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Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

411 points by nagonago 4y ago

rvz 4y ago
The human authorship requirement still stands: > If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. [0] Even with that, applicants now must disclose the inclusion of AI generated content and highlight which parts are human authored vs AI generated: > Consistent with the Office's policies described above, applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author's contributions to the work. [1] [0] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-44 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-44 [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-59 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-59
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know? It's already not completely obvious with the current state of the art in at least some domains. What happens when the tech moves from "Not completely obvious" to "Impossible to tell?"
  - pylua 4y ago
    Right… I hope this isn’t a situation where everyone has to be dishonest in order to compete at the highest level. Major League Baseball and cycling from the early 00s come to mind. I wonder if having correct rules that are unenforceable do more harm than good.
  - ars 4y ago
    Fraud has existed for a long time. For the most part society is designed with the assumption that most people will tell the truth. You could create a different kind of society, where the default assumption is everyone lies, but I suspect no one would be able to live under those conditions. Note this is not the same as taking steps to check for lying, it's just a question of what's the default assumption.
  - parhamn 4y ago
    “Not going to know” can apply to most laws. Most people especially enterprises abide.
  - favorited 4y ago
    > If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know? USCO doesn't generally proactively investigate (it would take too long), but a copyright claim could be invalidated if it is proven that the applicant didn't disclose required information. As of today, the USCO has explicitly say that AI-assistance needs to be disclosed.
  - mouse_ 4y ago
    The correct response would be the end of digital intellectual property. We would have a creative explosion akin to the age of free sampling in music, the early internet or the modern Chinese digital landscape. The actual response will be more layers of bureaucracy, which will have the chilling effect of demoralizing small creators and further empowering IP trolls and large corporations with lots of money for this sort of thing.
  - SrslyJosh 4y ago
    Watermarking seems like a possible solution: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/17/business/ai-text-detection.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/17/business/ai-t... I think that OpenAI et al are incentivized to pursue watermarking. If someone uses GPT to write a best-selling novel or a blockbuster movie script, OpenAI would want a piece of the action. Similarly, publishers/distributors of creative works are incentivized to use any available detection tools because they don't want to be surprised when someone comes along and says, "Actually, you owe us a boatload of cash for that work."
  - sacnoradhq 4y ago
    It's stupid to create a rule that's both unenforceable and limits protecting unique creations generated by AI but initiated by humans. Results are all that matter, not process.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know? IF a dispute arises, it will be settled in a court of law, with the trier of fact (jury or judge, as may be) applying the civil preponderance of the evidence standard. (Tools for detecting use of generative AI models are being developed, as are systems of including watermarks that are unnoticeable by casual human inspection in the output of such systems.)
  - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
    I've seen Grammarly commercials. What if I write some paragraphs, and then drag a big Grammarly slider across it, and it's no longer my words, but my ideas are still there, just buffed and touched up professionally? What's "AI generation" anyway? I wrote a limerick for a friend last week. Well, I had the idea for it and it was jangling inside my head, but I didn't feel like fleshing it out, so I had the AI write it. I was accused of "cheating". But I'm capable of writing this limerick; I just wanted to see if a computer could put a ribbon on it. And it worked fine. I claim authorship (and copyright) nonetheless.
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. > For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. > When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. > As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application. This is the crux of the argument for me.
- badkitty99 4y ago
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- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  Based on this reasoning, does that mean that you could not claim copyright over a picture captured by a motion sensor camera. Basically you instructed it to capture when it determined movement and the camera determined how those instructions are implemented in its output.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    Has anyone tried to claim copyright over that before? I wouldn't be surprised if it was rejected.
hayksaakian 4y ago
Seems like a win for artists who oppose generative AI. Now those who use AI to claim a copyright are "put on notice" to clearly disclaim the AI generated portions of their content. It will be interesting to see if Prompts themselves could be copyrighted, since presumably humans came up with the prompts.
- Laforet 4y ago
  Recipes are usually not copyrightable as they are just a list of ingredients and instructions with no room for expression. I wonder if the same argument could be applied to prompts.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    They state this in the document as well: > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable. It sounds like it would depend on the complexity of your prompt.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- raincole 4y ago
  Companies will just outsource to small studios/individual artists that don't admit they use AI.
favorited 4y ago
It's great that USCO is ending speculation with an official stance. Their rationale seems perfectly reasonable, and in step with the court rulings that they cited.
YPPH 4y ago
>For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. [...] But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. Neat example and convincing reasoning.
kube-system 4y ago
This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions on the matter. But it doesn’t answer any tough questions either, like: if an AI model outputs something very close to a training input, does the result infringe on the copyrights of the input work?
- kirubakaran 4y ago
  And how close is too close?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    You can get ChatGPT to output copyright material very easily
    - shagie 4y ago
      You can get ChatGPT to output copyright material very easily. You can also copy and paste from an existing copyrighted work. In either case, it is you, the human - with agency to do so - who should be liable for the content that you publish.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        That’s the concern. You can easily identify when you are copying others work when done directly. If you use a black box that sometimes gives you infringing output, how do you use it with confidence?
        shagie 4y ago
        You can use it, just don't use it for things that you publish without doing sufficient diligence to see if that work would be infringing on something else. I intend to make an e-ink panel that displays woodcut style images generated by stable diffusion (get a list of a 30 or so different descriptions of scenes, and have them slowly get generated over the day and display a different one each hour). So, here's the question - are any of those woodcut images derivative of some other work? Don't know - and it likely doesn't matter as it would be something hanging on a wall in a room. On the other hand, if I was to collect them and publish them as a book, then I, as the human who is publishing them, would need to do sufficient diligence to see if any of them are derivative works. They might be - but I am the one publishing it then - not Stable Diffusion. Likewise, if I was creating a collection of epic rap battles between historical figures as generated by GPT... then I should search to make sure that none of the phrases that are used in there are lifted directly from some other source. Again, it is me as the human with agency that is publishing it, not GPT. If you were to go to Fiverr and request 100 pictures of woodcuttings or people to write epic rap battles between Julius Caesar and Ghengis Khan - would it matter if it was a human lifted the text or GPT? It is still upon you, the person publishing it to do the check.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material." As an artist and a musician I use various degrees of randomness in my work - from feedback and "noise" in a composition to abstract splatters in my paintings. Plenty of art, writing, and music is the result of partially or completely random techniques, over which the artist has little to no control, and AI generated works are just another tool in the hands of a creator. The copyright office understands neither art nor creativity.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  I tend to agree, and I find myself doubtful that this will remain the status quo for very long. As soon as these things reach the point where they could realistically be used for something like a Disney movie, all of a sudden there will be a lot of money behind finding ways to make the output copyrightable. It seems to me that there's a spectrum here. If, for example, I create an animated music video for a song (that I own) by using Stable Diffusion to generate the imagery, generate all the prompts that are fed to the model, cut and edit that imagery together via my own creative vision... Where does the line between my authorship and the model's end? I'm not allowed to claim any ownership of that output? Then again... If someone enters a similar prompt, and gets similar output, should I have some claim to that? It's a pretty tricky philosophical issue, honestly. The more I think about it, I think I'm ok with this as the general framework, at least for now, as, if nothing else, it may prevent powerful interests like Disney from gobbling up ownership of the whole generative AI space in its infancy
  - mlindner 4y ago
    I think that's covered pretty clearly in this document? If you add creative vision on top of the generated output, then that creative vision is copyrightable.
user3939382 4y ago
This works for now. However, I can imagine a spectrum of input parameter specificity that could eventually blur the line this draws and undermine this strategy. On one side you have these general prompts. On the other side you have, say, autotune, where the final output is still created by a machine but the human's input (voice in this case) greatly constrains the output.
famouswaffles 4y ago
Not possible to reliably tell apart. The Image generation scene is one thing. For a lot of output, there are still some tells. Text generation though...well good luck ever finding that out.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  It sounds like the honor system, which is not unprecedented. A lot of governmental systems rely on people to tell the truth when interacting with the government, and then they have to police cases of suspected fraud after the fact. If you were dragged into a copyright suit by someone, you could probably try to prove that the work was AI generated as a defense? Not sure how effective it would be.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > If you were dragged into a copyright suit by someone, you could probably try to prove that the work was AI generated as a defense? Not sure how effective it would be. It would probably be similar to when wordperfect was sued for including famous painting as clipart. WordPerfect won using basically this defense (that no human creativity went into making the clip art) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Cor....
- tap-snap-or-nap 4y ago
  Government just found a way to expand itself and give out wages for a job that they cannot really do.
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  Who has the burden of proof? Can I just claim everything and anything as “made by AI” and start (ab)using it and then it is up to the original author to proof that it wasn’t actually made by an AI?
