5 ms·

The US Copyright Office says you can't copyright Midjourney AI-generated images

37 points by webmaven 4y ago

pcthrowaway 4y ago
This stood out to me the most: > AI-assisted art is going to need to be treated like photography. It is just a matter of time Is crafting a prompt, selecting a generation, potentially interacting with parts of it, regenerating, perhaps supplying some of your own artwork as a seed for inpainting, copying part of the inpainted region and mixing with the previously generated artwork, any less creative than shooting a photograph? Even if none of the images you supplied are in the final output, you guided the process.
- desro 4y ago
  There's a highly nontrivial amount of creative work that goes into getting high quality stuff out of the diffusion models. One-step txt2img is a parlor trick. Those of us who are seriously using these tools are often making many round trips to/from GIMP and img2img, txt2img, doing compositing, painting and masking. It's definitely a process that stretches creative muscle. Check out some of InvokeAI's canvas overdrive videos [0] for a bit more of a sense of how an artist works with that implementation. [0] https://youtube.com/@invokeai https://youtube.com/@invokeai
  - zaptrem 4y ago
    Wasn’t the comic in question the result of similar effort and even potentially fine tuning for the aesthetic consistency?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Seems very reasonable. You can copyright the human produced work, but cannot copyright the output of mathematical algorithms.
- unusualmonkey 4y ago
  So you think CGI should not be copyrightable?
  - freejazz 4y ago
    You can copyright CGI, the office distinguishes one from the other, just like you can copyright a painting you made in photoshop.
    - unusualmonkey 4y ago
      Which is my point.
      - freejazz 4y ago
        How so?
        unusualmonkey 4y ago
        The comment I responded to stated: > but cannot copyright the output of mathematical algorithms. I was pointing out that CGI can be described that way - so taking the argument to its logical conclusion we would have to remove copyright from cgi.
        freejazz 4y ago
        That's just glossing over the issue - the difference is in how the tools are used, not just that they employ mathematical algorithms. I guess that's your point? Not sure why people post this way, it's impossible for me to tell what point you are making, I have to make all sorts of assumptions about what you are writing and why. So, my bad.
- desro 4y ago
  How does that square with the algorithms used to render the 3D models humans construct and rig? I think the "rendering" analogy is quite apt once you're past the point of initial generation and off to painting, editing, and roundtripping. And it might not even need to be taken that far... could an argument be made that this technology is simply a rendering engine for text?
causi 4y ago
are not the product of human authorship This gets into dangerous territory. What level of AI tooling is required for an image to no longer be copyrightable? Will this prevent software like Photoshop from including powerful AI-assisted tools? For example, what if Photoshop had a text box where you could just type in the edits you want, like "remove the man with the hat from the background" or "make all the kids smile at the camera" or "change the background and lighting to evening in Venice"? I can see painters in the 1800s throwing fits over how "exposing a photographic plate to light is not art!"
- freejazz 4y ago
  One thing I notice in approaching this issue as an attorney vs the way I see others discuss it is that it's not sufficient to just characterize things a certain way on a facial level. It's not convincing to a court or the copyright office to just call it "AI tooling", an argument needs to made w/r/t the facts of the situation, how these models' outputs differ from existing machine-driven processes (like various photoshop tools). It's in this nuance that the answer lies, and it's not in surface-level equivocation or appeals to "creativity". Like, the issue for the copyright office isn't that artists are whining that it's not "art", it's that copyright law only protects human expressions.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  If I ask Bob to paint me a picture with the prompt 'Paint a banana wearing a green hat' do I own the copyright for Bob's painting because I provided the prompt?
  - causi 4y ago
    If Bob is your employed artist, you do. If you set your own picture down in front of Bob and asked him to paint a banana wearing a green hat on top of it, which of you owns the copyright? If you tell photoshop to apply a blur filter over a picture, was the resulting image "created by non-human hands"?
  - freejazz 4y ago
    It's called work for hire doctrine... it's not even remotely close to this issue. This is exactly how tons of artists do their work. Go watch "The Price of Everything" and see Koons' studio working exactly this way. You have to actually make an argument based in fact, not superficial characterizations that are belied by the facts and common sense.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
