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There is nothing obvious here. If I draw the image using photoshop, including many of its ai tools, most would say it's copyrightable. If I take a photo and u

There is nothing obvious here. If I draw the image using photoshop, including many of its ai tools, most would say it's copyrightable. If I take a photo and use an AI denoiser (your phone already does), most would say it's copyrightable. That denoiser could be stable diffusion (it can be used for "traditional denoising"). Is that copyrightable? If I infill part of my manual drawing with SD, is that copyrightable? What if I draw a sketch, and use control net to get an image of that? There is definitely no clear line that would make this decision "obvious".

JohnFen 4y ago
All of your examples are clearly copyrightable, because in all of them, you were the one who created the works (and I assume that you're a human). There's no legal ambiguity in any of your examples. The use of AI or any other sorts of tool to modify or improve your work doesn't alter that. This is clearly shown in legal precedents.
- cypress66 4y ago
  So the control net example (which is image to image) is copyrightable, but the OP case (text to image) is not? Then the line to draw is that when there's a change in modality, it's not copyrightable? Most people are probably going to end up using something like controlnet anyway because of the extra control it gives you.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    No, I don't think that it has to do with modality. Again, IANAL, but as I understand it, the legal line is how much of the art was created by a human. There is certainly a gray area here that will have to be hashed out, but I don't think it's as large as you think it is. The rulings are going to be about whether or not the creative work is the work of a human. I imagine that a case can be made that describing a work to a machine and having the machine engage in the creativity part means the creative work is done by the machine, not the human. But if the human did the creative work and the machine modified it, then the work is done by the human. Of course, we're all speculating here. I have no idea how the courts will rule on these things. I could even see the necessity of Congress making some clarifying laws. Also, understand that I am not expressing what I personally think should be the case. I'm just trying to work out what is, or is likely, to be the case.
avereveard 4y ago
This is all covered by the law. Collections and arrangements of non copyrightable data are copyrightable. People refuse to just apply the copyright principles as they are trying to claim according to their convenience either that work which is not result of human creativity is copyrightable (it isn't) and that work that isn't result of human creativity can be used to wash copyrighted content (you can't because copyright also cover subjects and stories independently from the artwork) Just because the transform is called ai doesn't change a thing. If you check the principles, they mention storage, transmission, transformation, and effort, not this or that technology. Tech is at most referenced as example.
- b33j0r 4y ago
  I was confused for far too long about what tensors are, because I got weird answers from authority figures and I guess it never clicked. Lol. That was silly. In this regime, [x y z w] is an ordinary matrix, while [x y z is_feline_65] is a tensor. I get why it’s more than that, but come on… this is all matrix addition and multiplication. Even transformers and diffusion models. So what is the difference between a filter kernel or soft brush in Photoshop, or an inference model matrix? Easy. People don’t use photoshop with multilayer 80B parameter spraypaint brushes. And justifiably have no idea what most of these words mean.
DiscourseFan 4y ago
I don't think someone inputting a phrase and getting an entire artwork which was the product of many hours of labor which was not their own, not even including the labor of the artists whose work the program was trained on, means that their input was involved much at all. You could say that by the same logic my comment, being a string inputted on a computer built by labor not my own, posted to a website built by others, means that it is not my comment being written but simply text being posted to this website using the technology I am employing. But that wouldn't cohere, simply because I could write this anywhere else, and in fact I could write it with a pencil or even carve it into a wall using a stone I found; the tool, in that case, is separate from the work itself and its reproducibility. The AI art which was generated for the book could NOT have been reproduced anywhere else with other tools in the even remotely the same way, it is only on account of being inputted into that specific machine which it was generated thusly, therefore it is not an actual work of art by this person who inputted the phrase, whose unique creativity could be applied using other tools to produce similar art, but something generated almost wholly by the machine on account of an external input, and something unique to that machine specifically.
- pishpash 4y ago
  What is "that specific machine"? There can be an arbitrary number of generative AI's like that trained on similar data that would behave similarly. Or it could be a different one that the author would need different prompts for to get the result. What difference does it make? Conversely, without a prompt and subsequent guiding, the machine can only generate a random image or an average image or some noise. What creativity is in that? None, because that's an actual mechanical reproduction of the input dataset. The quantum of creativity lies with the author who supplied the remaining information to narrow "all possible images distributed statistically" to "one image".

