9 ms·

AI-generated art lacks copyright protection, D.C. court says

176 points by kordlessagain 3y ago

megamix 3y ago
Do you agree AI generated art is theft in the first place?
awestroke 3y ago
Oh but I created all these artworks myself your honor
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Sure, because judges are stupid. This kind of thing has been in court before. If I recall there was some case in which the authorship of some picture was contested, and the judge asked the people involved to draw something right there, in court. So the same thing would happen. They'd ask you "okay, so how did you draw it? What tools do your use? Can you show us sketches? Can you draw something here, right now?"
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    Yes, m'Lud. My "brush and palette" are this laptop. <types-in prompt> My "paint" is software, m'Lud. Some of it is pre-made "paint" that someone else wrote, like tubes of paint from an art-shop; some of it is my own modifications, analogous to grinding your own pigments.
Takennickname 3y ago
How would you even prove that
- andsoitis 3y ago
  Artists typically attribute their work. Artists are generally unlikely to pretend work generated by AI is their own, because their reputation will be damaged.
  - simonh 3y ago
    A lot of the people using AI art generators are not themselves artists, but how do you prove they aren't?.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      It is up to them to prove originality/provenance if they want to enforce copyright.
      - brookst 3y ago
        Burden of proof goes the other way. If someone copyrights AI art, you copy it, and they sue you… it’s going to be on you to prove it was not original.
        andsoitis 3y ago
        > If someone copyrights AI art They would be risking contravening the law. Probably not worth it.
        GaggiX 3y ago
        That would make sense if there is an actual way to enforce the law, the entire conversation is about how to prove that a bad actor is violating copyright law by copyrighting AI art.
        anigbrowl 3y ago
        Your posts here are very naive. Scamming is widespread, and there are no legal penalties (other than the loss of the filing fee) for false claims of authorship. The only risk to an AI-powered scammer is if they go to the expense of suing someone else for copyright infringement, which they probably won't since scammers like easy money. And there is a lot of easy money to be made, so this is going to keep happening. Last week there was a book about the Maui fires in the top 100 on Amazon, which looks to have been written entirely by ChatGPT: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/08/17/amazon-bestselling-book-published-2-days-into-maui-wildfires-raises-red-flags-from-publishers-reviewers/?sh=29649e255893 https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/08/17/amazon-...
bartchamdo 3y ago
Fantasyland as the idea of copyright starts to crack. Wait till AI starts inventing things and attempts to patent them.
- beepbooptheory 3y ago
  What incentive would it have to patent something it invented?
  - sgc 3y ago
    Why wouldn't the AI creator program it to do that, for personal gain? If there is value, somebody will try to extract it.
  - gene-h 3y ago
    Why wouldn't operators of algorithms that produce novel inventions attempt to patent their output or even automate the process so that the patenting occurs with little to no human intervention? I'd argue we aren't very far from this point. Computers have already been used to make novel inventions. I think we could see an explosion in computer generated inventions if physical reasoning, reasoning about how objects move with respect to each other, continues to improve. Previously used approaches, such as genetic algorithms, have difficulty solving problems like inventing a new type of lock or clock escapement which require multiple moving parts.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
thrill 3y ago
Previous rulings had found that when code itself was copyrighted due to being a work of art (of human labor), the output of that code was indeed copyrightable if the program did the majority of the work in producing that output. This ruling seems at odds with that previous interpretation. https://mwhlawgroup.com/can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-its-output/ https://mwhlawgroup.com/can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-...
- brookst 3y ago
  Are weights code?
  - jrajav 3y ago
    No, weights are data, just like transformation matrices used by graphics code. The data has no meaning without the code, and the code is what creates and manages it based on its inputs, as an aid to generating some output. So it's perfectly accurate to talk about the code as the main (or only) actual mechanism.
    - halfcat 3y ago
      The distinction that data has no meaning without code is unconvincing. The code has no meaning without a compiler or interpreter. The compiler and interpreter have no meaning without a CPU. If I store x86 CPU instructions in a Postgres database, is that data or code? It’s also a worth viewing this in light of different computing models. The main mechanism may look quite different if you’re looking at a CPU, GPU, or DSP model of computing.
      - somesoftdev 3y ago
        I believe code holds meaning even without a compiler or interpreter. I can read code and discern its functionality. I can even recognize existing algorithms such as quicksort. I can achieve the same understanding with pseudocode, which lacks an existing compiler. Similarly, prompts possess meaning; I can comprehend the task delegated to a machine learning model by reading the prompt. I agree that both code and data are akin in terms of meaning. Transitioning from Assembly language to Python liberates us from concerns about registers and low-level intricacies. Python directs our attention to the problems we aim to solve, in contrast to low-level languages where a significant effort is spent on specifying hardware operations. High-level languages emphasize outcomes, enabling us to focus on the result rather than meticulously instructing the hardware. AI propels us further along this trajectory. In this sense, I view a prompt and code as rather similar.