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    You do, in a civil claim its up to you to prove that your rights were actually violated.
tylergetsay 4y ago
If a TV show generates a script using AI in which animated characters read using AI voices... would I be allowed to then distribute/remix the portion of that episode? What does the distinction requirement actually do besides serve as a notice, is there some kind of diminished rights?
- kevingadd 4y ago
  In this case they're saying they wouldn't register it, you could still try to take someone to court for copyright infringement. But you'd be rolling the dice since "the copyright office says it's unfit for registration" is probably a pretty convincing defense to the average judge. It wouldn't be the first time there was an argument over whether a work was copyrightable or who had the rights, though - for example the Monkey Selfie case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
tobiasSoftware 4y ago
How does this affect programming? Does this mean if a program was built using GitHub Copilot, that in order to have copyright on software, you have to explain that to the copyright office?
- cush 4y ago
  Maybe similar to how software is affected today by open source, by providing attribution.
eloop 4y ago
So if movies use AI to help create characters they won't be able to claim copyright? I expect Hollywood studios will have something to say about this. With AI already being deeply integrated into DCC tools this stance isn't going to last long. And how will it be enforced if the artists don't show how they made the art?
- kevingadd 4y ago
  There's still a ton of human expression in the average movie, so they're pretty safe. If they edged towards being fully AI though I could see your concern coming true.
- kjksf 4y ago
  Applying color balancing in photoshop doesn't make the original image taken by a photographer the product of a machine. Laws are not black and white. The whole point of lawsuits and lengthy opinions by judges is to have a nuanced interpretation of the law. If the whole movie would be generated by a computer from a single sentence then yes, it wouldn't be copyrightable. But as long as producing movie involves human screen writers, human directors, human performers, human camera operators etc. they are obviously creative works of those humans and therefore copyrightable.
recuter 4y ago
> For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. But I can certainly specify those things in the prompt. In fact I can write some of the poem and have it riff on the rest for me. And anyway how would you know whether or not and how much I was assisted by the AI. Strawberry Fields forever. -- Written by llama 13b, edited by a human(?) -- Written by a human, edited by llama 13b(?) -- Written by llama 13b, edited by a human(?)
- bawolff 4y ago
  > And anyway how would you know whether or not and how much I was assisted by the AI. Because in a lawsuit you would have to reveal that info. You can't just sue someone and not answer questions pertinent to your claim.
  - recuter 4y ago
    - Your honor my wholly original work of Halvin and Cobbs, a cartoon of a little boy and his pet tiger is entirely original to me. - Did you use an AI to produce it? - See, the problem with fine art is that it's supposed to express original truths. But who likes originality and truth?! Nobody! Lifes hard enough without it! Only an idiot would pay for it! Popular art knows the customer is always right! People want more of what they already know they like, so popular art gives it to 'em! - Sir, did you use an AI to plagiarize your way to an unofficial sequel of a beloved comic strip? Answer the question! - Yesn't.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      You are then held in contempt for not giving a straight answer. Its not like no one has ever thought of the idea of telling half-truths or digressions in court as a loop-hole before. Pretty sure judges take a very dim view of that.
    - 4y ago
bnj 4y ago
It's all well and good that the copyright office deems that protection only applies to the parts of the work where a human was in control of the traditional elements of authorship, and that there is a duty to disclose the use of generative technologies ... but now one can plausibly assert that they are the sole author of a work which was produced by one of these models, and be 100% confident that no one can dispute that.
- layer8 4y ago
  For a single work, yes. If they turn it into a high-volume business, it might become more difficult to maintain the plausibility in the long run, and they could be asked to put their claimed artistry to test in a controlled environment.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Being the copyright owner and being the author of something are very different things.
- kjksf 4y ago
  And it doesn't matter because anyone can use the AI to produce thousands of similar images with little effort. All those tools have randomization so they don't produce the exact same image for the exact same prompt. The value of an image produced by AI is very low because the cost to produce it is very low. No point in committing federal fraud by falsely claim you made them. > no one can dispute that Of course I can dispute that. I can even prove you didn't make the AI image by asking you to produce a work of similar quality under supervision. If all you can do is type AI prompts into a computer, good luck producing an actual painting.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    The courts are not going to be able to stop the flood of AI generated images. Even now, when it takes a lot more human effort to generate an image because It has to be done by a human, the courts are ineffective at stopping the rampant and blatant copyright infringement that happens daily on a truly massive scale on the internet. Now that the floodgates of creativity have been opened by AI, the amount of content being generated is going to exponentially increase, and all the laws and courts in the world are not going to be able to even slow it.
brotchie 4y ago
I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.
- danuker 4y ago
  I would assume the prompt itself is copyrightable. As far as inpainting or other manual modifications, I'm uncertain.
- DiscourseFan 4y ago
  You might be able to copy-write the method by which you generated something, but not the thing generated itself. Although even the former act might be too far, it's like saying that you fooled around with the parameters on a computer for 8 hours before it started working, and now you want to copy-write the operation of the computer: the computer is doing what it was intended to do, you just needed time to figure out how to use it. You could copy-write a training manual for how to ride a bike, but not bike riding itself.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Nitpick: Everyone does this, but it's "copyright" as in "the right to copy", rather than "copywrite"/"copy-write".
  - bawolff 4y ago
    You cannot copyright the method of doing anything. You might be able to patent it, but that is a different thing. Copyright applies to the end result. Patents apply to methods and mechanisms.
    - DiscourseFan 4y ago
      No I understand, by "the method" I meant a written work about how the operation is performed--apologies if that was too vague in my OP--not the literal method itself, as in the example of copy-writing a manual for riding a bike.
natch 4y ago
Reading this, it’s clear a tool like InvokeAI (built on Stable Diffusion but with potentially a lot of human input in a mouse-driven GUI) could certainly qualify for human authorship under their principles.
logicallee 4y ago
On a practical level, in order to protect authors and inventors (i.e. give them a reason to keep doing their work), this makes it even more vital to closely lock down AI interactions and preferably bring models offline in the sense of running locally on hardware without network component and where the bits are not sent anywhere except to the user. That way the output of the interaction can still be covered by trade secrecy if not published, since it will not be covered by copyright law if published or leaked by employees at the hosting company who have access to the output of the interaction. To give a specific example, if as a paying user you craft a prompt to give you a competitive advantage, it will not be protected by copyright if leaked. You can still run the code on your own server and others can still try to guess how you did it, but they should not have access to the interaction unless you explicitly publish it. This will continue to encourage innovation. It is not necessarily the best trade-off but it is understandable.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
If this is the logic, then corporations should lose personhood because they can't have it both ways. I don't see the rationale because ultimately there are owners of copyright, whereas the creation process should be immaterial to protection whether it was paint thrown against a wall, AI generation, or some poor human painting with hummingbird eyelashes.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > whereas the creation process should be immaterial to protection On the contrary, the US position has been for a very, very, long time that the creation process is the only thing that's material to protection. The result is not the thing that matters. Corporations can own copyright not because they're human beings, but because the copyrighted work was originally generated by a human being's creative expression. There's no contradiction or having it both ways here: this isn't a set of guidance about who can own copyright, it's a set of guidance about what can generate copyright.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
Yay, the software development industry is saved! (only partly /s) Not that I thought AI would be writing decent code for a while yet, but the fact that AI-generated code can't be copyrighted (and therefore licensed[0]) is going to create problems. It'll be interesting where they draw the line with this, though: If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and alters it, is that copyright that can be owned? Does the entire code base then become copyrightable? If a human reverse-engineers uncoyrightable AI code, does that reverse-engineered code become copyrightable? If a human downloads someone else's uncopyrightable AI-generated code, and makes some changes to it, can they then claim copyright on that code? [0] Since the whole of software licensing rests on copyright, this is going to get tricky for licenses. How do we determine if a restrictive license has been added to uncopyrightable (and therefore unlicensable) code?
- Kerrick 4y ago
  > If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and alters it, is that copyright that can be owned? Does the entire code base then become copyrightable? I am not a lawyer and I did not research anything for this, but I'm under the impression that a derivative work of something in the public domain is itself copyrightable. If something isn't copyrightable, it's in the public domain. So, if you alter it sufficiently to create a derivative work, the altered form should be copyrightable. But the original would still be public domain. I think?
  - datpiff 4y ago
    > derivative work of something in the public domain is itself copyrightable I don't think this is true in most of the world. Here's a UK referience: https://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p22_derivative_works https://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p22_derivative_work... "You cannot extend the duration of copyright in a work by creating a derivative work. If the original work is in the public domain, it will remain in the public domain; you cannot prevent anyone else using the same public domain work for their own purposes."
    - 4y ago
JCM9 4y ago
So this effectively destroys any concept of AI digital art for sale. If there’s no way to protect it then there’s really nothing to own. It would be like trying to sell someone public domain content.
- el_nahual 4y ago
  There's plenty of copies of public domain works available for purchase on Amazon. It does mean that AI digital art will fetch commodity prices, but not that it won't be sold. Sort of like hotel art.
- danuker 4y ago
  Not quite; having it exist is something that may be worth paying for, even if it's equivalent to public domain.
- lxe 4y ago
