Absolutely not. AI images can be mass-produced and two people using the same seed will be able to create the same image. If they're copyrightable nothing would be stopping a company from making millions of images a day and copyright trolling anyone who tries to use them.

There's also a lot of other issues like image AIs being trained on real copyrighted data, so nothing stops me from saying "Hey, generate an image of Kirby". It's hard to argue that you own that image when it clearly depicts something that isn't yours.

I don't think copyright should exist, but as long as it does I lean towards "no" because AI images are just copying with extra steps imo

only if you have full rights to every bit of data it was trained on.

"Should AI art be copyrightable?" Is the wrong question. AI is a tool for people to make things. You might as well ask "Should art made in Photoshop be copyrightable?" When you put the two questions side by side, it becomes obvious that yes is the only logical general answer, but the more important thing is the actual process. I can make a drawing of Mario in Photoshop, but I don't own the copyright for Mario. Meanwhile, I can make a unique logo in Photoshop and I can own the copyright. Simply saying "made with AI" isn't sufficient for describing the process. For AI, copyrights in their source material and originality of the final product are complicated topics, so the only real solution is that the outputs of an AI will need to be handled on a case by case basis.

I don't think AI art should be copyrighted. Copyright is for human creation. The phrase that human generated should be copyright protected (if its unique enough) but not the generated image.

It's the same argument to Scott's bear video is public domain, because a bear clicked shutter button, even though camera belonged to tom scott.

Only if the AI is sentient and created the image of its own free will and creativity. Otherwise no.

No, because creativity is not AI's strong suit. What AIs "create" is almost always based on something a human being made first.

And corporations will absolutely abuse this copyright law to steal content and revenue from actual, creative people.

No. It's too exploitable to be a 'yes'. Our justice system has proven to be incapable of handling nuance and has a track record of ruling for the already advantaged.

If you were to copyright AI art who would the credit go to? The original artists the training was based on? The person who created the training model? The person who writes the prompt? The computer itself? I don't think copyright makes sense in this context

No.

I'm pretty sure in the US this is already answered as "no". The reason is - non-persons in the legal sense cannot hold copyrights at all. This was tested with photographs I think taken by a monkey and maybe a bear. The AI isn't a legal person, so cannot have copyright.

That's not to say humans can't take an AI image, and manipulate it / clean it up / etc and have copyright in the final result if they do a minor level of touching up or more.

Of course, I find the idea of copyright and IP rights in general as usually expressed pretty insane anyway. The AI "conundrum" is just another point showing how nonsensical IP laws are when you actually think about them and the supposed things they're meant to accomplish.

My theoretical answer is this: in an ideal world, there would be no copyright at all. This is an artificial contrivance that was once dreamed up to serve physical-copy economy, and it was rendered obsolete by the digital age. Shit would be so much easier when we got rid of this shit and everyone could share everything by default without any profit motive. (Caveat: This will not work unless literally every jurisdiction on the planet gets rid of copyright laws all at once, otherwise this is way too exploitable due to power imbalance. So I don't think this is a practical proposition. *cough* unless we all decide Anarchism is a good idea after all *cough*)

My practical answer is this: Welllllll we're kinda damned if we do and we're damned if we don't. My personal feeling is that AI creations aren't really copyrightable, and even suggesting they are copyrightable is kind of opening a huge can of worms regarding what exactly counts as "creativity" in the first place. The best we can do under current copyright regime is to regulate how the AI datasets are curated, because goodness knows the current datasets weren't exactly ethically obtained.

Why do you think it's more complicated than a yes or no?

Didn’t a court, at least in the US, already rule that you cannot copyright an AI created image?

The situation today is that AI images are copyrighted (or not) just like any other images.

Given the power of the copyright industry, I doubt that this will be cut back. In the interest of society, it should be, but denying copyright to AI imagery is not the best place to do this.

The original intention of copyright was the same as that of patents: To encourage the creation of new works by making it possible to monetize them through licensing. AI images can be very expensive to make, depending on what goes into them. Without copyright on these images, we might miss out.

ETA: This purpose of copyright is given in the US Constitution (though it is older). US Americans could think about that. IP is property created to serve the public. That's the only justification for property to be found in that document.

I don't see why it is complicated. It should not be copyrightable because ideas aren't copyrightable.

Otherwise you definitely have to start fresh with AI and build new ones which somehow aren't trained on the pictures produced by artists.

Because if you copyright the idea behind an image, than definitely all AI produced images are infringing on the copyright of the art they used for training.

It's absurd to give a copyright to a result of simple text2image, only the app itself can have a copyright. The only case of a AI content which can have a copyright is, when an artist use it in several processes as an tool for his work, for example in things like this, which can't be done with a simple text input, but a long work with several different AI apps and tools.

https://tube.kuylar.dev/watch?v=_LxQDu9HJJ8

Different take: If I generate an image through a random number generator, should this be copyrightable?

Sure.

If I make my own AI image generator and create a nice image with it, or use some AI engine that gives me full ownership of the output, I can choose to share it online with whatever license I want to share it with. I don't see why the regular copyright rules for digital images and photographs would not hold... If someone shares their AI creation online and wants others to share with attribution, or not share at all, what is wrong with that?

I can take a ton of photos of objects with my phone, upload them to Flickr, and they are all copyrighted. That doesn't mean that other's can simply take similar photos if they wish to do so. The same with AI. One can decide whether to share with attribution, pay someone to let them use it, or to generate the image themselves using AI. It does not seem like a problem to me.

they will be