GaggiX 3y ago
This seems to work only with people that will admin and probably promote their works as AI generated, other people will probably argue how the image or text was actually modified enough by the human to grant him the copyright. Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
- tedajax 3y ago
  Because the "generated" art is more accurately described as "stolen".
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    There is nothing accurate about describe it as "stolen", no one is depriving you of your art when training a model, like no human is depriving you of your art when learning from it.
    - cjbgkagh 3y ago
      While I wouldn’t describe AI art as stolen I do think it’s fair to claim there has been a loss of potential earning from the creative work that went into developing a style and the marketing that went into evangelizing/popularizing it.
      - johngladtj 3y ago
        The same applies when another human does it
        tester457 3y ago
        Great difference in scale, humans cannot automate at nearly the level machines can. The law will have to account for this.
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
Step one: Take a piece of AI-generated art. Step two: Very slightly modify it. (Visual art: Apply a color filter, draw in a single element, have a different AI change some details, etc. Music: Subtly change the tempo or add one minor audio effect.) Step three: Copyright the work as something "made by a human with AI assistance." If challenged, step four: Claim that humans have been making works of art with all available technical means from the dawn of civilization, and that to draw an arbitrary line in the sand at assisted generation is unprincipled. And, basically, lmao at the courts, as usual.
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago
  The court can rule that you have copyright only on the modifications you did, and if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it.
  - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    > if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it. If the AI generated portion exists nowhere else, and if it's not _obviously_ an AI-generated work, how would a court know what's generated and what's been modified?
    - __loam 3y ago
      It's fun to see people who are unfamiliar with the discovery process in law.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- skybrian 3y ago
  They’ll likely just decide it’s not different enough. Courts aren’t computers; they can look at intent. A classic essay: What colour are your bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
space_fountain 3y ago
The headline doesn’t seem to be what actually happened. The filer was arguing that the ai created the work on its own as a work for hire and thus the ai was the author with the computer scientist merely being the owner of the copyright as it was made for hire. I don’t think the argument that ai is a tool and the human operating it is the author was considered because the filer explicitly didn’t want to consider it. In the review being appealed here (https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/a-recent-entrance-to-paradise.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...). It makes it clear that the computer scientist doing the filing was trying to argue this was a work made for hire with the author being the computer. They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn’t how the law works. The summary makes it clear early that it’s just taking their word that the work had no human input and was thus purely the creation of the computer. This seems to be a a better article https://www.millernash.com/industry-news/paradise-denied-copyright-or-not-in-ai-generated-images https://www.millernash.com/industry-news/paradise-denied-cop....
- toast0 3y ago
  > They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn’t how the law works. Just a nitpick that this isn't really about copyright assignment, it's about rights that arise as a result of a eligible work by a eligible author being fixed into a tangible medium. These rights aren't assigned to the author, they come into being automatically. In this case, the ruling seems to be that there was no eligible author, and as such, no rights came into being. Or at least, the claimed author is not an eligible author: had the claim been that the human was the author, using the AI as a paintbrush, that would be a different question. It would be another matter if a natural person authored a work and wished to assign its rights to a non-person. Which yeah, you pretty much can't do. Under most legal frameworks, ownership is for people, natural or corporate; anything that's not a people is property and property can't own property.
briandw 3y ago
This ruling is consistent IMO with the Monkey Takes a Selfie ruling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- randyrand 3y ago
  I've always found that ruling so bad. Who pushes the button is the least important part of photography and can be easily automated. It's choosing the subject matter, getting the camera to that location, angles, exposure, lenses, and taking the time to do it all that is the creative part. For the sake of argument, if a camera had 5 years of storage and battery life and was left running from the factory, should canon own everything it produced? Is pushing the shutter button really the most important question?
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    > I've always found that ruling so bad. Who pushes the button is the least important part of photography and can be easily automated. It's choosing the subject matter, getting the camera to that location, angles, exposure, lenses, and taking the time to do it all that is the creative part. Wasn't the point that all those things were absent in that case? If the monkey indeed snatch the camera completely unexpectedly, and then proceeded to take a selfie of itself, then the photographer didn't choose the subject matter, location, angles, exposure, or anything else.