  As an AI artist who's been selling digital art, it really depends on whether you really care about "protecting" your work. I've seen my stuff stolen all over the place, NFTs minted, etc. Most sites will take the copycats down. Lack of copyright protection doesn't necessarily supersede individual marketplace policies.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    "I've seen my stuff stolen all over the place, NFTs minted, etc" The overwhelming majority of artist do not have the resources, time, or inclination to constantly chase down copycats and copyright infringers. Copyright law is just ineffective at stopping or even penalizing most of the infringement that goes on in the digital era. It's a relic of a past when making copies was hard.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  Digital art as a whole has already been made worthless by the creation of diffusion models, whether there is copyright on them really doesn't matter at that point, because pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute.
LegionMammal978 4y ago
One part I found particularly interesting about this is footnote 27: > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable. I wonder if this is meant to imply that no possible prompt can produce copyrightable output. What if the prompt already contains expressive elements that the model faithfully reproduces in its output? (For instance, in the limiting case, "Exactly repeat this poem that I wrote: ...") Or perhaps this is meant only in the strict sense, that a creative prompt does not necessarily produce copyrightable output, if the expressive elements in the output originate from the model instead of the prompt.
- layer8 4y ago
  There will be a case-by-case weighing of which artistic aspects were contributed by the human and which by the AI. What they are indeed saying here is that a prompt being copyrightable does not by itself imply that the generated output is copyrightable. I believe this also means that if someone takes your copyrighted prompt and uses it to produce some output, then that output doesn’t a priori infringe on your copyright.
prhrb 4y ago
The document is too long let me summarise it with ai
ummonk 4y ago
The U.S. Copyright Office seems to be living under a rock and completely unaware of how much creative work goes into prompt engineering, as well as selecting the subsequent image and applying variations to it until it meets the human's creative desires.
- legostormtroopr 4y ago
  If there is substantive work in the development of the prompt, then the applicant can submit the prompt for copyright. The finding seems pretty reasonable, if the machine is doing the work then the machine can claim authorship. Otherwise, we would say that the Pope was the author of the Sistine Chapel as they prompted Michelangelo to paint "a large curve display of heaven including with clouds and pictures of angels triumphant".
- mlindner 4y ago
  They state this about the prompt engineering: > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable. The prompt is fully copyrightable but the output isn't.
1attice 4y ago
This announcement has immediate, significant practical impact for creatives. The most important document a creative had, up until today, was their portfolio -- typically, a look-book of finished pieces. Now, that portfolio needs to include, for every piece, proof-of-work -- snapshots of the whatever-it-is in various states along the road to completion, in sufficient quantity to dissuade any legal claim that the work was AI-produced. At the limit, those aim to sell organic-certified free range content will want to surveil themselves during the entire creative process, and associate that recording indelibly with the created work. That's a whole lot of extra work and a whole lot of extra privacy violation, but the alternative will be to devalue one's own work: for to the extent to which it may have been produced by AI, it will be a liability to downstream consumers. For example, a film director might commission a score from a composer, but unless that score comes with timestamped, SHAsummed video of enough of the composition process to preclude invalidating the broader claim to a copyright (and thus salable work), that composition becomes a financial risk for the director. The consequences of not doing so are severe: At minimum, if the score cannot be copyrighted, then it can be borrowed, free-of-charge, by another film director, and at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film (IANAL; am I getting this right?) "Creative" just became the most surveilled job on the planet. We also may have just found the first agreeable use for blockchain -- an indelible public record of organic artistic creation, bearing SHAsums associated recorded twitch and youtube streams (along with logs of workstation network traffic) permanently with the finished work. Wouldn't it be hilarious if AI copyright law saved crypto?
- tobiasSoftware 4y ago
  "at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film" - which would also mean that anyone who used GitHub Copilot would not be able to copyright their software code.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    I hadn't thought of that -- but yes, it very well might be the case. Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI contribution. An efficient company will operate close to that line, say, targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage points.) That means that Joey, your new intern, might accidentally commit enough SLOC to make the whole codebase uncopyrightable. Even if Joey didn't do that, the possibility of Joey doing that will have a strong deterrent effect on hiring Joey, especially if he's WFH. The only mitigation would be to record everything Joey does, so that if there's ever any question, they can whip out the recordings of Joey picking his nose or whatever.
Lammy 4y ago
What I’m curious about is how much Neuralink will it take to make a person legally less-than-human in this context. If I’m hooked up to the Metabrain am I still entitled to ownership of my works?
lxe 4y ago
Good. Works containing any material should not be copyrightable.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
unsignedint 4y ago
Just curious... with such a decision in place, wouldn't more artists be inclined to make their use of generative AI less transparent? In other words, what would prevent them from ceasing to disclose that their work includes elements generated using generative AI? This could indeed increase skepticism, particularly when it comes to img2img and, if not as much, txt2img usage.
- RyanShook 4y ago
  Exactly. When someone rips off someone else's art a court can usually determine that the copyright was infringed. But when an artist uses an AI model trained on other people's works how can that be proven even in a courtroom?
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
Ok, so I won't tell anyone what tools I used to make my art. Not a big deal.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  The problem will come when somebody takes your art and starts selling it themselves. It will be down to you to prove you have a copyright.
iainctduncan 4y ago
Many commenters seem to be under the impression that "because I made something, it is copyrightable". That's not how it works. What is protected under copyright is determined by long processes of lobbying, legislation, lawsuits, and court cases. For example: a melody is copyrightable, a chord progression is not, even when the chord progression is so unique as to be the primary intellectual asset of a piece. (Look up contrafacts from the bebop era!) Another example, the rules around the copyright of a sound recording are very different from those of the intellectual property of a song. Only specific things are copyrightable. There is nothing unusual (from a legal sense) in the government and others taking a stance on which things those should be and under what circumstances. You have no a priori right to copyright something because you fucked around with a prompt for a long time. I don't see how they could go with a different stance given that all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright (IFF it is copyrightable, that is). This will fall apart it if it's possible for a company to have AI spew out eleventy-billion variation of training input and declare them all copyright. Don't forget that in the early 90's we went through an era of records being yanked off the shelf at great cost to labels when the sampling laws finally settled. (Anyone else remember the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of Us3's "Hand on the Torch"? fond memories!)
- Bjartr 4y ago
  > all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright You don't even need to declare it. Declaring it only affects things like whether infringement is "willful" or not when deciding penalties. If you create a (US) copyrightable work, you retain the copyright by default. For it to not be under copyright you have to explicitly place it in the public domain.
  - iainctduncan 4y ago
    I could be wrong, but I think I remembered reading that in music at least, you have to do something with it (like capture it on paper or recording). I seem to remember reading this came about to prevent people from being able to say something was copyright because they maintained they had written something say 10 years ago but just not gotten around to recording it - and then wanted to sue. But this is vague memories from reading about the bizarre and convoluted world of music publishing....
sheepscreek 4y ago
It’s going to be insanely hard to copyright anything produced by AI. Especially now that generative models are widely available/in use. The possibility of multiple instances of the same output being produced (as a whole, or in parts) is high. All you have to do is set the temperature low and the generative models will start producing repeatable results. All of a sudden, copyrighting GitHub Copilot supported source code is not so straightforward anymore. How does one distinguish the human authorship in a function from that generated by AI? Interesting times we live in. In a way, this may lead to less regulation/more openness. Equal opportunity for all. At least one can hope.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  I like to watch people play with Midjourney in the public Discord channels, and I can only assume that if the AI generated an image for somebody, it could generate the same image for me. (If the seed and prompt just happen to be exactly the same) People using AI generated images are not going to be able to sue for copyright infringement because they can never be sure the AI didn't just generate the same image for somebody else. (and more importantly, whose image was generated first :))
  - sheepscreek 4y ago
    Exactly. I thought about this some more. There is a way. If the training data is unique, and the copyrighter can prove that, then I would consider the end-result copyrightable. Also - what’s stopping people from lying on their applications about the origin of their work?
bilsbie 4y ago
Wasn’t there a voyager episode about this?
Waterluvian 4y ago
I would like the Copyright Office to delineate just how much effort is necessary for a work to possess “the traditional elements of authorship.” I type in MIDI instructions and play back a tune, but if I type in sentences it doesn’t count? Maybe they can measure entropy. Did you emit a sufficient amount of data to make the Music Box work, given the Copyright Office defined ratio? For every unit of data in your song, you must have emitted no less than 1/2 of a unit, which was specifically intended to manipulate the Music Box in order to shape outputs. Any less and the creation isn’t yours. What do you mean I can’t copyright this song? My air drumming against the cassette player introduced very significant data, which adjusted the playback. Just a very slight legato. It’s too similar? I assure you it is not. Convert the two to Universal Data Format and check the Hamming distance. Incredibly different pieces of data, believe you, me. This is basically the origin story for how the US Copyright Office became the galaxy’s Entropy Police. “Back in 2023 someone tried to copyright a photo of an “ottercat” surfing a DeLorean on the moon and now we’re in charge of how organized is too organized.”
- modzu 4y ago
  as you've discovered, really it just depends on your lawyer
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    It's always been all about the lawyers, juries, and judges. The laws have always been the least significant thing in the legal system.
- sgentle 4y ago
  Here you go: https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-... 308.2 Creativity "A work of authorship must possess 'some minimal degree of creativity' to sustain a copyright claim. [...] '[T]he requisite level of creativity is extremely low.' Even a 'slight amount' of creative expression will suffice. 'The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily, as they possess some creative spark, 'no matter how crude, humble or obvious it might be.'" 310.7 The Time, Effort, or Expense Required to Create the Work "When examining a work for original authorship, the U.S. Copyright Office [...] will not consider the amount of time, effort, or expense required to create the work. These issues have no bearing on whether a work possesses the minimum creative spark required by the Copyright Act and the Constitution." Note that this is not true in every country's copyright system (some do recognise effort), but it is true in the US.
