Copyrights -- who owns the rights to AI generated art?
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Humans vs. machines: the fight to copyright AI art
https://www.reuters.com/default/humans-vs-machines-fight-copyright-ai-art-2023-04-01/
Current copyright law says there must be human authorship for something to be granted copyright.
How much input from a human is needed, and of what nature should such inputs be, for the output to be eligible for copyright?
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This time the Copyright Office denied copyright protection for this:
Artist Jason M. Allen created the piece in question, titled Theatre D'opera Spatial, using the Midjourney image synthesis service, which was relatively new at the time. The image depicting a futuristic royal scene won top prize in the fair's "Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography" category.
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It gets even murkier when you consider that AI's can be trained on copywrited data sets (texts, images, etc.) - so even if you could give copywrite to an AI+human combo, how do you ascribe the value back to the millions of potentially copywrited bits the AI was trained on.
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@Klaus said in Copyrights -- who owns the rights to AI generated art?:
Well, but a human artist also learns from and is influenced by other art he sees.
It's not even remotely the same thing.
As an example, a human illustrator might look at John K's organic approach to drawing, and, like John K, start with dynamic gesture to make character reactions more lively and engaging. They're not drawing like John K, they're applying his process. But to bring the illustrations to life, he might also borrow background lighting ideas from Kelley Jones and her work on Sandman. The end result will look very different from Jones', but the process results in dynamic lighting appropriate for the project.
AI doesn't understand the difference between 2- and 3-point perspective in terms of how communication varies by those choices. It doesn't understand dynamic gesture or even the concept of "hands." It's working on a massive gap in understanding and makes up for that by referencing an absolute shit-ton of images to create something we understand as "person jumping over a creek" or whatever.
Human illustrations involve human decision-making, and AI-generated illustrations involve training a generative model, likely through a combination of reward model input and user feedback. The processes could not possibly be more different.
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It gets even murkier when you consider that AI's can be trained on copywrited data sets (texts, images, etc.) - so even if you could give copywrite to an AI+human combo, how do you ascribe the value back to the millions of potentially copywrited bits the AI was trained on.
@xenon said in Copyrights -- who owns the rights to AI generated art?:
It gets even murkier when you consider that AI's can be trained on copywrited data sets (texts, images, etc.) - so even if you could give copywrite to an AI+human combo, how do you ascribe the value back to the millions of potentially copywrited bits the AI was trained on.
What about AI-generated brushes used in Procreate, Illustrator or Photoshop?
There's going to be a line somewhere, and once we figure that out in the courts, that line's going to get crossed a lot. The financial incentive is way too great not to.
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AI images cannot possibly be anything but derivatives. It’s like copyrighting two passages from two books and calling it yours.
@Mik said in Copyrights -- who owns the rights to AI generated art?:
AI images cannot possibly be anything but derivatives. It’s like copyrighting two passages from two books and calling it yours.
Exactly right. And that's also not what writers do when they're influenced by other writers.
There's unfortunately a moral component to this. If we keep it simple and only look at completely generated material with no human illustration work, the question on the table is, should we value that output just as much as what humans do themselves?
Anyone who thinks so is too stupid to be trusted with this technology. They don't understand what drawings even fucking are.
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@jon-nyc said in Copyrights -- who owns the rights to AI generated art?:
Al Gore?
Too many Midjourney prompts about your sister in a furry costume. The PMRC would shut him down.