f33d5173 3y ago
> Thaler’s motion for summary judgment, which Howell denied in the Friday order, argued that permitting AI to be listed as an author on copyrighted works would incentivize more creation, which is in line with copyright law’s purpose of promoting useful art for the public. Lel. Its wholly a semantic game. If you say "this machine created this artwork wink wink" the court will deny you because "machines can't have copyright". If you say "I created this artwork, using aid from a computer program" they'll likely let you do just about anything.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  Yes, perception is going to rule in these cases. So semantics matter. Strategic disclosure of methods will matter. And your copyrights will be even more secure if you have an army of lawyers to say you “created this artwork”. These are all highly subjective dials. I think these early cases are going to get buried in cases with increasing complexity. We don’t really know how this will fall out.
dragonwriter 3y ago
The court actually said AIs can’t be authors under copyright law, it takes no stand (becauae the question was not before it) on whether and, if so, in what conditions AI-generated art can be copyrighted by the human using the AI to generate it.
gumballindie 3y ago
Cool beans, hope this covers code too, and once source code leaks from companies that use AI then we can all use it to...you know "train" our ais.
gabereiser 3y ago
"Absent any human involvement" - so open it in photoshop, add your signature, done. It was created by you, the computer scientist, with the aide of a computer program (like photoshop :D). IANAL. YMMV. See ruling for details.
seydor 3y ago
But did they ask Disney?
another-dave 3y ago
I'm not clear on what the status of the piece is after the ruling. As in, let's say I got AI to generate a cartoon character preparatory sketch in black penline. If I printed that out and used it as a reference to do a "clean room implementation" of the character — do I now own the copyright, since I'm the first person to produce a copyright-eligible rendition of that likeness? Or since it's a copy of an uncopyrightable work is the character immediately in the public domain, as if it was generated by a human & then given a really permissive license?
simonw 3y ago
Has anyone got a good answer to the question of "how much" human intervention is needed for AI-generated works to be copyrighted? I type "a racoon wearing a hat" as a prompt and get back an image. It sounds like that's not copyrightable. How about if I type that into Photoshop generative art, and then apply some filters? Or how about I run that, and then "a walrus with a bowtie", and then "a platypus on a skateboard", and then arrange those three images together on a page? What about if I spend literally hours prompting, and re-prompting, and combining, and layering, and cropping until I get the result I'm looking for? These feel like important questions to me. Has anyone tested these in a court of law yet?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rcarr 3y ago
Here's an interesting question: Corridor Digital are getting closer to perfecting AI anime. After the first video, Rock Paper Scissors, they said they got some flak for training the AI on stills from an existing anime movie, so for the second one they hired an artist and trained it from their drawings. Well, what happens if you hire an artist that essentially draws some art work heavily inspired by an existing IP and then you train your AI model on that? Is that infringement, even though the art work you've trained the AI on is now one step removed from official source material, even if it is practically identical? What if you commission another artist to make artwork based on that artwork? And another after that? When does the signal get distorted enough to pass as not being based on pre-existing IP? The whole thing feels like the "grain of sand" philosophy problem. What constitutes enough change to warrant something as not belonging to an IP anymore? Are we going to have to come up with some sort of image comparison algorithm that spits out a comparison percentage and set some arbitrary number as the cut off point? Or are we going to continue with time consuming and costly case by case, human judged comparisons? The whole thing feels ridiculous.
- tadfisher 3y ago
  > Or are we going to continue with time consuming and costly case by case, human judged comparisons? That will absolutely always be required, because no matter how much we pretend, copyright is not a natural right, any more than capitalism is the natural economic system. You can extrapolate this to the concept of property, and by extension, ownership. The cans of Campbell's Soup don't care that Warhol copied their likeness any more than the trees we felled to build your house care if a squatter takes it over.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Bloomberg tries to get the reader to enable Javascript in order to download a PDF. Not necessary. Here is the opinion. No Javascript required. https://ia601401.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956.24.0.pdf https://ia601401.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.24...
nemo44x 3y ago
It’s so weird how much we rent in courts to make up laws based on their opinions of laws and precedence. It’s fine in a lunch but it’s really an indication congress needs to make laws. And courts determine if they are constitutional. This has been a problem for 75+ years. Courts just making de facto law. It’s not their role.
layer8 3y ago
This seems to be consistent with the Copyright Registration Guidance for Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence [0] previously discussed on HN [1]. [0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05321/copyright-registration-guidance-works-containing-material-generated-by-artificial-intelligence https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim. Because it shows how stupid they really are, but also how eager they are to scam you.
Nellyz 3y ago
[dead]