Cypher 4y ago
non ai content will be drowned out by the massive wave of generated content.
theferalrobot 4y ago
Would this not apply to tons of procedural generation tech as well (used in plenty of games and tons of movies)? We give it a bunch of elements and write algorithms to do the generation... but we are ultimately not the ones putting pen to paper so to speak. I think this is the 100% the right call, some small level of human effort should be required otherwise what is to stop a few individuals from mass copywriting 10 million images and suing everyone that produces something substantially similar. Having said that, there may be odd knock on effects at play here.
erlkonig 4y ago
The big clue here, is that if we allow generated content to be copyrighted, then some asshat company will just generate All The Things (within, say, a given space) and copyright them (likewise for trademarks and patents, which could be much easier to exhaust within defined spaces). Combined with the lifetime of companies and the preposterous copyright extensions granted to them, swaths of human-generated work could be excluded from copyright, blocked by some hidden trove of copyrighted machine output. Especially bad if someone manages to copyright everything that could be generated by some AI.
alphanullmeric 4y ago
Unpopular opinion : the government shouldn’t protect your art from getting used as training data. The government shouldn’t protect your generated art from being copied. Intellectual property is not real property. Nothing is being taken from you. Force is only justified in response to force, and you don’t get the right to throw someone in jail for “stealing” something you still have.
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  Do you also agree that government should not enforce if I borrow your bike while you are not using it if I return it? If not how is that different? You still have the bike and you werent using it while I borrowed it - you just didn’t know I was borrowing it
  - gumballindie 4y ago
    Probably doesnt mind that entire countries have built their economic models around copying ip and selling copycat products.
  - yipbub 4y ago
    In universe of perfectly slippery spherical cows, I wouldn't mind. However, in this universe bikes experience wear, I wouldn't be able to spontaneously decide to use it, etc.
    - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
      You writing a shitty knock off Harry Potter novel "wears" on the brand. Just think your favorite book, movie, or music and think if you would enjoy it if there was really no way to know what was real work and what was just some copy-cat or straight up scammer selling rubbish. Now it is easy; you can not publish your Harry Potter novel due to copyright. Put it in another way: to become a author in a world where copyright is not a thing is pretty much impossible. Either you have to sell your book digitally with draconian DRM - and you will still get your book stolen or you have to own your own print shop, because if you send your book to any publisher they can just take your work and publish it as their own. And let's be real the amount your bike wears out from me riding it to the shop and back is so negligible that it won't make a difference in the life span of the bike. There are good reasons to have copyright - however I do not like how long the copyright is. I've stated it before that in my mind good copyright would be something like 10-20 years or life time of the author whatever comes later. This would allow any creative to hold the right to their world/characters/whatever until they are gone and it wouldn't discourage them from publishing in their old age since even after they have passed their families would still benefit from the works for sometime.
drcode 4y ago
Autotuning of voices uses AI- Songs using autotune are partially AI generated.
logn 4y ago
But if you asked it to generate a story in the style of Stephen King, whose works are still copyrighted, then does King have a copyright claim even though he didn't operate the AI?
ar9av 4y ago
I'm sure there will be a number of ramifications but one I know of is for those who sell specific captures of guitar amps that were created through machine learning just lost their copyright on that product. Those works could not have existed without the AI that was used to create them.
pontifier 4y ago
Art is in the eye of the beholder. We're going to be awash in so much AI generated content that the act of lifting something truly marvelous out of that background will be a creative action worthy of protection.
NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
What the government needs to do is to say that all AI-generated content is CC-SA 4.0 or GFDL and all the code is AGPL <latest version>. That oughta do it. (edit: I put "CC-BY-SA" and then I remembered there's no need to give credit to a hunk of sand and electrons!)
- anticensor 4y ago
  Or, specified more correctly, a share alike and attribution regime not based on copyright.
gumballindie 4y ago
Now the big question is how do we make “ai” companies pay for the data they use to generate their content. Stealing ip by scraping content and then reselling it is not fair use.
trippsydrippsy 4y ago
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nige123 4y ago
This is already a hot legal mess. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) should come up with Berne convention 3.0 that provides: - increased protection for human authorship - longer copyright terms for hoomans - shorter copyright terms for bots (5 years) - moral rights preventing 'globbing' by generative AIs - royalty system for original authors - derived computer-generated works pay I'd like to see a blockchain ledger-esque system where human authors can claim authorship and they receive nano-royalties every time works are derived from it. The generative AI's can 'glob' it but they will need to pay their dues. Importantly GAI's can't register their stuff in the hooman copyright chain.
- hnbad 4y ago
  I think the last thing we need is even longer copyright terms for humans.
heikegaichengji 4y ago
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heikegaichengji 4y ago
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reneberlin 4y ago
chatgpt4 summarized: This is a statement of policy by the U.S. Copyright Office to explain how it examines and registers works that contain material generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The statement is effective from March 16, 2023. The Office has experience and expertise in distinguishing between copyrightable and noncopyrightable works. The Office may require additional information from applicants who use AI to create or use copyrighted works.
- amon22 4y ago
  Thats a pretty bad summary
  - reneberlin 4y ago
    Pretty correct, but it wasn't mine (my comment) but chatGPTs. I just presented the commentt from chatGPT for fun - which might not comply with rules that i dismissed. Sorry, i wanted to publicy show the summarization-feature, but still: it was not my best idea. You can always do your own summ...
reneberlin 4y ago
Please let chatgpt4 summarize this
auggierose 4y ago
That's not going to be practical. How do you distinguish if something was created by mere computation, or by AI? Oops, AI is just mere computation. So if you forbid mere computation, I cannot use fancy numerical algorithms in shading my 3D art? Ain't gonna fly.
DeathArrow 4y ago
ChatGPT sues US Government Anti AI discrimination NGOs call for public protests.
- anticensor 4y ago
  A non-person cannot sue.
hermannj314 4y ago
In the studio, the photographer directs the lighting, the model, tweaks the shot, issues commands to modify the scene, presses a button, checks the outputs, iterates, chooses the best shot. In a virtual conversation, the promptographer directs the computer to set the tone, chooses their model, tweaks the inputs, issues commands to change the virtual parameters, presses a few buttons, checks the outputs, iterates, and takes the best output. One of these is a creative work guided by a tool and one is a act that shows no human creative authorship at all.
- bearmode 4y ago
  Creating AI artwork is simply telling the computer the result you want, and picking what you believe to be the best output. There may be something of an iterative process there, but it's really not creative. Also the photographer is not "guided by a tool". The camera doesn't guide them.
  - hermannj314 4y ago
    Can you elaborate on what makes something creative or not? On the 2nd point, the camera guides photographer. Watch anyone take a selfie, they use the camera to decide what to do with the camera. It is iterative.
    - bearmode 4y ago
      Sure. It's like having a friend who can draw. You detail to them something you're picturing in your mind, and they make it into something actually real. Who would have ownership over that art piece? Who actually did the work to make it exist? Copyright doesn't protect ideas, it protects the specific creative expression of those ideas. By creating a prompt you're creating an idea, but that isn't a copyrightable, creative action. You're just the 'ideas guy' for a robot artist. And again on the 2nd point, the camera doesn't guide the photographer. It can help them dial in their vision, but they're in full creative control at all times. It guides you no more than a hammer guides you to the nail.
bearmode 4y ago
And how will they know?
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Pointless screaming at the tide hoping it won’t come in. In 3 years there won’t be a major digital tool that isn’t pipelining through ai especially in CG and music, in 10 years the pre-AI versions of those tools won’t run on a modern computer. Unless you’re ready to say “anything made with Adobe CC can’t be copyrighted “ then this is pointless to debate.
- Entinel 4y ago
  They specifically address works that use AI but are sufficiently modified by a human
qwerty456127 4y ago
I would speculate there will be no works containing no material generated by artificial intelligence soon. At least it will become a common practice to use a GPT to improve your language, possibly also assist the creative proccess by supplying facts and suggesting creative ideas. Everybody uses spell checkers and thesauri already (some also use grammar checkers like Grammarly), also google things up - this will be increasingly extended/replaced with advanced AIs usage. It is generally considered correct for a writer to hire assisnatnst who would proofread their writings before publishing them or even assist their thought through conversation so I can see no big deal in an AI doing the same job.
jcarrano 4y ago
How come work “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine” cannot be copyrighted <<it was made “without any creative contribution from a human actor”>> but machine code as generated by a compiler can?
vanattab 4y ago
Hmm. I am not so sure about this. What about the fact that to produce a image I like with dalle our similar I need to often run many many different descriptions to get what I want and some times use the edit feature. If a generate an image and use the built in photoshop like erase feature and regerate something else to fill the space is it copywriteable. What about if photoshop has or implements (probably already exits) auto insertion of images and people. Say you just paste something onto your image and photoshop runs ai algorithm that helps blen it in. What about traditional painters that relay on randomness in thier work? Like guys who just spin a canvas get blindfold and just throw paint around?
- lukko 4y ago
  Then with DALL-E it is like you are instructing a commissioned artist (who would own the copyright). I think it's fundamentally different to using a tool in Photoshop - content aware fill uses the rest of the image to fill in space, so whoever owned the original image would own the content-aware fill section. If an AI is used to generate new features - images, people - then it is like a collage or original and copyrighted work. Artists that throw paint around made the artistic and creative decision to do that, would choose the paint, the canvas etc. and actually it is very difficult to create work that has that quality of spontaneity and randomness - they would definitely own the copyright.
jasrys 4y ago
In addition to the new registration guidelines, the USCO announced a new AI initiative and series of public hearings https://copyright.gov/ai/ https://copyright.gov/ai/

