TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 2 mo. ago

People are ‘blatantly stealing my work,’ AI artist complains - with notes on a similar appeal that failed hard just recently

pivot-to-ai.com People are ‘blatantly stealing my work,’ AI artist complains

AI artist Jason Allen submitted some Midjourney output, “Theatre D’Opera Spatial,” to the digital art category of the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition in 2022. He won, to some controversy.…

45 comments

AI artist Jason Allen

Absolute degenerate.

I have also spent some time screwing around with AI art generators. No way I'm addressing my self as an artist for it. AI art can be useful in certain situations such as whipping together a stupid meme to share between some friends. It's not any talent involved, and it's not something you should consider as copyright worthy.

Creating nice art is available to anyone. It just require some creativity and talent if you want to love of it. Being an artist is not some basic human right. As plenty of "artists" believe.
- @Crampon
  
  AI artists are just the new version of "fractal artists" who for the most part just pick a color palette and run a Mandelbrot generator until they find an appealing image.
  
  It's not nothing but it's not going to get you very far.
  
  Some AI artists actually take the time to touch up the image in something like phtoshop once they get the idea they want but there are still problems with the image.
  
  As the images get better though that might stop
  
  Now do pour painting
- Right? I used to think Kinkade was the pompous narcissist. That anyone would consider themselves an AI "artist" is absolutely wild.
- Thank heavens we have people like you to police who gets to be called an artist or not...
  
  I instructed the Ford dealer to sell me a new Focus with leather interior and aluminum wheels. I am a car designer and manufacturer. I made this.
  
  It's not a protected title. Go to town with it.
  
  But it's diluting the value of it if you carry no talent but want all the recognition.
  
  Thank heavens we have people like you to police who gets to be called the police...
  
  Your position seems to be that art is whatever the US Copyright Office deems worthy of copyright.
- i mean, it IS art. you are just using a tool that makes it much much easier to put your mind into the screen.
  
  art is a process not a thing on a screen. get rid of the tension between idea and realisation and you get rid of most of what is interesting about art. (besides i'm sorry for your mind if your imagination is adequately represented by the output of stock image generators.)
  
  wow look at this one, too good to headbutt a screen like is tradition
We all know what it means when Midjourney churns out pictures that look like your art: their model got trained on your stuff. I think it’s time for Jason Allen to go full uroboros and sue Midjourney for using his art without permission.
They're so close to figuring it out but don't have that much self awareness, or perhaps just have cognitive disonance about it.
"All Allen could copyright was what he did to the image himself" - so if he trained the model himself, would that make the work copyrightable? Does that mean midjourney has the copyright of all the images created with it?
- The image gatcha does not create a new copyright. There might be a copyright in the text of a complex prompt (do you feel lucky in court?) Mere "sweat of the brow" does not generate a new copyright in the US, so e.g. retouching work on a photo does not generate a new copyright and photos of a public domain artwork do not create a new copyright.
  
  This doesn't touch on the old copyrights of the stuff Midjourney trained on to make its computer-mediated collages. Those copyrights still exist.
  
  Does the computer-mediated collage launder the previous copyrights? The answer is "do you feel lucky in court?"
  
  It's Tornado Cash, but for pictures of Garfield with a machete.
- so if he trained the model himself, would that make the work copyrightable?
  
  I think if he "trained" the model on art he himself created you might have an argument.
  
  Not in the US, there art can only be created by a human.
  If it's created by an algorithm or animal supernatural being it's public domain.
  
  Interesting facts:
  
  when photography was invented there was a debate whether photos can be copyrighted
  
  if you claim to have written down something revealed to you by a supernatural entity, it's public domain
  
  the following image is public domain because it was taken by a monkey

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