What I find curious is that the creator of Zarya of the Dawn has repeatedly demonstrated that her work is of human origin and not the simple result of a one-click img2text program. The creator invested a lot of time not only in generating images, but also in blending them using Photoshop and making substantial edits to ensure that the characters appear correctly while fixing errors typical of the AI. Things like manually correcting blurred faces and hands in Photoshop using her digital art skillset. She personally wrote the text and performed the task of a letterer by placing the bubbles. She also took care of the assembly of the book, including designing the layout and making sure everything was printed correctly. All of these details were clearly explained and underlined by her lawyer in his letter to the copyright office: https://copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf https://copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf I would invite everyone to go through the letter before commenting as it adds a lot of necessary context. Personally, I can't help but thing this is at least partially the result of the "$187,500 for one year of full-time lobbyist in D.C" against AI art GoFundMe[1] and I can't help but find it particular that people can so easily and transparently put money together to push a certain agenda. [1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-technologies https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-techno...
- salawat 4y ago
  >Personally, I can't help but thing this is at least partially the result of the "$187,500 for one year of full-time lobbyist in D.C" against AI art GoFundMe[1] and I can't help but find it particular that people can so easily and transparently put money together to push a certain agenda. So it's fine when $BIG_CORPS run by largely unaccountable CEOs/management teams/Boards do it, but not when the little guy grassroots? Is that what I'm reading? For that matter, it's fine when the above use things like dark money pools and PACs to influence government while obscuring where the funds came from, but you're complaining that the little guy, transparently donating to a cause, is something that shouldn't be kosher? Look, I hate lobbyists as much as the next person, but if it's the way things work, then it's the way things work, and I won't begrudge the people for making their voice heard, even if some nuance ends up getting lost in the shuffle. I'm just to make sure I understand here.
Buttons840 4y ago
If I can mechanically perform a musical piece written hundreds of years ago and get a copyright on that, why isn't touching up the output of a neutral network also protected?
- Riverheart 4y ago
  Edited If the neural network gets good enough that no significant work is required for the final product then I imagine you could change some pixels in the output and call it a "touch up". We're not there yet of course but ultimately how much effort does a touch up require to warrant a copyright? Is the touch up creative? Fixing blurry faces/hands seems like replacing a rusty pipe with a new one. For the musical piece, copyright probably expired or has no one to defend it today. At least with performance art, the effort of your derived work is easier to gauge. Your musical abilities and voice are unique to you and what, I think, is being copyrighted. You don't normally claim total ownership of the covered piece. Sam Smith got sued a couple times for his work (notes, not lyrics) being too close to others in what he claimed were original pieces.
- freejazz 4y ago
  Because what you get there is only a copyright in the sound recording, not the underlying musical work. So you can only control uses of your audio recording, you can't stop people from using the same work which is as you noted, in the public domain. By your own logic, the only copyright the edits would entitle one to would be what the edits consisted of and none of the underlying work. This is obviously meaningless in the context of images.
dmoy 4y ago
From a different direction: images created by a monkey cannot be copyrighted. If you raise a monkey, teach it everything, and then give it a camera, nothing it takes can be copyrighted. At least based on current US IP law. So AI can't have it both ways - either it's doing something rote computationally like CGI in which case it could be copyrighted, or it's doing something novel on its own, in which case it can't. (Or, my personal preference, probably the law should be changed) But as it stands this isn't a super surprising result from the IP law side of things. Unfortunate reality yes, but not surprising.
sigmar 4y ago
>The Office also dismisses the claim that her edits to some of the images make them eligible for copyright, judging the changes were either “too minor and imperceptible to supply the necessary creativity for copyright protection” or that it couldn’t determine her contributions based on the information submitted. So they have no idea how much the images were edited... but if they were edited, they conclude it wasn't edited enough?
- freejazz 4y ago
  There is no contradiction there, either she didn't edit the images enough, or that they couldn't determine that any edits were made, as according to her, at all. There are multiple images at issue.