JohnFen 4y ago

All of your examples are clearly copyrightable, because in all of them, you were the one who created the works (and I assume that you're a human). There's no legal ambiguity in any of your examples. The use of AI or any other sorts of tool to modify or improve your work doesn't alter that. This is clearly shown in legal precedents.

cypress66 4y ago
So the control net example (which is image to image) is copyrightable, but the OP case (text to image) is not? Then the line to draw is that when there's a change in modality, it's not copyrightable? Most people are probably going to end up using something like controlnet anyway because of the extra control it gives you.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  No, I don't think that it has to do with modality. Again, IANAL, but as I understand it, the legal line is how much of the art was created by a human. There is certainly a gray area here that will have to be hashed out, but I don't think it's as large as you think it is. The rulings are going to be about whether or not the creative work is the work of a human. I imagine that a case can be made that describing a work to a machine and having the machine engage in the creativity part means the creative work is done by the machine, not the human. But if the human did the creative work and the machine modified it, then the work is done by the human. Of course, we're all speculating here. I have no idea how the courts will rule on these things. I could even see the necessity of Congress making some clarifying laws. Also, understand that I am not expressing what I personally think should be the case. I'm just trying to work out what is, or is likely, to be the case.

avereveard 4y ago

This is all covered by the law. Collections and arrangements of non copyrightable data are copyrightable. People refuse to just apply the copyright principles as they are trying to claim according to their convenience either that work which is not result of human creativity is copyrightable (it isn't) and that work that isn't result of human creativity can be used to wash copyrighted content (you can't because copyright also cover subjects and stories independently from the artwork) Just because the transform is called ai doesn't change a thing. If you check the principles, they mention storage, transmission, transformation, and effort, not this or that technology. Tech is at most referenced as example.

b33j0r 4y ago
I was confused for far too long about what tensors are, because I got weird answers from authority figures and I guess it never clicked. Lol. That was silly. In this regime, [x y z w] is an ordinary matrix, while [x y z is_feline_65] is a tensor. I get why it’s more than that, but come on… this is all matrix addition and multiplication. Even transformers and diffusion models. So what is the difference between a filter kernel or soft brush in Photoshop, or an inference model matrix? Easy. People don’t use photoshop with multilayer 80B parameter spraypaint brushes. And justifiably have no idea what most of these words mean.

DiscourseFan 4y ago

I don't think someone inputting a phrase and getting an entire artwork which was the product of many hours of labor which was not their own, not even including the labor of the artists whose work the program was trained on, means that their input was involved much at all. You could say that by the same logic my comment, being a string inputted on a computer built by labor not my own, posted to a website built by others, means that it is not my comment being written but simply text being posted to this website using the technology I am employing. But that wouldn't cohere, simply because I could write this anywhere else, and in fact I could write it with a pencil or even carve it into a wall using a stone I found; the tool, in that case, is separate from the work itself and its reproducibility. The AI art which was generated for the book could NOT have been reproduced anywhere else with other tools in the even remotely the same way, it is only on account of being inputted into that specific machine which it was generated thusly, therefore it is not an actual work of art by this person who inputted the phrase, whose unique creativity could be applied using other tools to produce similar art, but something generated almost wholly by the machine on account of an external input, and something unique to that machine specifically.

pishpash 4y ago
What is "that specific machine"? There can be an arbitrary number of generative AI's like that trained on similar data that would behave similarly. Or it could be a different one that the author would need different prompts for to get the result. What difference does it make? Conversely, without a prompt and subsequent guiding, the machine can only generate a random image or an average image or some noise. What creativity is in that? None, because that's an actual mechanical reproduction of the input dataset. The quantum of creativity lies with the author who supplied the remaining information to narrow "all possible images distributed statistically" to "one image".