411 points by nagonago 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

The human authorship requirement still stands: > If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. [0] Even with that, applicants now must disclose the inclusion of AI generated content and highlight which parts are human authored vs AI generated: > Consistent with the Office's policies described above, applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author's contributions to the work. [1] [0] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-44 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-44 [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-59 https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-59

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know? It's already not completely obvious with the current state of the art in at least some domains. What happens when the tech moves from "Not completely obvious" to "Impossible to tell?"
- pylua 4y ago
  Right… I hope this isn’t a situation where everyone has to be dishonest in order to compete at the highest level. Major League Baseball and cycling from the early 00s come to mind. I wonder if having correct rules that are unenforceable do more harm than good.
- ars 4y ago
  Fraud has existed for a long time. For the most part society is designed with the assumption that most people will tell the truth. You could create a different kind of society, where the default assumption is everyone lies, but I suspect no one would be able to live under those conditions. Note this is not the same as taking steps to check for lying, it's just a question of what's the default assumption.
- parhamn 4y ago
  “Not going to know” can apply to most laws. Most people especially enterprises abide.
- favorited 4y ago
  > If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know? USCO doesn't generally proactively investigate (it would take too long), but a copyright claim could be invalidated if it is proven that the applicant didn't disclose required information. As of today, the USCO has explicitly say that AI-assistance needs to be disclosed.
- mouse_ 4y ago
  The correct response would be the end of digital intellectual property. We would have a creative explosion akin to the age of free sampling in music, the early internet or the modern Chinese digital landscape. The actual response will be more layers of bureaucracy, which will have the chilling effect of demoralizing small creators and further empowering IP trolls and large corporations with lots of money for this sort of thing.
- SrslyJosh 4y ago
  Watermarking seems like a possible solution: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/17/business/ai-text-detection.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/17/business/ai-t... I think that OpenAI et al are incentivized to pursue watermarking. If someone uses GPT to write a best-selling novel or a blockbuster movie script, OpenAI would want a piece of the action. Similarly, publishers/distributors of creative works are incentivized to use any available detection tools because they don't want to be surprised when someone comes along and says, "Actually, you owe us a boatload of cash for that work."
- sacnoradhq 4y ago
  It's stupid to create a rule that's both unenforceable and limits protecting unique creations generated by AI but initiated by humans. Results are all that matter, not process.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know? IF a dispute arises, it will be settled in a court of law, with the trier of fact (jury or judge, as may be) applying the civil preponderance of the evidence standard. (Tools for detecting use of generative AI models are being developed, as are systems of including watermarks that are unnoticeable by casual human inspection in the output of such systems.)
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  I've seen Grammarly commercials. What if I write some paragraphs, and then drag a big Grammarly slider across it, and it's no longer my words, but my ideas are still there, just buffed and touched up professionally? What's "AI generation" anyway? I wrote a limerick for a friend last week. Well, I had the idea for it and it was jangling inside my head, but I didn't feel like fleshing it out, so I had the AI write it. I was accused of "cheating". But I'm capable of writing this limerick; I just wanted to see if a computer could put a ribbon on it. And it worked fine. I claim authorship (and copyright) nonetheless.

EMIRELADERO 4y ago

> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. > For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. > When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. > As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application. This is the crux of the argument for me.

badkitty99 4y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Based on this reasoning, does that mean that you could not claim copyright over a picture captured by a motion sensor camera. Basically you instructed it to capture when it determined movement and the camera determined how those instructions are implemented in its output.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Has anyone tried to claim copyright over that before? I wouldn't be surprised if it was rejected.

hayksaakian 4y ago

Seems like a win for artists who oppose generative AI. Now those who use AI to claim a copyright are "put on notice" to clearly disclaim the AI generated portions of their content. It will be interesting to see if Prompts themselves could be copyrighted, since presumably humans came up with the prompts.

Laforet 4y ago
Recipes are usually not copyrightable as they are just a list of ingredients and instructions with no room for expression. I wonder if the same argument could be applied to prompts.
- mlindner 4y ago
  They state this in the document as well: > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable. It sounds like it would depend on the complexity of your prompt.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
raincole 4y ago
Companies will just outsource to small studios/individual artists that don't admit they use AI.

favorited 4y ago

It's great that USCO is ending speculation with an official stance. Their rationale seems perfectly reasonable, and in step with the court rulings that they cited.

YPPH 4y ago

kube-system 4y ago

This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions on the matter. But it doesn’t answer any tough questions either, like: if an AI model outputs something very close to a training input, does the result infringe on the copyrights of the input work?

kirubakaran 4y ago
And how close is too close?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- petesergeant 4y ago
  You can get ChatGPT to output copyright material very easily
  - shagie 4y ago
    You can get ChatGPT to output copyright material very easily. You can also copy and paste from an existing copyrighted work. In either case, it is you, the human - with agency to do so - who should be liable for the content that you publish.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      That’s the concern. You can easily identify when you are copying others work when done directly. If you use a black box that sometimes gives you infringing output, how do you use it with confidence?
      - shagie 4y ago
        You can use it, just don't use it for things that you publish without doing sufficient diligence to see if that work would be infringing on something else. I intend to make an e-ink panel that displays woodcut style images generated by stable diffusion (get a list of a 30 or so different descriptions of scenes, and have them slowly get generated over the day and display a different one each hour). So, here's the question - are any of those woodcut images derivative of some other work? Don't know - and it likely doesn't matter as it would be something hanging on a wall in a room. On the other hand, if I was to collect them and publish them as a book, then I, as the human who is publishing them, would need to do sufficient diligence to see if any of them are derivative works. They might be - but I am the one publishing it then - not Stable Diffusion. Likewise, if I was creating a collection of epic rap battles between historical figures as generated by GPT... then I should search to make sure that none of the phrases that are used in there are lifted directly from some other source. Again, it is me as the human with agency that is publishing it, not GPT. If you were to go to Fiverr and request 100 pictures of woodcuttings or people to write epic rap battles between Julius Caesar and Ghengis Khan - would it matter if it was a human lifted the text or GPT? It is still upon you, the person publishing it to do the check.

pmoriarty 4y ago

"Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material." As an artist and a musician I use various degrees of randomness in my work - from feedback and "noise" in a composition to abstract splatters in my paintings. Plenty of art, writing, and music is the result of partially or completely random techniques, over which the artist has little to no control, and AI generated works are just another tool in the hands of a creator. The copyright office understands neither art nor creativity.

agentwiggles 4y ago
I tend to agree, and I find myself doubtful that this will remain the status quo for very long. As soon as these things reach the point where they could realistically be used for something like a Disney movie, all of a sudden there will be a lot of money behind finding ways to make the output copyrightable. It seems to me that there's a spectrum here. If, for example, I create an animated music video for a song (that I own) by using Stable Diffusion to generate the imagery, generate all the prompts that are fed to the model, cut and edit that imagery together via my own creative vision... Where does the line between my authorship and the model's end? I'm not allowed to claim any ownership of that output? Then again... If someone enters a similar prompt, and gets similar output, should I have some claim to that? It's a pretty tricky philosophical issue, honestly. The more I think about it, I think I'm ok with this as the general framework, at least for now, as, if nothing else, it may prevent powerful interests like Disney from gobbling up ownership of the whole generative AI space in its infancy
- mlindner 4y ago
  I think that's covered pretty clearly in this document? If you add creative vision on top of the generated output, then that creative vision is copyrightable.

user3939382 4y ago

This works for now. However, I can imagine a spectrum of input parameter specificity that could eventually blur the line this draws and undermine this strategy. On one side you have these general prompts. On the other side you have, say, autotune, where the final output is still created by a machine but the human's input (voice in this case) greatly constrains the output.

famouswaffles 4y ago

Not possible to reliably tell apart. The Image generation scene is one thing. For a lot of output, there are still some tells. Text generation though...well good luck ever finding that out.

kevingadd 4y ago
It sounds like the honor system, which is not unprecedented. A lot of governmental systems rely on people to tell the truth when interacting with the government, and then they have to police cases of suspected fraud after the fact. If you were dragged into a copyright suit by someone, you could probably try to prove that the work was AI generated as a defense? Not sure how effective it would be.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > If you were dragged into a copyright suit by someone, you could probably try to prove that the work was AI generated as a defense? Not sure how effective it would be. It would probably be similar to when wordperfect was sued for including famous painting as clipart. WordPerfect won using basically this defense (that no human creativity went into making the clip art) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Cor....
tap-snap-or-nap 4y ago
Government just found a way to expand itself and give out wages for a job that they cannot really do.
nextlevelwizard 4y ago
Who has the burden of proof? Can I just claim everything and anything as “made by AI” and start (ab)using it and then it is up to the original author to proof that it wasn’t actually made by an AI?
- PeterisP 4y ago
  You do, in a civil claim its up to you to prove that your rights were actually violated.

tylergetsay 4y ago

If a TV show generates a script using AI in which animated characters read using AI voices... would I be allowed to then distribute/remix the portion of that episode? What does the distinction requirement actually do besides serve as a notice, is there some kind of diminished rights?

kevingadd 4y ago
In this case they're saying they wouldn't register it, you could still try to take someone to court for copyright infringement. But you'd be rolling the dice since "the copyright office says it's unfit for registration" is probably a pretty convincing defense to the average judge. It wouldn't be the first time there was an argument over whether a work was copyrightable or who had the rights, though - for example the Monkey Selfie case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

tobiasSoftware 4y ago

How does this affect programming? Does this mean if a program was built using GitHub Copilot, that in order to have copyright on software, you have to explain that to the copyright office?