37 points by webmaven 4y ago

This stood out to me the most: > AI-assisted art is going to need to be treated like photography. It is just a matter of time Is crafting a prompt, selecting a generation, potentially interacting with parts of it, regenerating, perhaps supplying some of your own artwork as a seed for inpainting, copying part of the inpainted region and mixing with the previously generated artwork, any less creative than shooting a photograph? Even if none of the images you supplied are in the final output, you guided the process.

desro 4y ago
There's a highly nontrivial amount of creative work that goes into getting high quality stuff out of the diffusion models. One-step txt2img is a parlor trick. Those of us who are seriously using these tools are often making many round trips to/from GIMP and img2img, txt2img, doing compositing, painting and masking. It's definitely a process that stretches creative muscle. Check out some of InvokeAI's canvas overdrive videos [0] for a bit more of a sense of how an artist works with that implementation. [0] https://youtube.com/@invokeai https://youtube.com/@invokeai
- zaptrem 4y ago
  Wasn’t the comic in question the result of similar effort and even potentially fine tuning for the aesthetic consistency?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Seems very reasonable. You can copyright the human produced work, but cannot copyright the output of mathematical algorithms.

unusualmonkey 4y ago
So you think CGI should not be copyrightable?
- freejazz 4y ago
  You can copyright CGI, the office distinguishes one from the other, just like you can copyright a painting you made in photoshop.
  - unusualmonkey 4y ago
    Which is my point.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      How so?
      - unusualmonkey 4y ago
        The comment I responded to stated: > but cannot copyright the output of mathematical algorithms. I was pointing out that CGI can be described that way - so taking the argument to its logical conclusion we would have to remove copyright from cgi.
        freejazz 4y ago
        That's just glossing over the issue - the difference is in how the tools are used, not just that they employ mathematical algorithms. I guess that's your point? Not sure why people post this way, it's impossible for me to tell what point you are making, I have to make all sorts of assumptions about what you are writing and why. So, my bad.
desro 4y ago
How does that square with the algorithms used to render the 3D models humans construct and rig? I think the "rendering" analogy is quite apt once you're past the point of initial generation and off to painting, editing, and roundtripping. And it might not even need to be taken that far... could an argument be made that this technology is simply a rendering engine for text?

causi 4y ago

are not the product of human authorship This gets into dangerous territory. What level of AI tooling is required for an image to no longer be copyrightable? Will this prevent software like Photoshop from including powerful AI-assisted tools? For example, what if Photoshop had a text box where you could just type in the edits you want, like "remove the man with the hat from the background" or "make all the kids smile at the camera" or "change the background and lighting to evening in Venice"? I can see painters in the 1800s throwing fits over how "exposing a photographic plate to light is not art!"

freejazz 4y ago
One thing I notice in approaching this issue as an attorney vs the way I see others discuss it is that it's not sufficient to just characterize things a certain way on a facial level. It's not convincing to a court or the copyright office to just call it "AI tooling", an argument needs to made w/r/t the facts of the situation, how these models' outputs differ from existing machine-driven processes (like various photoshop tools). It's in this nuance that the answer lies, and it's not in surface-level equivocation or appeals to "creativity". Like, the issue for the copyright office isn't that artists are whining that it's not "art", it's that copyright law only protects human expressions.
ROTMetro 4y ago
If I ask Bob to paint me a picture with the prompt 'Paint a banana wearing a green hat' do I own the copyright for Bob's painting because I provided the prompt?
- causi 4y ago
  If Bob is your employed artist, you do. If you set your own picture down in front of Bob and asked him to paint a banana wearing a green hat on top of it, which of you owns the copyright? If you tell photoshop to apply a blur filter over a picture, was the resulting image "created by non-human hands"?
- freejazz 4y ago
  It's called work for hire doctrine... it's not even remotely close to this issue. This is exactly how tons of artists do their work. Go watch "The Price of Everything" and see Koons' studio working exactly this way. You have to actually make an argument based in fact, not superficial characterizations that are belied by the facts and common sense.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Karawebnetwork 4y ago

