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No one. All the 'X Does Not Exist' websites use random generation, without any human curation; the US Copyright Office is clear, non-humans (and machines in par

by gwern 7y ago

No one. All the 'X Does Not Exist' websites use random generation, without any human curation; the US Copyright Office is clear, non-humans (and machines in particular) cannot create a copyright, and since there is no human author expressing any creativity in random generation via NNs, there is no copyright, and they are automatically public domain. I got this question a lot on my anime faces as well and provide a few references on why they're public domain: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#faq https://www.gwern.net/Faces#faq

visarga 7y ago
You're forgetting about 'who paid for the electricity, hardware and set up the model used in generating this image?' Couldn't this allow the person hosting the model to claim copyright? I am also thinking about hyper-parameter configuration and selection of training data as creative human input in this process.
- gwern 7y ago
  No, it doesn't. Again, the law is very clear about this. The US Copyright Office guidelines are extremely blunt: machines are not authors. Period. It doesn't matter if you twiddled with the hyperparameters or how much you paid for the electricity. (Similarly, you can spend billions of dollars measuring a physical constant, but as a fact, it is not copyrightable.)
Cpoll 7y ago
What happens if you sign it with your name, or modify a single pixel manually?
gridlockd 7y ago
What is that interpretation based on? I'm not aware of any case law on this. The input of these networks are all copyrighted. The closest analogy in terms of copyright is probably "collage". In any case, the idea that you can just take some artist's life work, train a CNN on it, and then do what you please with the results doesn't seem "right".
- amdavidson 7y ago
  Is your example not transformative in the most basic sense?
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    Arguably, but transformation may or may not help you in a "fair use" defense. That is decided case-by-case.
- gwern 7y ago
  > What is that interpretation based on? I'm not aware of any case law on this. There's plenty of case law that non-humans are not creators and cannot get a copyright. How could you have not heard of the Naruto case, for example? It was famous! (And funny.)
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    Late reply, but here we go: You're ignoring the fact that the inputs are copyrighted and that therefore the "non-human" is not the (sole) creator and the "work" is derived. The CNN isn't creating anything new except for random numbers. Taken to the extreme, your position would be that any transformation performed by a computer program and involving random numbers would effectively remove copyright. That can't possibly be true, so there would have to be some "threshold of originality". Again, no case law on this, as far as I'm aware. In effect, I believe you are spreading legal misinformation based on a flawed understanding of copyright law, which may put others in harms way. > How could you have not heard of the Naruto case, for example? Not really a good comparison. The "inputs" here are the monkey and the jungle, neither of which are themselves protected by copyright. A better comparison would be a monkey creating a "director's cut" of Disney's Jungle Book, interspersed with footage from National Geographic, both of which are copyrighted. I doubt the "a monkey did it" kind of defense would stand here.
    - gwern 7y ago
      The 'inputs' are the random numbers. Not the training data. They don't produce a copy of an existing work, any more than a human trained on looking at faces is producing a copy and 'stealing other people's lifework' (without even paying them a cent! how dare they), unless it's so similar to serve as a substitute (among other considerations). > A better comparison would be a monkey creating a "director's cut" of Disney's Jungle Book, interspersed with footage from National Geographic, both of which are copyrighted. That wouldn't be a good comparison at all, because a human could very easily identify exactly which frames are literally copied from which copyrighted work. That's not 'transformative' at all. In contrast, if you look at the faces, most of them don't have even a remotely similar exemplar in the dataset (you can do nearest-neighbor lookups using features or pixels, and GAN papers often do to demonstrate that they are not just 'memorizing' - I discuss this in my FAQ section).
valentinvieriu 7y ago
I was wondering this too. Thank you for sharing this. I've had a similar idea with https://art42.net https://art42.net and wondering what type of copyright to add. Is this Creative Commons?
3131s 7y ago
What about non-NN generative art?
buboard 7y ago
has anyone ever sued for using their dataset? Most publishers will not care enough, but museums are very protective of their art, and i can see them suing if someone uses a large collection.

by gwern 7y ago

visarga 7y ago

You're forgetting about 'who paid for the electricity, hardware and set up the model used in generating this image?' Couldn't this allow the person hosting the model to claim copyright? I am also thinking about hyper-parameter configuration and selection of training data as creative human input in this process.

gwern 7y ago
No, it doesn't. Again, the law is very clear about this. The US Copyright Office guidelines are extremely blunt: machines are not authors. Period. It doesn't matter if you twiddled with the hyperparameters or how much you paid for the electricity. (Similarly, you can spend billions of dollars measuring a physical constant, but as a fact, it is not copyrightable.)

Cpoll 7y ago

What happens if you sign it with your name, or modify a single pixel manually?

gridlockd 7y ago

What is that interpretation based on? I'm not aware of any case law on this. The input of these networks are all copyrighted. The closest analogy in terms of copyright is probably "collage". In any case, the idea that you can just take some artist's life work, train a CNN on it, and then do what you please with the results doesn't seem "right".

amdavidson 7y ago
Is your example not transformative in the most basic sense?
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Arguably, but transformation may or may not help you in a "fair use" defense. That is decided case-by-case.
gwern 7y ago
> What is that interpretation based on? I'm not aware of any case law on this. There's plenty of case law that non-humans are not creators and cannot get a copyright. How could you have not heard of the Naruto case, for example? It was famous! (And funny.)
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Late reply, but here we go: You're ignoring the fact that the inputs are copyrighted and that therefore the "non-human" is not the (sole) creator and the "work" is derived. The CNN isn't creating anything new except for random numbers. Taken to the extreme, your position would be that any transformation performed by a computer program and involving random numbers would effectively remove copyright. That can't possibly be true, so there would have to be some "threshold of originality". Again, no case law on this, as far as I'm aware. In effect, I believe you are spreading legal misinformation based on a flawed understanding of copyright law, which may put others in harms way. > How could you have not heard of the Naruto case, for example? Not really a good comparison. The "inputs" here are the monkey and the jungle, neither of which are themselves protected by copyright. A better comparison would be a monkey creating a "director's cut" of Disney's Jungle Book, interspersed with footage from National Geographic, both of which are copyrighted. I doubt the "a monkey did it" kind of defense would stand here.
  - gwern 7y ago
    The 'inputs' are the random numbers. Not the training data. They don't produce a copy of an existing work, any more than a human trained on looking at faces is producing a copy and 'stealing other people's lifework' (without even paying them a cent! how dare they), unless it's so similar to serve as a substitute (among other considerations). > A better comparison would be a monkey creating a "director's cut" of Disney's Jungle Book, interspersed with footage from National Geographic, both of which are copyrighted. That wouldn't be a good comparison at all, because a human could very easily identify exactly which frames are literally copied from which copyrighted work. That's not 'transformative' at all. In contrast, if you look at the faces, most of them don't have even a remotely similar exemplar in the dataset (you can do nearest-neighbor lookups using features or pixels, and GAN papers often do to demonstrate that they are not just 'memorizing' - I discuss this in my FAQ section).

valentinvieriu 7y ago

I was wondering this too. Thank you for sharing this. I've had a similar idea with https://art42.net https://art42.net and wondering what type of copyright to add. Is this Creative Commons?

3131s 7y ago

What about non-NN generative art?

buboard 7y ago

has anyone ever sued for using their dataset? Most publishers will not care enough, but museums are very protective of their art, and i can see them suing if someone uses a large collection.