cush 4y ago
Maybe similar to how software is affected today by open source, by providing attribution.

eloop 4y ago

So if movies use AI to help create characters they won't be able to claim copyright? I expect Hollywood studios will have something to say about this. With AI already being deeply integrated into DCC tools this stance isn't going to last long. And how will it be enforced if the artists don't show how they made the art?

kevingadd 4y ago
There's still a ton of human expression in the average movie, so they're pretty safe. If they edged towards being fully AI though I could see your concern coming true.
kjksf 4y ago
Applying color balancing in photoshop doesn't make the original image taken by a photographer the product of a machine. Laws are not black and white. The whole point of lawsuits and lengthy opinions by judges is to have a nuanced interpretation of the law. If the whole movie would be generated by a computer from a single sentence then yes, it wouldn't be copyrightable. But as long as producing movie involves human screen writers, human directors, human performers, human camera operators etc. they are obviously creative works of those humans and therefore copyrightable.

recuter 4y ago

> For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. But I can certainly specify those things in the prompt. In fact I can write some of the poem and have it riff on the rest for me. And anyway how would you know whether or not and how much I was assisted by the AI. Strawberry Fields forever. -- Written by llama 13b, edited by a human(?) -- Written by a human, edited by llama 13b(?) -- Written by llama 13b, edited by a human(?)

bawolff 4y ago
> And anyway how would you know whether or not and how much I was assisted by the AI. Because in a lawsuit you would have to reveal that info. You can't just sue someone and not answer questions pertinent to your claim.
- recuter 4y ago
  - Your honor my wholly original work of Halvin and Cobbs, a cartoon of a little boy and his pet tiger is entirely original to me. - Did you use an AI to produce it? - See, the problem with fine art is that it's supposed to express original truths. But who likes originality and truth?! Nobody! Lifes hard enough without it! Only an idiot would pay for it! Popular art knows the customer is always right! People want more of what they already know they like, so popular art gives it to 'em! - Sir, did you use an AI to plagiarize your way to an unofficial sequel of a beloved comic strip? Answer the question! - Yesn't.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    You are then held in contempt for not giving a straight answer. Its not like no one has ever thought of the idea of telling half-truths or digressions in court as a loop-hole before. Pretty sure judges take a very dim view of that.
  - 4y ago

bnj 4y ago

It's all well and good that the copyright office deems that protection only applies to the parts of the work where a human was in control of the traditional elements of authorship, and that there is a duty to disclose the use of generative technologies ... but now one can plausibly assert that they are the sole author of a work which was produced by one of these models, and be 100% confident that no one can dispute that.

layer8 4y ago
For a single work, yes. If they turn it into a high-volume business, it might become more difficult to maintain the plausibility in the long run, and they could be asked to put their claimed artistry to test in a controlled environment.
bawolff 4y ago
Being the copyright owner and being the author of something are very different things.
kjksf 4y ago
And it doesn't matter because anyone can use the AI to produce thousands of similar images with little effort. All those tools have randomization so they don't produce the exact same image for the exact same prompt. The value of an image produced by AI is very low because the cost to produce it is very low. No point in committing federal fraud by falsely claim you made them. > no one can dispute that Of course I can dispute that. I can even prove you didn't make the AI image by asking you to produce a work of similar quality under supervision. If all you can do is type AI prompts into a computer, good luck producing an actual painting.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  The courts are not going to be able to stop the flood of AI generated images. Even now, when it takes a lot more human effort to generate an image because It has to be done by a human, the courts are ineffective at stopping the rampant and blatant copyright infringement that happens daily on a truly massive scale on the internet. Now that the floodgates of creativity have been opened by AI, the amount of content being generated is going to exponentially increase, and all the laws and courts in the world are not going to be able to even slow it.

brotchie 4y ago

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

danuker 4y ago
I would assume the prompt itself is copyrightable. As far as inpainting or other manual modifications, I'm uncertain.
DiscourseFan 4y ago
You might be able to copy-write the method by which you generated something, but not the thing generated itself. Although even the former act might be too far, it's like saying that you fooled around with the parameters on a computer for 8 hours before it started working, and now you want to copy-write the operation of the computer: the computer is doing what it was intended to do, you just needed time to figure out how to use it. You could copy-write a training manual for how to ride a bike, but not bike riding itself.
- mlindner 4y ago
  Nitpick: Everyone does this, but it's "copyright" as in "the right to copy", rather than "copywrite"/"copy-write".
- bawolff 4y ago
  You cannot copyright the method of doing anything. You might be able to patent it, but that is a different thing. Copyright applies to the end result. Patents apply to methods and mechanisms.
  - DiscourseFan 4y ago
    No I understand, by "the method" I meant a written work about how the operation is performed--apologies if that was too vague in my OP--not the literal method itself, as in the example of copy-writing a manual for riding a bike.

natch 4y ago

Reading this, it’s clear a tool like InvokeAI (built on Stable Diffusion but with potentially a lot of human input in a mouse-driven GUI) could certainly qualify for human authorship under their principles.

logicallee 4y ago

On a practical level, in order to protect authors and inventors (i.e. give them a reason to keep doing their work), this makes it even more vital to closely lock down AI interactions and preferably bring models offline in the sense of running locally on hardware without network component and where the bits are not sent anywhere except to the user. That way the output of the interaction can still be covered by trade secrecy if not published, since it will not be covered by copyright law if published or leaked by employees at the hosting company who have access to the output of the interaction. To give a specific example, if as a paying user you craft a prompt to give you a competitive advantage, it will not be protected by copyright if leaked. You can still run the code on your own server and others can still try to guess how you did it, but they should not have access to the interaction unless you explicitly publish it. This will continue to encourage innovation. It is not necessarily the best trade-off but it is understandable.

sacnoradhq 4y ago

If this is the logic, then corporations should lose personhood because they can't have it both ways. I don't see the rationale because ultimately there are owners of copyright, whereas the creation process should be immaterial to protection whether it was paint thrown against a wall, AI generation, or some poor human painting with hummingbird eyelashes.

danShumway 4y ago
> whereas the creation process should be immaterial to protection On the contrary, the US position has been for a very, very, long time that the creation process is the only thing that's material to protection. The result is not the thing that matters. Corporations can own copyright not because they're human beings, but because the copyrighted work was originally generated by a human being's creative expression. There's no contradiction or having it both ways here: this isn't a set of guidance about who can own copyright, it's a set of guidance about what can generate copyright.

marcus_holmes 4y ago

Yay, the software development industry is saved! (only partly /s) Not that I thought AI would be writing decent code for a while yet, but the fact that AI-generated code can't be copyrighted (and therefore licensed[0]) is going to create problems. It'll be interesting where they draw the line with this, though: If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and alters it, is that copyright that can be owned? Does the entire code base then become copyrightable? If a human reverse-engineers uncoyrightable AI code, does that reverse-engineered code become copyrightable? If a human downloads someone else's uncopyrightable AI-generated code, and makes some changes to it, can they then claim copyright on that code? [0] Since the whole of software licensing rests on copyright, this is going to get tricky for licenses. How do we determine if a restrictive license has been added to uncopyrightable (and therefore unlicensable) code?

Kerrick 4y ago
> If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and alters it, is that copyright that can be owned? Does the entire code base then become copyrightable? I am not a lawyer and I did not research anything for this, but I'm under the impression that a derivative work of something in the public domain is itself copyrightable. If something isn't copyrightable, it's in the public domain. So, if you alter it sufficiently to create a derivative work, the altered form should be copyrightable. But the original would still be public domain. I think?
- datpiff 4y ago
  > derivative work of something in the public domain is itself copyrightable I don't think this is true in most of the world. Here's a UK referience: https://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p22_derivative_works https://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p22_derivative_work... "You cannot extend the duration of copyright in a work by creating a derivative work. If the original work is in the public domain, it will remain in the public domain; you cannot prevent anyone else using the same public domain work for their own purposes."
  - 4y ago

JCM9 4y ago

So this effectively destroys any concept of AI digital art for sale. If there’s no way to protect it then there’s really nothing to own. It would be like trying to sell someone public domain content.

el_nahual 4y ago
There's plenty of copies of public domain works available for purchase on Amazon. It does mean that AI digital art will fetch commodity prices, but not that it won't be sold. Sort of like hotel art.
danuker 4y ago
Not quite; having it exist is something that may be worth paying for, even if it's equivalent to public domain.
lxe 4y ago
As an AI artist who's been selling digital art, it really depends on whether you really care about "protecting" your work. I've seen my stuff stolen all over the place, NFTs minted, etc. Most sites will take the copycats down. Lack of copyright protection doesn't necessarily supersede individual marketplace policies.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "I've seen my stuff stolen all over the place, NFTs minted, etc" The overwhelming majority of artist do not have the resources, time, or inclination to constantly chase down copycats and copyright infringers. Copyright law is just ineffective at stopping or even penalizing most of the infringement that goes on in the digital era. It's a relic of a past when making copies was hard.
antibasilisk 4y ago
Digital art as a whole has already been made worthless by the creation of diffusion models, whether there is copyright on them really doesn't matter at that point, because pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute.