What I find curious is that the creator of Zarya of the Dawn has repeatedly demonstrated that her work is of human origin and not the simple result of a one-click img2text program. The creator invested a lot of time not only in generating images, but also in blending them using Photoshop and making substantial edits to ensure that the characters appear correctly while fixing errors typical of the AI. Things like manually correcting blurred faces and hands in Photoshop using her digital art skillset. She personally wrote the text and performed the task of a letterer by placing the bubbles. She also took care of the assembly of the book, including designing the layout and making sure everything was printed correctly. All of these details were clearly explained and underlined by her lawyer in his letter to the copyright office: https://copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf https://copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf I would invite everyone to go through the letter before commenting as it adds a lot of necessary context. Personally, I can't help but thing this is at least partially the result of the "$187,500 for one year of full-time lobbyist in D.C" against AI art GoFundMe[1] and I can't help but find it particular that people can so easily and transparently put money together to push a certain agenda. [1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-technologies https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-techno...

salawat 4y ago
>Personally, I can't help but thing this is at least partially the result of the "$187,500 for one year of full-time lobbyist in D.C" against AI art GoFundMe[1] and I can't help but find it particular that people can so easily and transparently put money together to push a certain agenda. So it's fine when $BIG_CORPS run by largely unaccountable CEOs/management teams/Boards do it, but not when the little guy grassroots? Is that what I'm reading? For that matter, it's fine when the above use things like dark money pools and PACs to influence government while obscuring where the funds came from, but you're complaining that the little guy, transparently donating to a cause, is something that shouldn't be kosher? Look, I hate lobbyists as much as the next person, but if it's the way things work, then it's the way things work, and I won't begrudge the people for making their voice heard, even if some nuance ends up getting lost in the shuffle. I'm just to make sure I understand here.

Buttons840 4y ago

If I can mechanically perform a musical piece written hundreds of years ago and get a copyright on that, why isn't touching up the output of a neutral network also protected?

Riverheart 4y ago
Edited If the neural network gets good enough that no significant work is required for the final product then I imagine you could change some pixels in the output and call it a "touch up". We're not there yet of course but ultimately how much effort does a touch up require to warrant a copyright? Is the touch up creative? Fixing blurry faces/hands seems like replacing a rusty pipe with a new one. For the musical piece, copyright probably expired or has no one to defend it today. At least with performance art, the effort of your derived work is easier to gauge. Your musical abilities and voice are unique to you and what, I think, is being copyrighted. You don't normally claim total ownership of the covered piece. Sam Smith got sued a couple times for his work (notes, not lyrics) being too close to others in what he claimed were original pieces.
freejazz 4y ago
Because what you get there is only a copyright in the sound recording, not the underlying musical work. So you can only control uses of your audio recording, you can't stop people from using the same work which is as you noted, in the public domain. By your own logic, the only copyright the edits would entitle one to would be what the edits consisted of and none of the underlying work. This is obviously meaningless in the context of images.

dmoy 4y ago

From a different direction: images created by a monkey cannot be copyrighted. If you raise a monkey, teach it everything, and then give it a camera, nothing it takes can be copyrighted. At least based on current US IP law. So AI can't have it both ways - either it's doing something rote computationally like CGI in which case it could be copyrighted, or it's doing something novel on its own, in which case it can't. (Or, my personal preference, probably the law should be changed) But as it stands this isn't a super surprising result from the IP law side of things. Unfortunate reality yes, but not surprising.

sigmar 4y ago

>The Office also dismisses the claim that her edits to some of the images make them eligible for copyright, judging the changes were either “too minor and imperceptible to supply the necessary creativity for copyright protection” or that it couldn’t determine her contributions based on the information submitted. So they have no idea how much the images were edited... but if they were edited, they conclude it wasn't edited enough?

freejazz 4y ago
There is no contradiction there, either she didn't edit the images enough, or that they couldn't determine that any edits were made, as according to her, at all. There are multiple images at issue.