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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

#51

Post by jay_kyburz »

autoexec wrote: post #41
jay_kyburz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it encourages commercial projects to hire human artists so that they can gain the protection of copyright" Nobody will ever know if a human was involved or not.

That is kind of a problem if companies are fine with lying, or hiring an artist willing to lie and claim they created something, just to get copyright protection. I can't say for sure that we'll have (or always have) some means of telling if something was created by AI or not. Removing AI generated works from copyright entirely means that if you can demonstrate your work was created by AI you wouldn't have to worry t…

I was thinking more from the perspective of a copyright infringer. You can't safely go ahead rip images from somebody else and use them in your own products because you can't know if they are protected or not. You don't have to declare copyright to be protected by it.

It's really not helpful to try and define what is an AI image and what is not. What if an artist repaints the background, or photoshops out an extra finger, or just re-colors some icons.

Whats different about using text in Midjourny and a brush in photoshop. What about if you use both on every image?

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

#52

Post by Kim_Bruning »

wokwokwok wrote: post #3
fwlr wrote: post #2

It is so unusual to see clear and precise analysis on this topic. I particularly appreciate this turn of phrase, describing what Stable Diffusion does: “pull from an artist-chosen place in its massive table of probabilities to drive the generation of an image.”

Yes, but I mean it's also wrong... That's not how the diffusion process works. You can pick any number of interesting ways to describe it but if they're technically wrong, it doesn't really matter how poetic they are right? Diffusion models do use random noise. As I understand it, every 'step' is composed of three parts: a) the previous output, b) the latent generated from the prompt and c) random noise. As you move…

This is YC, so I get to be pedantic ;-)

For stable diffusion, you can actually just set the seed to a fixed number.

After that you can always get the exact same image for the exact same prompt.[1]

In general, there are some interesting philosophical debates to be had about pseudo-random number generators.

[1] YMMV: in some configurations you may still have other sources of noise.

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

#53

Post by jay_kyburz »

aiappreciator wrote: post #18
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 gene…

>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.

I like this idea so much, it should be extended to all copyright.

Not only does it make very clear when something was "published", we could have a central repository of copyrighted works you could search and review.

All work published after 2025 is public domain unless resisted with the global copyright office.

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

#54

Post by gnopgnip »

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…

Copyright doesn't prevent independent creation. Two people can take photos of Venice Beach at the same time, and neither is infringing.

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

#55

Post by autoexec »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #51
autoexec wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is kind of a problem if companies are fine with lying, or hiring an artist willing to lie and claim they created something, just to get copyright protection. I can't say for sure that we'll have (or always have) some means of telling if something was created by AI or not. Removing AI generated works from copyright entirely means that if you can demonstrate your work was created by AI you wouldn't have to worry t…

I was thinking more from the perspective of a copyright infringer. You can't safely go ahead rip images from somebody else and use them in your own products because you can't know if they are protected or not. You don't have to declare copyright to be protected by it. It's really not helpful to try and define what is an AI image and what is not. What if an artist repaints the background, or photoshops out an extra fi…

> I was thinking more from the perspective of a copyright infringer.

When using AI generated images no one should be an infringer since copyright shouldn't apply to AI's output. People should be able to use AI generated images already created without fear of infringement, but you're right in that it requires you to be able to identify a work as being AI generated. Edit's to an AI generated image shouldn't make it copyrightable so photoshops and recolors wouldn't matter, but repainting an AI generated image entirely by hand could arguably give an artist the ability to copyright the specific reproduction, to the extent that if I repainted the Mona Lisa by hand I should have copyright protection for my re-painting.

The difference between using Midjourny to create an image and using a brush in photoshop is that the line generated by the brush tool in photoshop wasn't dependent on countless other copyrighted works while the image generated by Midjourny was.

Since copyrighted works were exploited in the creation of images created by Midjourny in a way that makes it impossible to credit or compensate the authors of those works we can resolve the issue entirely by preventing any of the art it creates from being protected by copyright. Artists whose work was used to train AI can rest assured that no one is exclusively profiting off of their work without compensation. The sum of all art created by human hands throughout history goes in, art free for all of humanity to use without restriction comes out.

Anyone can use both Midjourny and photoshop to make an image but the resulting image wouldn't be able to have copyright protection, still, the image wouldn't be at risk of being accused of copyright infringement either. That frees everyone to use the powerful new AI technology to create artistic works without fear, but also without the protection of copyright.

Once again though, that'd require us know when an image was generated by AI even if edits were later made after the fact which may or may not be possible causing some people to get protection for works when they shouldn't, but even that would mean people who could prove their works were AI generated would be safe from being accused of infringement which solves one the big legal problems AI images have caused currently.

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

#56

Post by LeeroyWasHere »

tantalor wrote: post #13
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.

I agree, following a recipe doesn't make someone a chef.

If you're somehow at the helm of a plane, car, boat and you don't have the training, but it drives itself, you aren't a pilot, driver, captain, you're a passager.

AI Art is made by passagers, not an artist.

iPhone owners aren't photographers.

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

#57

Post by ROTMetro »

VanL wrote: post #21
aiappreciator wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gene…

A photo that tries to capture an existing painting as closely as possible is not copyrightable. However, even minor changes (such as changing the tint of the photo) have been found to be enough for copyrightability.

Actually this is still in debate with the whole Warhol Prince pictures thing, but should be ruled on this early this year.

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

#58

Post by ROTMetro »

autoexec wrote: post #41
jay_kyburz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it encourages commercial projects to hire human artists so that they can gain the protection of copyright" Nobody will ever know if a human was involved or not.

That is kind of a problem if companies are fine with lying, or hiring an artist willing to lie and claim they created something, just to get copyright protection. I can't say for sure that we'll have (or always have) some means of telling if something was created by AI or not. Removing AI generated works from copyright entirely means that if you can demonstrate your work was created by AI you wouldn't have to worry t…

You have to list the specific artist(s) on the copyright. Is someone really interested in lying in Federal paperwork for minimal return? Risk/reward ratio on the specific individual(s) who claim to be the artist seems to not be worth it. This isn't a case of limited liability protection hiding behind the 'personhood' of a company but an individual that has to personally claim to be the artist. A company can't claim to be the artist for purpose of copyright, but instead get's the artist rights assigned to them later.

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

#59

Post by ROTMetro »

__loam wrote: post #38

I hope all these AI companies get their asses handed to them by the courts. The amount of uncompensated labor required to build these systems is totally staggering.

Agree, but you'll get downvoted here for saying it. But then you'd get a nice collection of downvotes here previously just for pointing out that this was the legal outcome that was coming as if copyright law either didn't exist and wasn't flushed out before AI or somehow didn't ally. It's like all the 'Politicians and judges don't understand der interwebs' people then saying 'Section 230 (created by politicians and upheld by judges) is vitally important to der interwebs and must be protect from politicians and judges'.
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