LegionMammal978 4y ago

One part I found particularly interesting about this is footnote 27: > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable. I wonder if this is meant to imply that no possible prompt can produce copyrightable output. What if the prompt already contains expressive elements that the model faithfully reproduces in its output? (For instance, in the limiting case, "Exactly repeat this poem that I wrote: ...") Or perhaps this is meant only in the strict sense, that a creative prompt does not necessarily produce copyrightable output, if the expressive elements in the output originate from the model instead of the prompt.

layer8 4y ago
There will be a case-by-case weighing of which artistic aspects were contributed by the human and which by the AI. What they are indeed saying here is that a prompt being copyrightable does not by itself imply that the generated output is copyrightable. I believe this also means that if someone takes your copyrighted prompt and uses it to produce some output, then that output doesn’t a priori infringe on your copyright.

prhrb 4y ago

The document is too long let me summarise it with ai

ummonk 4y ago

The U.S. Copyright Office seems to be living under a rock and completely unaware of how much creative work goes into prompt engineering, as well as selecting the subsequent image and applying variations to it until it meets the human's creative desires.

legostormtroopr 4y ago
If there is substantive work in the development of the prompt, then the applicant can submit the prompt for copyright. The finding seems pretty reasonable, if the machine is doing the work then the machine can claim authorship. Otherwise, we would say that the Pope was the author of the Sistine Chapel as they prompted Michelangelo to paint "a large curve display of heaven including with clouds and pictures of angels triumphant".
mlindner 4y ago
They state this about the prompt engineering: > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable. The prompt is fully copyrightable but the output isn't.

1attice 4y ago

This announcement has immediate, significant practical impact for creatives. The most important document a creative had, up until today, was their portfolio -- typically, a look-book of finished pieces. Now, that portfolio needs to include, for every piece, proof-of-work -- snapshots of the whatever-it-is in various states along the road to completion, in sufficient quantity to dissuade any legal claim that the work was AI-produced. At the limit, those aim to sell organic-certified free range content will want to surveil themselves during the entire creative process, and associate that recording indelibly with the created work. That's a whole lot of extra work and a whole lot of extra privacy violation, but the alternative will be to devalue one's own work: for to the extent to which it may have been produced by AI, it will be a liability to downstream consumers. For example, a film director might commission a score from a composer, but unless that score comes with timestamped, SHAsummed video of enough of the composition process to preclude invalidating the broader claim to a copyright (and thus salable work), that composition becomes a financial risk for the director. The consequences of not doing so are severe: At minimum, if the score cannot be copyrighted, then it can be borrowed, free-of-charge, by another film director, and at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film (IANAL; am I getting this right?) "Creative" just became the most surveilled job on the planet. We also may have just found the first agreeable use for blockchain -- an indelible public record of organic artistic creation, bearing SHAsums associated recorded twitch and youtube streams (along with logs of workstation network traffic) permanently with the finished work. Wouldn't it be hilarious if AI copyright law saved crypto?

tobiasSoftware 4y ago
"at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film" - which would also mean that anyone who used GitHub Copilot would not be able to copyright their software code.
- 1attice 4y ago
  I hadn't thought of that -- but yes, it very well might be the case. Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI contribution. An efficient company will operate close to that line, say, targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage points.) That means that Joey, your new intern, might accidentally commit enough SLOC to make the whole codebase uncopyrightable. Even if Joey didn't do that, the possibility of Joey doing that will have a strong deterrent effect on hiring Joey, especially if he's WFH. The only mitigation would be to record everything Joey does, so that if there's ever any question, they can whip out the recordings of Joey picking his nose or whatever.

Lammy 4y ago

What I’m curious about is how much Neuralink will it take to make a person legally less-than-human in this context. If I’m hooked up to the Metabrain am I still entitled to ownership of my works?

lxe 4y ago

Good. Works containing any material should not be copyrightable.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

unsignedint 4y ago

Just curious... with such a decision in place, wouldn't more artists be inclined to make their use of generative AI less transparent? In other words, what would prevent them from ceasing to disclose that their work includes elements generated using generative AI? This could indeed increase skepticism, particularly when it comes to img2img and, if not as much, txt2img usage.

RyanShook 4y ago
Exactly. When someone rips off someone else's art a court can usually determine that the copyright was infringed. But when an artist uses an AI model trained on other people's works how can that be proven even in a courtroom?

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

Ok, so I won't tell anyone what tools I used to make my art. Not a big deal.

jay_kyburz 4y ago
The problem will come when somebody takes your art and starts selling it themselves. It will be down to you to prove you have a copyright.

iainctduncan 4y ago

Many commenters seem to be under the impression that "because I made something, it is copyrightable". That's not how it works. What is protected under copyright is determined by long processes of lobbying, legislation, lawsuits, and court cases. For example: a melody is copyrightable, a chord progression is not, even when the chord progression is so unique as to be the primary intellectual asset of a piece. (Look up contrafacts from the bebop era!) Another example, the rules around the copyright of a sound recording are very different from those of the intellectual property of a song. Only specific things are copyrightable. There is nothing unusual (from a legal sense) in the government and others taking a stance on which things those should be and under what circumstances. You have no a priori right to copyright something because you fucked around with a prompt for a long time. I don't see how they could go with a different stance given that all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright (IFF it is copyrightable, that is). This will fall apart it if it's possible for a company to have AI spew out eleventy-billion variation of training input and declare them all copyright. Don't forget that in the early 90's we went through an era of records being yanked off the shelf at great cost to labels when the sampling laws finally settled. (Anyone else remember the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of Us3's "Hand on the Torch"? fond memories!)

Bjartr 4y ago
> all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright You don't even need to declare it. Declaring it only affects things like whether infringement is "willful" or not when deciding penalties. If you create a (US) copyrightable work, you retain the copyright by default. For it to not be under copyright you have to explicitly place it in the public domain.
- iainctduncan 4y ago
  I could be wrong, but I think I remembered reading that in music at least, you have to do something with it (like capture it on paper or recording). I seem to remember reading this came about to prevent people from being able to say something was copyright because they maintained they had written something say 10 years ago but just not gotten around to recording it - and then wanted to sue. But this is vague memories from reading about the bizarre and convoluted world of music publishing....

sheepscreek 4y ago

It’s going to be insanely hard to copyright anything produced by AI. Especially now that generative models are widely available/in use. The possibility of multiple instances of the same output being produced (as a whole, or in parts) is high. All you have to do is set the temperature low and the generative models will start producing repeatable results. All of a sudden, copyrighting GitHub Copilot supported source code is not so straightforward anymore. How does one distinguish the human authorship in a function from that generated by AI? Interesting times we live in. In a way, this may lead to less regulation/more openness. Equal opportunity for all. At least one can hope.

jay_kyburz 4y ago
I like to watch people play with Midjourney in the public Discord channels, and I can only assume that if the AI generated an image for somebody, it could generate the same image for me. (If the seed and prompt just happen to be exactly the same) People using AI generated images are not going to be able to sue for copyright infringement because they can never be sure the AI didn't just generate the same image for somebody else. (and more importantly, whose image was generated first :))
- sheepscreek 4y ago
  Exactly. I thought about this some more. There is a way. If the training data is unique, and the copyrighter can prove that, then I would consider the end-result copyrightable. Also - what’s stopping people from lying on their applications about the origin of their work?

bilsbie 4y ago

Wasn’t there a voyager episode about this?

Waterluvian 4y ago

I would like the Copyright Office to delineate just how much effort is necessary for a work to possess “the traditional elements of authorship.” I type in MIDI instructions and play back a tune, but if I type in sentences it doesn’t count? Maybe they can measure entropy. Did you emit a sufficient amount of data to make the Music Box work, given the Copyright Office defined ratio? For every unit of data in your song, you must have emitted no less than 1/2 of a unit, which was specifically intended to manipulate the Music Box in order to shape outputs. Any less and the creation isn’t yours. What do you mean I can’t copyright this song? My air drumming against the cassette player introduced very significant data, which adjusted the playback. Just a very slight legato. It’s too similar? I assure you it is not. Convert the two to Universal Data Format and check the Hamming distance. Incredibly different pieces of data, believe you, me. This is basically the origin story for how the US Copyright Office became the galaxy’s Entropy Police. “Back in 2023 someone tried to copyright a photo of an “ottercat” surfing a DeLorean on the moon and now we’re in charge of how organized is too organized.”

modzu 4y ago
as you've discovered, really it just depends on your lawyer
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  It's always been all about the lawyers, juries, and judges. The laws have always been the least significant thing in the legal system.
sgentle 4y ago
Here you go: https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-... 308.2 Creativity "A work of authorship must possess 'some minimal degree of creativity' to sustain a copyright claim. [...] '[T]he requisite level of creativity is extremely low.' Even a 'slight amount' of creative expression will suffice. 'The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily, as they possess some creative spark, 'no matter how crude, humble or obvious it might be.'" 310.7 The Time, Effort, or Expense Required to Create the Work "When examining a work for original authorship, the U.S. Copyright Office [...] will not consider the amount of time, effort, or expense required to create the work. These issues have no bearing on whether a work possesses the minimum creative spark required by the Copyright Act and the Constitution." Note that this is not true in every country's copyright system (some do recognise effort), but it is true in the US.