176 points by kordlessagain 3y ago

megamix 3y ago

Do you agree AI generated art is theft in the first place?

awestroke 3y ago

Oh but I created all these artworks myself your honor

dale_glass 3y ago
Sure, because judges are stupid. This kind of thing has been in court before. If I recall there was some case in which the authorship of some picture was contested, and the judge asked the people involved to draw something right there, in court. So the same thing would happen. They'd ask you "okay, so how did you draw it? What tools do your use? Can you show us sketches? Can you draw something here, right now?"
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Yes, m'Lud. My "brush and palette" are this laptop. <types-in prompt> My "paint" is software, m'Lud. Some of it is pre-made "paint" that someone else wrote, like tubes of paint from an art-shop; some of it is my own modifications, analogous to grinding your own pigments.

Takennickname 3y ago

How would you even prove that

andsoitis 3y ago
Artists typically attribute their work. Artists are generally unlikely to pretend work generated by AI is their own, because their reputation will be damaged.
- simonh 3y ago
  A lot of the people using AI art generators are not themselves artists, but how do you prove they aren't?.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    It is up to them to prove originality/provenance if they want to enforce copyright.
    - brookst 3y ago
      Burden of proof goes the other way. If someone copyrights AI art, you copy it, and they sue you… it’s going to be on you to prove it was not original.
      - andsoitis 3y ago
        > If someone copyrights AI art They would be risking contravening the law. Probably not worth it.
        GaggiX 3y ago
        That would make sense if there is an actual way to enforce the law, the entire conversation is about how to prove that a bad actor is violating copyright law by copyrighting AI art.
        anigbrowl 3y ago
        Your posts here are very naive. Scamming is widespread, and there are no legal penalties (other than the loss of the filing fee) for false claims of authorship. The only risk to an AI-powered scammer is if they go to the expense of suing someone else for copyright infringement, which they probably won't since scammers like easy money. And there is a lot of easy money to be made, so this is going to keep happening. Last week there was a book about the Maui fires in the top 100 on Amazon, which looks to have been written entirely by ChatGPT: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/08/17/amazon-bestselling-book-published-2-days-into-maui-wildfires-raises-red-flags-from-publishers-reviewers/?sh=29649e255893 https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/08/17/amazon-...

bartchamdo 3y ago

Fantasyland as the idea of copyright starts to crack. Wait till AI starts inventing things and attempts to patent them.

beepbooptheory 3y ago
What incentive would it have to patent something it invented?
- sgc 3y ago
  Why wouldn't the AI creator program it to do that, for personal gain? If there is value, somebody will try to extract it.
- gene-h 3y ago
  Why wouldn't operators of algorithms that produce novel inventions attempt to patent their output or even automate the process so that the patenting occurs with little to no human intervention? I'd argue we aren't very far from this point. Computers have already been used to make novel inventions. I think we could see an explosion in computer generated inventions if physical reasoning, reasoning about how objects move with respect to each other, continues to improve. Previously used approaches, such as genetic algorithms, have difficulty solving problems like inventing a new type of lock or clock escapement which require multiple moving parts.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

thrill 3y ago

Previous rulings had found that when code itself was copyrighted due to being a work of art (of human labor), the output of that code was indeed copyrightable if the program did the majority of the work in producing that output. This ruling seems at odds with that previous interpretation. https://mwhlawgroup.com/can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-its-output/ https://mwhlawgroup.com/can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-...

