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Bullshit. I made a new image using a computer program that I was legally licensed to use. The program might be Corel Draw. It might be Blah Blah Diffusion Pr

Bullshit. I made a new image using a computer program that I was legally licensed to use. The program might be Corel Draw. It might be Blah Blah Diffusion Pro Plus. Either way, I made the image and I own the copyright, unless some other contract was made between myself and the program's owner or my employer.

ROTMetro 4y ago
A machine operator does not own the copyright on the parts his machine stamps out even though he puts in inputs. GM's engineers can own the copyright on a car they design in CAD. If you put in creative inputs using a tool, it is copyrightable (a car's design). If all you did was say, give my XYZ widget (in this case 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow') you only gave instructions for generating a widget, you did not create art.
- mring33621 4y ago
  If someone asks me to make/paint/draw a picture of a 'frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow', I would be basing my new work on all the 'art' and images that I have seen in the past. I might even search for related content on the internet for inspiration! So long as I don't copy a previous, copyrighted image 'too much' (this is fuzzy and maybe should be quantified legally in our bright, digital future), I can claim copyright on the new image. Since, so far, non-human things are not allowed to hold copyright, a human can claim copyright over works created by non-human things, that the human owns or controls. It's even easier to reason about if the human and non-human thing 'collaborate' on the final creative product. So, if I fiddle around with my inputs (prompts) into Super Diffusion Power Plus Gold Edition, then we (the software and I) collaborated. And I own the output that I chose (curated) as the best one.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Do you have citations for a ruling that AI generated art is not copyrightable? To my knowledge, such a ruling has not been made, so we can at best make wild guesses at what the courts will find. I don't think this particular wild guess is on the right track; the creative input given to the AI generator was the prompt. There is also an argument to be made that, in the same sense a photograph can be copyrighted even though it's just a single still image from a moment that occurred around it, an Ai-generated artwork can be copyrighted because the artist performed the creative act of retaining it. In essence, they pulled it from the soup of possible outputs and held it up as one worth noting, as a photographer pulls an image from the soup of possible moments and framings.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    But the photographer took the picture, determined the framing and composition. A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image. Their pulling it from a pile is not an act of creation, and therefore does not qualify. You have to CREATE a work, not critique/currate it. At best you have an 'anonymous work' by Title 17. An “anonymous work” is a work on the copies or phonorecords of which no natural person is identified as author. The fact that it is a curated 'anonymous work' does not make it somehow more copyrightable.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      The picture was there in electromagnetic flux; the photographer just got in the way of the photons. I think a similar argument can be made that in the infinite space of stable diffusion solutions, asking for one is just getting in the way of the noise. If a photograph is art, a human saying "this shook noise is worth showing people" is art. Does the equation of copyright change if the artist says "I want a boat on a calm sea" and starts from a white triangle and blue rectangle? If not, there must be some point of human contribution of information between "words into the stable diffuser" and "using Photoshop on a canvas starting blank" where the work becomes copyrightable. Where is the line? > A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image. If I take a blank canvas, set color to [200, 10, 10], and click in the corner with the paint bucket, my contribution is five parcels of information (compressible to one, the color), and I get to claim copyright on the whole ruddy square that results. Especially if I name it "Ruddy Square" and sell it to the MoMA.
      - ROTMetro 4y ago
        Maybe. Everything from back when I was a real person and dealt with copyright, patent, and trademark lawyers tells me otherwise, but I know this from the tech industry side/tech industry lawyers and not art specifically. My reading of Title 17 tells me otherwise. But maybe you are right. And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain. In your case, you would not be able to copyright that piece of art. You can't own colors or dimensions. You could copyright an installation of the art piece, so that no one else could display a [200,10,10] colored piece of art with the same dimensions you used and call their installation 'Ruddy Square', but that is the only copy protection you would be given.
- drusepth 4y ago
  >If you put in creative inputs using a tool, it is copyrightable (a car's design). If all you did was say, give my XYZ widget (in this case 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow') you only gave instructions for generating a widget, you did not create art. Does this still hold true if you worked through hundreds of variants of 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow', generating dozens or hundreds of images for each version of your prompt, ultimately putting in hours or days (or weeks) of work to produce a single image depicting the perfect umbrella-wielding frog you were originally envisioning? This isn't even considering inpainting, masking, and other image-in-image manipulations these models can also do to get you closer to the results you're trying to create. For artists using AI, this seems to be the more common case and is a far cry from the idealistic one-prompt-and-done that usually gets used for an example in these conversations.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Yes. Museum curators/gallery owners do not own the copyrights to the pictures they selected. What your are describing you put the computer as 'anonymous creator' as far as Title 17 is concerned.
ROTMetro 4y ago
Also there was no need to call bullshit. You're the reason the internet sucks now.

