Good. Maybe this could put a stop to the attempts by companies to gut their payroll and replace artists with software.
Using automation tools isn't something new in engineering. One can claim that as long as a person is involved and guiding/manipulating the tool, it can be copyrighted. I am sure laws will catch up as usage of AI becomes mainstream in the industry.
I dont think AI is equivalent. It can create content without you being involved and in massive quantities. It is very much capable of decimating the workforce.
You have to remember that you exist in a capitalist system that would love very much to replace you with cheaper labor if it could and there is no human that can possibly work for cheaper than an appropriately trained AI.
The only way that an artist would have a chance to survive is either through maintaining the craft via the novelty of it. I.e hand drawn/painted etc. (Which would be progresssively easier to fake) Or to become one of the people that make prompts and dont actually generate the content themselves. And the latter group of people is going to shrink over time as AI gets better at making content with little input. So any precedent set now is going to cause issues down the line when the tide shifts in AI's favor.
I agree that AI can decimate workforce. My point is, other tools did that already and this is not unique to AI. Imagine electronic chip design. Transistor was invented in 40s and it was a giant tube. Today we have chips with billions of transistors. Initially people were designing circuits on transistor level, then register transfer level languages got invented and added a layer of abstraction. Today we even have high level synthesis languages which converts C to a gatelist. And consider the backend, this gate list is routed into physical transistors in a way that timing is met, clocks are distributed in balance, signal and power integrity are preserved, heat is removed etc. Considering there are billions of transistors and no single unique way of connecting them, tool gets creative and comes with a solution among virtually infinite possibilities which satisfy your specification. You have to tell the tool what you need, and give some guidance occasionally, but what it does is incredible, creative, and wouldn't be possible if you gathered all engineers in the world and make them focus on a single complex chip without tools' help. So they have been taking engineers' jobs for decades, but what happened so far is that industry grew together with automation. If we reach the limits of demand, or physical limitations of technology, or people cannot adapt to the development of the tools fast enough by updating their job description and skillset, then decimation of the workforce happens. But this isn't unique to AI.
I am not against regulating AI, I am just saying what I think will happen. Offloading all work to AI and getting UBI would be nice, but I don't see that happening in near future.
That's already the case, but also it has to be substantially guided by a human because copyright only protects human expression and elements beyond what the human intentionally expressed are not protected. (Of course studios won't generally admit how much human involvement there really were)
Ha.
A lot of money will fly and laws and views will change like butter in the sun.
Pretty sure this case is dead. The copyright office did the same thing with the monkey selfies and the ai art piece from stephen thaler. That "void of ownership" is just public domain. Gonna be interesting what other kind of ai cases come up later though.
If those people have ever tried actually using image generation software they will know that there is significant human authorship required to make something that isn't remotely dogshit. The most important skill in visual art is not how to draw something but knowing what to draw.
Then why does all AI need to harvest the work of millions of artists in order to create one mediocre painting? Millions upon millions of hours of blood sweat and tears is hidden behind that algorithm. Thousands of people starting to draw when they are 5 and never stopping in order to get as good as they are.
All big AI services refuse to disclose the training set they use and those that we know anything about absolutely uses copyrighted material from artist that didn't consent to be part of the training set.
This is what fuels my contempt for AI. People that uses literal billions of dollars of stolen time and talent and then pretend that actually having ideas is the important bit.
I mean, I agree that the developers of these AI tools need to be made to be more ethical in how they use stuff for training, but it is worth noting that that's kind of also how humans learn. Every human artist learns, in part, by absorbing the wealth of prior art that they experience. Copying existing pieces is even a common way to practice.
Yeah, that shrug you did about how it would be nice if AI didn't steal art is part of the problem. Shrugging and saying joink doesn't work when you want to copyright stuff.
Human learns by assimilating other people work and working it into their own style, yes. That means that the AI is the human in this and the AI owns the artistic works. Since AI does not yet have the right to own copyrights, any works produced by that AI is not copyrightable.
That is if you accept that AI and humans learn art in the same way. I don't personally think that is analogous but it doesn't matter for this discussion.
The difference is a human artist can then make new unique art and contribute to the craft so it can advance and they can make a living off it. AI made art isn’t unique, it’s a collage of other art. To get art from AI you have to feed it prompts of things it’s seen before. So when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
It is funny how that "one mediocre painting" won the award while the human art did not.
So if I tell someone else to draw something, who gets the copyright?
If someone is doing work for you, you get the copyright. That's how it always worked
That's only with the artist's agreement though isn't it? Usually because you're paying them. In this case the artist isn't a person so can't grant you the copyright (I think)
This isnt always the case. Tattoos for example, are commissioned and paid for but the actual copyright often resides with the artist not the person that paid for the work.
Yes, the artist must agree that copyright transfer is part of the agreement. By default ownership is with the artist.
We're gonna have some juicy legal battles when Hollywood start leveraging generative AI more and more
If you compare the AI image that was used with the image that one the price after the artist enhanced it to that level you could argue that paintings from sketches are not copyright-able
Well if the sketch was made by the artist then no you can't, and if the sketch wasn't then the copyright board has a right to know, and he didn't disclose the original image.
