AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
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AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
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Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#2It 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.”
Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#3It 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 further up, the scheduler changes the weights of a, b, and c that get mixed in.
...but from the article:
> The subtle error comes in a misunderstanding about the "randomly generated noise."
It's not an error. You're just focusing on what you want to focus on.
Let's be 100% blunt: The author of an AI art image is pressing the random generator button. Every time. The output is random.
It's not a matter of debate; the initial seed to the diffusion model is random noise.
The prompt guides the diffusion process, which basically denoises the random noise added to the image certainly... but saying there's no random component to it is completely and utterly wrong.
Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#4someone should AI-assist their website layout, there are already a couple products for this.
Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#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 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. Admittedly unlikely, but it could happen, and might eventually even be worth the GPU time depending on how popular AI artwork becomes (and how fast GPUs get).
In any case, I don't see why the unaltered, or in this case extremely minorly altered, image output itself should be copyrightable. It's like two people going to Venice Beach to record the waves at the same time. They each have copyright over their specific recordings, but they can't copyright the sounds of the waves itself; the other person is free to do what they want with their own recording of the same sound. The same way that if you generate a Midjourney image with a specific prompt/seed, I should be able to use the same settings to generate the same image and do what I want with it.
Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#6Did they award Copyright to Netflix's animation short "Dog and Boy"? I am curious to see how they treat the small proprietor vs the big corporation.
Info: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/netfl...
Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#7Is there an agenda or bias here on the side of the USCO? Perhaps taking an extreme anti-ai position allows them to flesh out their exact position (with time and reflection) and ensures they don't have to 'strip' copyright later (only grant it), which presumably would be contentious if payouts have occurred?
Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#8Is there an agenda or bias here on the side of the USCO? Perhaps taking an extreme anti-ai position allows them to flesh out their exact position (with time and reflection) and ensures they don't have to 'strip' copyright later (only grant it), which presumably would be contentious if payouts have occurred?
Well, being hard without any practical means of enforcing it leads to people not respecting the law. TBH I am not sure what to do here
Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#9Did they award Copyright to Netflix's animation short "Dog and Boy"? I am curious to see how they treat the small proprietor vs the big corporation. Info: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/netfl...
There are significant differences between the cases; in that Netflix case, img2img was used to generate more details from scenes that were already fairly fleshed out and drawn. That process seems more analogous to running a picture through Photoshop filters.
There's certainly a blurry line here, it's never going to be 100% cut and dry. I can copyright a figure drawing I do, but I can't copyright my drawing of a straight line. Maybe text-to-image can't be copyrighted, but image-to-image results can. Going to take a long while to resolve this.
Re: AI-assisted art – A mixed decision from the copyright office
#10Did they award Copyright to Netflix's animation short "Dog and Boy"? I am curious to see how they treat the small proprietor vs the big corporation. Info: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/netfl...
Wouldn't be a good comparison. They specifically agree she has copyright over the whole work+arrangement, so the short as a whole is 100% copyrighted. Netflix used AI for the background images, so those are the only parts that might be public domain, but you also don't know how heavily edited or modified by hand the backgrounds are (and realistically, they probably were a lot); this would also grant a copyright (and they deny her the copyright on the grounds that all her edits to the images were trivial). So "Dog and Boy" is quite safe under their novel interpretation.