Opinion: The Copyright Office is making a mistake on AI-generated art
Opinion: The Copyright Office is making a mistake on AI-generated art
A rule against copyrighting AI art will be unworkable.
I'm kind of mixed on this, because I think AI art is pretty cool, but I also hate our current copyright system. I kind of agree with the copyright office that images generated by a prompt should not be covered by copyright. What if I just type in "cat" and set the seed to 1, and try to copyright that? What if I copyright the image for EVERY seed with that prompt? Literally anyone else could easily generate the exact same image, and are they going to be in violation of my copyright now?
It gets really complicated though. What if I draw a sketch and then feed it into stable diffusion to flesh it out further? Then I do extensive inpainting across the whole thing, then I take it to Photoshop and do further edits. At this point, I think it's fair to say this is an original image of my own creation, which should be eligible for copyright protection.
I can understand partially your argument, and I'd agree the work you personally do is your own, but the art generated by the AI is not.
It's as much your art as the person who googles extensively to find images that they ten cut out and place into your art. It's as much your art as taking it to another person, asking them to make the edits, and revising.
Now, if the image you get from google is creative commons, and the revision artist agrees to signing off their rights, you'd be able to copywrite your work. I'd agree to the same situation with AI, if the people who's art makes up the model agree to that circumstance, you should be able to copywrite. Otherwise you're just taking credit for others work because you described it well enough while ingraining it into your own.
No specific person's art is being put into my generated image, unlike if I were to copy an image from Google. If a model is trained on 1 trillion images, then every single one of those images influenced the weights in the model which then resulted in the output.
But my argument there is that when the generation becomes very integrated into the workflow as a tool, then it can be nearly impossible to separate out what was actually created by me vs what the ai did.
Literally anyone else could easily generate the exact same image, and are they going to be in violation of my copyright now?
It is already the case that if an AI generates an image that happens to be effectively identical to a copyrighted one the person who generated the image can be in violation of that copyright. It doesn't matter how the copyright originated.
In the case of your cat example, though, the solution is trivial. Use a random seed. There's far too many potential images any given model could generate to ever copyright all of them, or even a tiny sliver of them, and if that did miraculously happen just train the model a little more and you get a whole new set of outputs. It's unfeasible.
I agree that AI work should not have copyright protection. Even with human intervention it still collects data, without expressed permission, from numerous sources.
This will actually protect smaller artists. It will prevent giant companies from profiting from their work without credit or payment.
I agree that AI work should not have copyright protection. Even with human intervention it still collects data, without expressed permission, from numerous sources.
Generative AI models could be trained using only on public domain and royalty free images. Should the output of those be eligible for copyright, but not if they also had unlicensed training data?
It seems there two separate arguments being conflated in this debate. One is whether using copyrighted works as AI training data is fair use. The other is whether creative workers should be protected from displacement by AI.
"Royalty free" is not the same as public domain, most "royalty free" images still need to be licensed for particular uses and come with other restrictions. The only thing royalty free means is that the copyright owner doesn't demand a cut of each sale you make of whatever you used it in.
But that won’t happen. Companies have money, and by extension, lobbyists. It doesn’t matter what the general consensus is, they will get their way.
So we kill open source models, and proprietary data models like adobe are fine, so they can be the only resource and continue rent seeking while independent artists can eat dirt.
Whether or not the model learned from my art is probably not going to affect me in any way shape or form, unless I'm worried about being used as a prompt so people could use me as a compass while directing their new image aesthetic. Disney/warner could already hire someone to do that 100% legally, so it's just the other peasants im worried about. I don't think the peasants are the problem when it comes to the wellbeing and support of artists
I believe a person can still sell or market art that is AI created. I just believe they shouldn't have total ownership of the work.
Already most creators don't fret over fanart or fanfiction so there is wiggle room for fair-use. It's a lot like the game modding scene. Usually modders use pre-existing assets or code to create something new.
Let people play but not own AI work for now.
Ok that's entirely disingenuous. You can make an AI model open source where you get real permission from artists instead of taking their work without permission and using it to replace them.
It's entirely possible. Will the large orgs have more resources to collect art? No shit, yeah, and they'll have better PCs to train on too. No matter what, allowed to take from hard working small artists while attempting to make them irrelevant or not, the big corps will always have a heads up here.
Unless, like so many other projects, an extremely complicated system benefits from collaborative work inside an open environment. Shocking, I know, working on merit over money.
You don't want a conversation though you just want "epic dunks"
I agree. With their example im not sure photos should. The exact photo. Ok, but someone making another thing based on it was sued? Thats bs. the photo was an event that happened. Im ok with them having rights on the photo but not what the photo shows.
Big companies like Adobe and Google can get the rights to use material to train their models. If stricter laws get passed it will only slightly inconvenience the larger companies, but might completely destroy any of the smaller companies or open-source versions available.
The anti-ai lawsuits aren't going to stop ai art/etc, just determine whether it's completely controlled by the current tech giants or not.
Sadly no matter what, the big media companies are going to have a huge advantage in everything because of decades of lobbying etc.
I think people should still be able to profit from selling the image themselves, however, I don't think we have enough knowledge on how AI will truly impact things. If it becomes a minor fad and is just a tool to help speed a process I think the law doesn't need to change much.
If AI becomes the majority creator on projects then we have to have this conversation about who owns what.
Close models will probably be the future, much like stock photos, and people will have to pay to access the models.
In the end big business will always fuck us over, copyright or not.
I do not think that you can shoehorn existing copyright laws to AI-generated art. It's not an apples to apples issue.
While there might be certain creativity and effort that is worth protecting in some gen-AI art cases, it does not require the same kind of skill, materials, time, effort, cost, and dedication that copyrights were envisioned to protect with more traditional works.
The photography example is a good one imo. There's a big difference between pointing your camera at something and snapping a quick photo, vs carefully setting a scene, lighting, and adjusting a lot of camera settings before finishing in Photoshop.
In comparison, you have an image generation where someone types cat into midjourney, vs someone in stable diffusion blending 3 models, using latent coupling to compose the layout of the whole image, using control nets to position all the individual people, and finally touching the image up in Photoshop.
I have no doubt that higher effort photography or high effort ai art should be covered by copyright, each can take hours of work to produce the desired result. It's just not feasible to verify how high effort the production of something is for general copyright.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The ruling raised an important question: Was the issue just that Thaler should have listed himself, rather than his AI system, as the image's creator?
Then on September 5, the office rejected the copyright for Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, holding that it “was not the product of human authorship” because it had been created by the AI software Midjourney.
The nation’s highest court acknowledged that “ordinary” photographs may not merit copyright protection because they may be a “mere mechanical reproduction” of some scene.
So even though a mechanical process captured the image, it nevertheless reflected creative choices by the photographer, and therefore deserved copyright protection.
Or consider the time an Associated Press photographer, Mannie Garcia, snapped a photo of then-Sen. Barack Obama listening to George Clooney during a 2006 panel discussion.
Two years later, artist Shepard Fairey used Garcia’s photo as the basis for an illustration called “Obama Hope” that was ubiquitous during the 2008 presidential campaign.
The original article contains 827 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I’m glad I read this article. I started out thinking that AI generated work didn’t deserve a copyright, but the comparison with early photography changed my mind. Artists have much more influence on AI generated images than I gave them credit for.