brookst 3y ago
Are weights code?
- jrajav 3y ago
  No, weights are data, just like transformation matrices used by graphics code. The data has no meaning without the code, and the code is what creates and manages it based on its inputs, as an aid to generating some output. So it's perfectly accurate to talk about the code as the main (or only) actual mechanism.
  - halfcat 3y ago
    The distinction that data has no meaning without code is unconvincing. The code has no meaning without a compiler or interpreter. The compiler and interpreter have no meaning without a CPU. If I store x86 CPU instructions in a Postgres database, is that data or code? It’s also a worth viewing this in light of different computing models. The main mechanism may look quite different if you’re looking at a CPU, GPU, or DSP model of computing.
    - somesoftdev 3y ago
      I believe code holds meaning even without a compiler or interpreter. I can read code and discern its functionality. I can even recognize existing algorithms such as quicksort. I can achieve the same understanding with pseudocode, which lacks an existing compiler. Similarly, prompts possess meaning; I can comprehend the task delegated to a machine learning model by reading the prompt. I agree that both code and data are akin in terms of meaning. Transitioning from Assembly language to Python liberates us from concerns about registers and low-level intricacies. Python directs our attention to the problems we aim to solve, in contrast to low-level languages where a significant effort is spent on specifying hardware operations. High-level languages emphasize outcomes, enabling us to focus on the result rather than meticulously instructing the hardware. AI propels us further along this trajectory. In this sense, I view a prompt and code as rather similar.

GaggiX 3y ago

This seems to work only with people that will admin and probably promote their works as AI generated, other people will probably argue how the image or text was actually modified enough by the human to grant him the copyright. Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.

tedajax 3y ago
Because the "generated" art is more accurately described as "stolen".
- GaggiX 3y ago
  There is nothing accurate about describe it as "stolen", no one is depriving you of your art when training a model, like no human is depriving you of your art when learning from it.
  - cjbgkagh 3y ago
    While I wouldn’t describe AI art as stolen I do think it’s fair to claim there has been a loss of potential earning from the creative work that went into developing a style and the marketing that went into evangelizing/popularizing it.
    - johngladtj 3y ago
      The same applies when another human does it
      - tester457 3y ago
        Great difference in scale, humans cannot automate at nearly the level machines can. The law will have to account for this.
EMIRELADERO 3y ago

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago

Step one: Take a piece of AI-generated art. Step two: Very slightly modify it. (Visual art: Apply a color filter, draw in a single element, have a different AI change some details, etc. Music: Subtly change the tempo or add one minor audio effect.) Step three: Copyright the work as something "made by a human with AI assistance." If challenged, step four: Claim that humans have been making works of art with all available technical means from the dawn of civilization, and that to draw an arbitrary line in the sand at assisted generation is unprincipled. And, basically, lmao at the courts, as usual.

Tuna-Fish 3y ago
The court can rule that you have copyright only on the modifications you did, and if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  > if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it. If the AI generated portion exists nowhere else, and if it's not _obviously_ an AI-generated work, how would a court know what's generated and what's been modified?
  - __loam 3y ago
    It's fun to see people who are unfamiliar with the discovery process in law.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
skybrian 3y ago
They’ll likely just decide it’s not different enough. Courts aren’t computers; they can look at intent. A classic essay: What colour are your bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

space_fountain 3y ago

The headline doesn’t seem to be what actually happened. The filer was arguing that the ai created the work on its own as a work for hire and thus the ai was the author with the computer scientist merely being the owner of the copyright as it was made for hire. I don’t think the argument that ai is a tool and the human operating it is the author was considered because the filer explicitly didn’t want to consider it. In the review being appealed here (https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/a-recent-entrance-to-paradise.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...). It makes it clear that the computer scientist doing the filing was trying to argue this was a work made for hire with the author being the computer. They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn’t how the law works. The summary makes it clear early that it’s just taking their word that the work had no human input and was thus purely the creation of the computer. This seems to be a a better article https://www.millernash.com/industry-news/paradise-denied-copyright-or-not-in-ai-generated-images https://www.millernash.com/industry-news/paradise-denied-cop....