ROTMetro 4y ago

A machine operator does not own the copyright on the parts his machine stamps out even though he puts in inputs. GM's engineers can own the copyright on a car they design in CAD. If you put in creative inputs using a tool, it is copyrightable (a car's design). If all you did was say, give my XYZ widget (in this case 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow') you only gave instructions for generating a widget, you did not create art.

mring33621 4y ago
If someone asks me to make/paint/draw a picture of a 'frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow', I would be basing my new work on all the 'art' and images that I have seen in the past. I might even search for related content on the internet for inspiration! So long as I don't copy a previous, copyrighted image 'too much' (this is fuzzy and maybe should be quantified legally in our bright, digital future), I can claim copyright on the new image. Since, so far, non-human things are not allowed to hold copyright, a human can claim copyright over works created by non-human things, that the human owns or controls. It's even easier to reason about if the human and non-human thing 'collaborate' on the final creative product. So, if I fiddle around with my inputs (prompts) into Super Diffusion Power Plus Gold Edition, then we (the software and I) collaborated. And I own the output that I chose (curated) as the best one.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Do you have citations for a ruling that AI generated art is not copyrightable? To my knowledge, such a ruling has not been made, so we can at best make wild guesses at what the courts will find. I don't think this particular wild guess is on the right track; the creative input given to the AI generator was the prompt. There is also an argument to be made that, in the same sense a photograph can be copyrighted even though it's just a single still image from a moment that occurred around it, an Ai-generated artwork can be copyrighted because the artist performed the creative act of retaining it. In essence, they pulled it from the soup of possible outputs and held it up as one worth noting, as a photographer pulls an image from the soup of possible moments and framings.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  But the photographer took the picture, determined the framing and composition. A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image. Their pulling it from a pile is not an act of creation, and therefore does not qualify. You have to CREATE a work, not critique/currate it. At best you have an 'anonymous work' by Title 17. An “anonymous work” is a work on the copies or phonorecords of which no natural person is identified as author. The fact that it is a curated 'anonymous work' does not make it somehow more copyrightable.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    The picture was there in electromagnetic flux; the photographer just got in the way of the photons. I think a similar argument can be made that in the infinite space of stable diffusion solutions, asking for one is just getting in the way of the noise. If a photograph is art, a human saying "this shook noise is worth showing people" is art. Does the equation of copyright change if the artist says "I want a boat on a calm sea" and starts from a white triangle and blue rectangle? If not, there must be some point of human contribution of information between "words into the stable diffuser" and "using Photoshop on a canvas starting blank" where the work becomes copyrightable. Where is the line? > A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image. If I take a blank canvas, set color to [200, 10, 10], and click in the corner with the paint bucket, my contribution is five parcels of information (compressible to one, the color), and I get to claim copyright on the whole ruddy square that results. Especially if I name it "Ruddy Square" and sell it to the MoMA.
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      Maybe. Everything from back when I was a real person and dealt with copyright, patent, and trademark lawyers tells me otherwise, but I know this from the tech industry side/tech industry lawyers and not art specifically. My reading of Title 17 tells me otherwise. But maybe you are right. And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain. In your case, you would not be able to copyright that piece of art. You can't own colors or dimensions. You could copyright an installation of the art piece, so that no one else could display a [200,10,10] colored piece of art with the same dimensions you used and call their installation 'Ruddy Square', but that is the only copy protection you would be given.
drusepth 4y ago
>If you put in creative inputs using a tool, it is copyrightable (a car's design). If all you did was say, give my XYZ widget (in this case 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow') you only gave instructions for generating a widget, you did not create art. Does this still hold true if you worked through hundreds of variants of 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow', generating dozens or hundreds of images for each version of your prompt, ultimately putting in hours or days (or weeks) of work to produce a single image depicting the perfect umbrella-wielding frog you were originally envisioning? This isn't even considering inpainting, masking, and other image-in-image manipulations these models can also do to get you closer to the results you're trying to create. For artists using AI, this seems to be the more common case and is a far cry from the idealistic one-prompt-and-done that usually gets used for an example in these conversations.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Yes. Museum curators/gallery owners do not own the copyrights to the pictures they selected. What your are describing you put the computer as 'anonymous creator' as far as Title 17 is concerned.

ROTMetro 4y ago

Also there was no need to call bullshit. You're the reason the internet sucks now.