Idk if he has shown the ai image (which isn't copyright-able) but it was discloed that AI was used in the process
The article says that he could have copyrighted the work if he disclaimed the AI generated source images in his application. The collage he created is copyrightable but he can't claim copyright on the source images because they were not created by a human. If someone were to take his collage, he'd still be protected.
What's significant about this is that this means that you can't simply copyright an image you had ai generate from a prompt, there needs to be some kind of transformation, and if someone else got ahold of the original AI image before transformation they could use it freely as public domain.
Why do photographers get copyright over their pictures then?
They're just pointing a camera at something and pressing a button.
AI is a tool like any other.
Because the human element is in everything they had to do to set up the photograph, from physically going to the location, to setting up the camera properly, to ensuring the right lighting, etc.
In an AI generated image, the only human element is in putting in a prompt(s) and selecting which picture you want. The AI made the art, not you, so only the enhancements on it are copywritable because those are the human element you added.
This scenario is closer to me asking why can't I claim copyright over the objects in my photograph, be
This scenario is closer to me asking why I can't claim the copyright of the things I took a photograph of, and only the photograph itself. The answer usually being because I didn't make those things, somebody/something else did, I only made the photo.
Edit: Posted this without realising I hadn't finished my last paragraph. Oops
It's honestly pretty much the same with ai, there's lots of settings, tweaking, prompt writing, masking and so on.. that you need to set up in order to get the result you desire.
A photographer can take shitty pictures and you can make shitty stuff with AI but you can also use both tools to make what you want and put lots of work into it.
The difference is it's not you making the art.
The photographer is the one making the photo, it is their skill in doing ehat I described above that directly makes the photo. Whereas your prompts, tweaking, etc. are instructions for an AI to make the scenery for you based on other people's artwork.
I actually have a better analogy for you...
If I trained a monkey to take photos, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting photo are, I don't own those photos, the monkey does. Though in actuality, the work goes to the public domain in lieu as non-human animals cannot claim copyright.
If you edit that monkey's photo, you own the edit, but you still don't own the photo because the monkey took it.
The same should, does currently seem to, apply to AI. It is especially true when that AI is trained on information you don't hold copyright or licensing for.
Actually... If an animal you own/trained makes art... you did get to have the copyright to the art, until recently with these same legal developments. Now it's less clear.
I also agree more with the other posters interpretation in general. We copyright art made by random chance emergent effects (Polluck et al.), process based art (Morris Louis et al.), performance art (so many examples.. Adrian Piper comes to mind), ephemeral art, math art, and photography, as the poster says. None of those artists are fully in control of every aspect of the final project- the art makes itself, in part, in each example.
If a human uses a math equation for the geometric output of a printer, and they tweak the variables to get the best looking output, we consider that art by law. Ai is exactly the same.
It's funny, I find that illustrators hate ai art, but "studio" artists (for lack of a better term) usually adore it
Actually… If an animal you own/trained makes art… you did get to have the copyright to the art, until recently with these same legal developments. Now it’s less clear.
If you're referring to Wikimedia's infamous Monkey Selfie Dispute, which is the case I'm most aware of, then the reason its less clear is because its hard to determine the sufficient amount of human creativity required to render a human copyright over an animals work.
I'd argue that last bit doesn't apply to the AI, because while you do provide inspiration in terms of your prompting, tweaking, etc., it is ultimately always the AI that interprets those prompts and creates the artwork. Supervising an AI is not the same thing as setting up and taking a photograph, or drawing a painting.
We copyright art made by random chance emergent effects (Polluck et al.), process based art (Morris Louis et al.), performance art (so many examples… Adrian Piper comes to mind), ephemeral art, math art, and photography, as the poster says. None of those artists are fully in control of every aspect of the final project- the art makes itself, in part, in each example.
If you're going to cite artists, it would be a good idea to at least link their work for context for those who aren't in the know... As I don't know these artists, I can't make an informed response, so I'll move on.
If a human uses a math equation for the geometric output of a printer, and they tweak the variables to get the best looking output, we consider that art by law. Ai is exactly the same.
There's a big difference between a human designing a math formula to output a desired geometry, and a human instructing an AI to do the same.
By having the AI do the artistic work, it'll always be the one making the artistic choices based on your instruction, and therefore the art is not yours to own.
Because photographs don't require other people photographs to work. It just requires the labour of the engineers at Nikon and you payed them by buying the camera.
Use an AI algorithm with no training set and see how good your tool is.
What if I used an open source algo with my own photographs as a dataset 🤔
Then absolutely go ahead. That isn't what the guy in the post did tough.
I don't see why you wouldn't be able to keep copyright then. Everything involved would have been owned by you.
That is a big difference to how other generative models work though, which do use other people's work.
Because you would have to prove that the AI only learned from your work and it’s my understanding that there is no way to track what is used as learning material or even have an AI unlearn something.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Because Mr. Allen is unwilling to disclaim the AI-generated material, the Work cannot be registered as submitted," the office wrote in its decision.
In this case, "disclaim" refers to the act of formally renouncing or giving up any claim to the ownership or authorship of the AI-generated content in the work.
In August 2022, 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.
In his appeal, Allen claimed that "the Office is placing a value judgment on the utility of various tools" and that denying copyright protection for AI-generated artwork would result in a "void of ownership."
More recently, it also denied copyright registration for an image that computer scientist Stephen Thaler claimed was autonomously generated by his AI system.
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