Cypher 4y ago

non ai content will be drowned out by the massive wave of generated content.

theferalrobot 4y ago

Would this not apply to tons of procedural generation tech as well (used in plenty of games and tons of movies)? We give it a bunch of elements and write algorithms to do the generation... but we are ultimately not the ones putting pen to paper so to speak. I think this is the 100% the right call, some small level of human effort should be required otherwise what is to stop a few individuals from mass copywriting 10 million images and suing everyone that produces something substantially similar. Having said that, there may be odd knock on effects at play here.

erlkonig 4y ago

The big clue here, is that if we allow generated content to be copyrighted, then some asshat company will just generate All The Things (within, say, a given space) and copyright them (likewise for trademarks and patents, which could be much easier to exhaust within defined spaces). Combined with the lifetime of companies and the preposterous copyright extensions granted to them, swaths of human-generated work could be excluded from copyright, blocked by some hidden trove of copyrighted machine output. Especially bad if someone manages to copyright everything that could be generated by some AI.

alphanullmeric 4y ago

Unpopular opinion : the government shouldn’t protect your art from getting used as training data. The government shouldn’t protect your generated art from being copied. Intellectual property is not real property. Nothing is being taken from you. Force is only justified in response to force, and you don’t get the right to throw someone in jail for “stealing” something you still have.

nextlevelwizard 4y ago
Do you also agree that government should not enforce if I borrow your bike while you are not using it if I return it? If not how is that different? You still have the bike and you werent using it while I borrowed it - you just didn’t know I was borrowing it
- gumballindie 4y ago
  Probably doesnt mind that entire countries have built their economic models around copying ip and selling copycat products.
- yipbub 4y ago
  In universe of perfectly slippery spherical cows, I wouldn't mind. However, in this universe bikes experience wear, I wouldn't be able to spontaneously decide to use it, etc.
  - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
    You writing a shitty knock off Harry Potter novel "wears" on the brand. Just think your favorite book, movie, or music and think if you would enjoy it if there was really no way to know what was real work and what was just some copy-cat or straight up scammer selling rubbish. Now it is easy; you can not publish your Harry Potter novel due to copyright. Put it in another way: to become a author in a world where copyright is not a thing is pretty much impossible. Either you have to sell your book digitally with draconian DRM - and you will still get your book stolen or you have to own your own print shop, because if you send your book to any publisher they can just take your work and publish it as their own. And let's be real the amount your bike wears out from me riding it to the shop and back is so negligible that it won't make a difference in the life span of the bike. There are good reasons to have copyright - however I do not like how long the copyright is. I've stated it before that in my mind good copyright would be something like 10-20 years or life time of the author whatever comes later. This would allow any creative to hold the right to their world/characters/whatever until they are gone and it wouldn't discourage them from publishing in their old age since even after they have passed their families would still benefit from the works for sometime.

drcode 4y ago

Autotuning of voices uses AI- Songs using autotune are partially AI generated.

logn 4y ago

But if you asked it to generate a story in the style of Stephen King, whose works are still copyrighted, then does King have a copyright claim even though he didn't operate the AI?

ar9av 4y ago

I'm sure there will be a number of ramifications but one I know of is for those who sell specific captures of guitar amps that were created through machine learning just lost their copyright on that product. Those works could not have existed without the AI that was used to create them.

pontifier 4y ago

Art is in the eye of the beholder. We're going to be awash in so much AI generated content that the act of lifting something truly marvelous out of that background will be a creative action worthy of protection.

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago

What the government needs to do is to say that all AI-generated content is CC-SA 4.0 or GFDL and all the code is AGPL <latest version>. That oughta do it. (edit: I put "CC-BY-SA" and then I remembered there's no need to give credit to a hunk of sand and electrons!)

anticensor 4y ago
Or, specified more correctly, a share alike and attribution regime not based on copyright.

gumballindie 4y ago

Now the big question is how do we make “ai” companies pay for the data they use to generate their content. Stealing ip by scraping content and then reselling it is not fair use.

trippsydrippsy 4y ago

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nige123 4y ago

This is already a hot legal mess. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) should come up with Berne convention 3.0 that provides: - increased protection for human authorship - longer copyright terms for hoomans - shorter copyright terms for bots (5 years) - moral rights preventing 'globbing' by generative AIs - royalty system for original authors - derived computer-generated works pay I'd like to see a blockchain ledger-esque system where human authors can claim authorship and they receive nano-royalties every time works are derived from it. The generative AI's can 'glob' it but they will need to pay their dues. Importantly GAI's can't register their stuff in the hooman copyright chain.

hnbad 4y ago
I think the last thing we need is even longer copyright terms for humans.

heikegaichengji 4y ago

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heikegaichengji 4y ago

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reneberlin 4y ago

chatgpt4 summarized: This is a statement of policy by the U.S. Copyright Office to explain how it examines and registers works that contain material generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The statement is effective from March 16, 2023. The Office has experience and expertise in distinguishing between copyrightable and noncopyrightable works. The Office may require additional information from applicants who use AI to create or use copyrighted works.

amon22 4y ago
Thats a pretty bad summary
- reneberlin 4y ago
  Pretty correct, but it wasn't mine (my comment) but chatGPTs. I just presented the commentt from chatGPT for fun - which might not comply with rules that i dismissed. Sorry, i wanted to publicy show the summarization-feature, but still: it was not my best idea. You can always do your own summ...

reneberlin 4y ago

Please let chatgpt4 summarize this

auggierose 4y ago

That's not going to be practical. How do you distinguish if something was created by mere computation, or by AI? Oops, AI is just mere computation. So if you forbid mere computation, I cannot use fancy numerical algorithms in shading my 3D art? Ain't gonna fly.

DeathArrow 4y ago

ChatGPT sues US Government Anti AI discrimination NGOs call for public protests.

anticensor 4y ago
A non-person cannot sue.

hermannj314 4y ago

In the studio, the photographer directs the lighting, the model, tweaks the shot, issues commands to modify the scene, presses a button, checks the outputs, iterates, chooses the best shot. In a virtual conversation, the promptographer directs the computer to set the tone, chooses their model, tweaks the inputs, issues commands to change the virtual parameters, presses a few buttons, checks the outputs, iterates, and takes the best output. One of these is a creative work guided by a tool and one is a act that shows no human creative authorship at all.

bearmode 4y ago
Creating AI artwork is simply telling the computer the result you want, and picking what you believe to be the best output. There may be something of an iterative process there, but it's really not creative. Also the photographer is not "guided by a tool". The camera doesn't guide them.
- hermannj314 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on what makes something creative or not? On the 2nd point, the camera guides photographer. Watch anyone take a selfie, they use the camera to decide what to do with the camera. It is iterative.
  - bearmode 4y ago
    Sure. It's like having a friend who can draw. You detail to them something you're picturing in your mind, and they make it into something actually real. Who would have ownership over that art piece? Who actually did the work to make it exist? Copyright doesn't protect ideas, it protects the specific creative expression of those ideas. By creating a prompt you're creating an idea, but that isn't a copyrightable, creative action. You're just the 'ideas guy' for a robot artist. And again on the 2nd point, the camera doesn't guide the photographer. It can help them dial in their vision, but they're in full creative control at all times. It guides you no more than a hammer guides you to the nail.

bearmode 4y ago

And how will they know?

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

Pointless screaming at the tide hoping it won’t come in. In 3 years there won’t be a major digital tool that isn’t pipelining through ai especially in CG and music, in 10 years the pre-AI versions of those tools won’t run on a modern computer. Unless you’re ready to say “anything made with Adobe CC can’t be copyrighted “ then this is pointless to debate.

Entinel 4y ago
They specifically address works that use AI but are sufficiently modified by a human

qwerty456127 4y ago

I would speculate there will be no works containing no material generated by artificial intelligence soon. At least it will become a common practice to use a GPT to improve your language, possibly also assist the creative proccess by supplying facts and suggesting creative ideas. Everybody uses spell checkers and thesauri already (some also use grammar checkers like Grammarly), also google things up - this will be increasingly extended/replaced with advanced AIs usage. It is generally considered correct for a writer to hire assisnatnst who would proofread their writings before publishing them or even assist their thought through conversation so I can see no big deal in an AI doing the same job.

jcarrano 4y ago

How come work “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine” cannot be copyrighted <<it was made “without any creative contribution from a human actor”>> but machine code as generated by a compiler can?

vanattab 4y ago

Hmm. I am not so sure about this. What about the fact that to produce a image I like with dalle our similar I need to often run many many different descriptions to get what I want and some times use the edit feature. If a generate an image and use the built in photoshop like erase feature and regerate something else to fill the space is it copywriteable. What about if photoshop has or implements (probably already exits) auto insertion of images and people. Say you just paste something onto your image and photoshop runs ai algorithm that helps blen it in. What about traditional painters that relay on randomness in thier work? Like guys who just spin a canvas get blindfold and just throw paint around?

lukko 4y ago
Then with DALL-E it is like you are instructing a commissioned artist (who would own the copyright). I think it's fundamentally different to using a tool in Photoshop - content aware fill uses the rest of the image to fill in space, so whoever owned the original image would own the content-aware fill section. If an AI is used to generate new features - images, people - then it is like a collage or original and copyrighted work. Artists that throw paint around made the artistic and creative decision to do that, would choose the paint, the canvas etc. and actually it is very difficult to create work that has that quality of spontaneity and randomness - they would definitely own the copyright.

jasrys 4y ago

In addition to the new registration guidelines, the USCO announced a new AI initiative and series of public hearings https://copyright.gov/ai/ https://copyright.gov/ai/