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Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

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Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#51

Post by sgc »

dvngnt_ wrote: post #23

looks like the crux is that supposedly ai-generated images don't have copyright protections > When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. > As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application. but i think that's only if it's entirely prompt driven. you could argue that m…

According to my communications with the US copyright office, you never get a global copyright by editing. At best you get a copyright on your changes - and that only if they are copywritable on their own. Minor changes to wording or tweaking an image would generally not pass that threshold. It is a case by case judgment as to the status of any individual change.

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#52

Post by DonHopkins »

echelon wrote: post #4

Real AI artists are spending hundreds of hours and their human labor is absolutely copyrightable. There are three types of labor-intensive AI art: (1) ComfyUI node graph editing, (2) canvas-based compositions that use AI as a filter or brush, and (3) large multi-day compositions typically built for film and gaming. Sometimes all of these manual and laborious methodologies are employed for one work. We're so past the…

The prompts and node graphs are copyrightable human work product, but not the images, so publish your beautiful prompts and node graphs instead.

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#53

Post by mcintyre1994 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #40
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the other way - if you use an AI tool to edit an original image, is the output copyrightable? Is the answer different if the AI thing is doing a generative fill vs a bigger change? I guess this is the more financially important version of when Facebook was tagging any use of AI-powered tools in eg Photoshop as an AI generated image.

Photoshop is an AI tool. For several years now, inpainting and other Photoshop tools have been powered by AI.

Yep agreed. My understanding is that Adobe add some sort of metadata if you use those AI powered tools, and Facebook were displaying AI generated image if you uploaded an image with that metadata present. I guess I'm just curious whether the output of those tools can be copyrighted. Is it a boolean like Facebook treated it, where as soon as you use any of these tools it can't be copyrighted, or is it more complicated?

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#54

Post by partomniscient »

bickfordb wrote: post #21

Does this mean that if Hollywood shifts to AI for production that none of it will be copyrightable?

Disney may well buy AI companies that may compete with them (like a next level acquisition equivalent of when they bought Pixar) and copyright everything instead.

We live in an insane world where capitalism is a weapon which destroys and limits art, rather than art enriching us and the world.

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#55

Post by Lerc »

iamleppert wrote: post #30

Based on his argument, the human component should and rightfully be copyrightable. In this case, it's the prompt or conversation he had with the AI. That should definitely be able to be copyrightable, but I agree that the image itself should not. This is the fundamental problem with AI -- if the government isn't willing to protect it, there is fundamentally no market for it. What does that say about the value of the…

>in this case, it's the prompt or conversation he had with the AI. That should definitely be able to be copyrightable, but I agree that the image itself should not.

If you accept that, does that mean source code is copyrightable but compiled code is not?

I'm kind-of ok with the raw output of diffusion models being public domain. It gets more complicated when The process is more than just Text->Image. Artists spending large amounts of time iterating, compositing, inpainting etc. are applying their knowledge of style, design, colour, and lighting.

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#56

Post by thomastjeffery »

copy ≠ theft

Can we please end this delusional demand that property rights can be applied to data? Pretty please? If not now, then when? How much more unfeasible does copyright need to be before we move on? How much more unfeasible can it really get? When are we, as participants in a society, going to simply give up on playing this ridiculous game?

Copyright demands that we all participate in its own failure. That is, all of us but a select few who have already won the game.

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#57

Post by echelon »

DonHopkins wrote: post #52
echelon wrote: post #4

Real AI artists are spending hundreds of hours and their human labor is absolutely copyrightable. There are three types of labor-intensive AI art: (1) ComfyUI node graph editing, (2) canvas-based compositions that use AI as a filter or brush, and (3) large multi-day compositions typically built for film and gaming. Sometimes all of these manual and laborious methodologies are employed for one work. We're so past the…

The prompts and node graphs are copyrightable human work product, but not the images, so publish your beautiful prompts and node graphs instead.

This isn't "prompting" is the point. By some merits, there's way more work put into this than pointing and shooting a camera.

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#58

Post by rsynnott »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #14

This may not be the reason he's "losing" money here, but I was struck by how much less... impressive that piece is to me now compared to when I first saw it. (Visually impressive; I've always known it was from Midjourney.) When the news first broke about it winning an award, I was like "well damn, I can see why—it's visually striking!" But the longer I look at it, and the more LLM-generated images I see in general, t…

AI-generated images are interesting in that, in general, the more you look at them, and in particular the more you look at the detail, the worse they look. This is, arguably, one simple way to distinguish them from actual art.

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#59

Post by falcolas »

Manuel_D wrote: post #37

The inpainting tool in Photoshop is AI. If you use the inpainting tool, congratulations you're an AI artist. Should copyrighted of any images produced with the inpainting tool be ignored?

Yes.

Or rather, it should get the same copyright consideration as all the artwork that went into building the models.

So still yes.

Re: Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

#60

Post by falcolas »

caskethopper wrote: post #44

Will code generated via LLM be handled the same way, or does this only apply to expressive elements in art?

Last I heard, nothing generated by an LLM can be copyrighted. Copyright is for protecting the intellectual work of humans, not computers.

The closest I've heard is a LLM generated book had portions of the book copyrighted by the "Author", but only the portions where the author had significantly altered the LLM generated text.

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