tools.

You probably have a copyright to some landscape if you make it with colored pencils. If you simply take a picture you have more of an uphill battle claiming copyright.

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#256

Post by echelon »

radlad wrote: post #112
tantalor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not difficult to understand. 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…

Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? According to Wikimedia's legal analysis, it depends.[0] Furthermore, authorship and copyright are distinct. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_and_Cop...

Take out the second person and imagine if you set the camera to a timer.

Perhaps we record the path of the sun every day for a year to create an analemma. That's something artistic that should absolutely qualify for copyright.

Who owns the copyright then? Nobody? Because if so, that feels like bullshit. Like we're making up the rules completely arbitrarily with no logic at all.

At some level in many electronic systems there is some kind of autonomous human out of the loop subsystem. It'd be easy to target almost any of these and say a machine is responsible for making the content. No human is making quaternion calculations by hand, for instance.

If a human put in work, regardless of any automations, a human deserves the copyright. Either that, or nobody deserves copyright.

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#257

Post by [deleted] »

wildzzz wrote: post #21

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…

[deleted]

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#258

Post by johnnyanmac »

visarga wrote: post #126
jachee wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I prompt you to draw me a bird, I can’t claim copyright on the bird you draw. (At least not with a contract of some sort, of which you are party.)

So.. does the conductor of an orchestra get royalty rights? He's just prompting the "actual" musicians.

The real answer is "it depends". Live music copyright is way hornier an issue than AI. And yes, has been fought in courts for centuries.

But roughly speaking: writing music is an art, which is different from ochaestrating an ensemble in real time taking into account conditions for the audio. The author of the piece isn't always the orchestrator, and arrangements are another matter entirely .

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#259

Post by hirsin »

radlad wrote: post #235
aydyn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The same can be said for AI art. If you think you can exactly reproduce stylistically of some of the more popular AI work, you would be mistaken.

I agree, to an extent. I mentioned it in another comment but IMO there's a big difference between someone who types a low-effort prompt like "silly image of a cat" and someone who spends hours or days iterating on a prompt. Or someone who uses AI to iteratively tweak an image (which may or may not have initially been AI-generated.) Or someone who creates art out of smaller components created by AI (e.g. textures.)

No there isn't (a big difference)

Like, really. If I open ms paint and just do some low effort scrawl, I have copyright on that. Level of effort has not ever decided if something is copyrightable or not.

For derivative works, there is real effort required to de distinct from the original. Maybe that's a more interesting discussion... Is low effort use of an AI insufficient to prevent the copyright from reverting to the original authors it was trained on?

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#260

Post by Aloisius »

soerxpso wrote: post #246
slavik81 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the AI is considered a person. It's that your inputs were the same in both cases, and it's your creative input that justifies the copyright. If your creative input was insufficient to justify granting you copyrights in one case, they would also be insufficient in the other case, as the inputs were identical in both cases.

In the case mentioned above where someone just spins around in their chair and takes a random photo on their phone (which they would then own the rights to), did that person really do any 'creative input'? All they did was press a button on a tool, with no further thought. That actually seems like less creative input than when I type a prompt into a tool and hit 'generate'. Why are cameras, image editors, etc, tools…

If you can show that no human creative expression was involved in composition, timing, etc, then no, it's not copyrightable.

There's a very good argument for security camera footage not being copyrightable for that very reason. There just hasn't been any case law yet to test it.

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