toast0 3y ago
> They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn’t how the law works. Just a nitpick that this isn't really about copyright assignment, it's about rights that arise as a result of a eligible work by a eligible author being fixed into a tangible medium. These rights aren't assigned to the author, they come into being automatically. In this case, the ruling seems to be that there was no eligible author, and as such, no rights came into being. Or at least, the claimed author is not an eligible author: had the claim been that the human was the author, using the AI as a paintbrush, that would be a different question. It would be another matter if a natural person authored a work and wished to assign its rights to a non-person. Which yeah, you pretty much can't do. Under most legal frameworks, ownership is for people, natural or corporate; anything that's not a people is property and property can't own property.

briandw 3y ago

This ruling is consistent IMO with the Monkey Takes a Selfie ruling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

randyrand 3y ago
I've always found that ruling so bad. Who pushes the button is the least important part of photography and can be easily automated. It's choosing the subject matter, getting the camera to that location, angles, exposure, lenses, and taking the time to do it all that is the creative part. For the sake of argument, if a camera had 5 years of storage and battery life and was left running from the factory, should canon own everything it produced? Is pushing the shutter button really the most important question?
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > I've always found that ruling so bad. Who pushes the button is the least important part of photography and can be easily automated. It's choosing the subject matter, getting the camera to that location, angles, exposure, lenses, and taking the time to do it all that is the creative part. Wasn't the point that all those things were absent in that case? If the monkey indeed snatch the camera completely unexpectedly, and then proceeded to take a selfie of itself, then the photographer didn't choose the subject matter, location, angles, exposure, or anything else.

f33d5173 3y ago

> Thaler’s motion for summary judgment, which Howell denied in the Friday order, argued that permitting AI to be listed as an author on copyrighted works would incentivize more creation, which is in line with copyright law’s purpose of promoting useful art for the public. Lel. Its wholly a semantic game. If you say "this machine created this artwork wink wink" the court will deny you because "machines can't have copyright". If you say "I created this artwork, using aid from a computer program" they'll likely let you do just about anything.

Nevermark 3y ago
Yes, perception is going to rule in these cases. So semantics matter. Strategic disclosure of methods will matter. And your copyrights will be even more secure if you have an army of lawyers to say you “created this artwork”. These are all highly subjective dials. I think these early cases are going to get buried in cases with increasing complexity. We don’t really know how this will fall out.

dragonwriter 3y ago

The court actually said AIs can’t be authors under copyright law, it takes no stand (becauae the question was not before it) on whether and, if so, in what conditions AI-generated art can be copyrighted by the human using the AI to generate it.

gumballindie 3y ago

Cool beans, hope this covers code too, and once source code leaks from companies that use AI then we can all use it to...you know "train" our ais.

gabereiser 3y ago

"Absent any human involvement" - so open it in photoshop, add your signature, done. It was created by you, the computer scientist, with the aide of a computer program (like photoshop :D). IANAL. YMMV. See ruling for details.

seydor 3y ago

But did they ask Disney?

another-dave 3y ago

I'm not clear on what the status of the piece is after the ruling. As in, let's say I got AI to generate a cartoon character preparatory sketch in black penline. If I printed that out and used it as a reference to do a "clean room implementation" of the character — do I now own the copyright, since I'm the first person to produce a copyright-eligible rendition of that likeness? Or since it's a copy of an uncopyrightable work is the character immediately in the public domain, as if it was generated by a human & then given a really permissive license?

simonw 3y ago

Has anyone got a good answer to the question of "how much" human intervention is needed for AI-generated works to be copyrighted? I type "a racoon wearing a hat" as a prompt and get back an image. It sounds like that's not copyrightable. How about if I type that into Photoshop generative art, and then apply some filters? Or how about I run that, and then "a walrus with a bowtie", and then "a platypus on a skateboard", and then arrange those three images together on a page? What about if I spend literally hours prompting, and re-prompting, and combining, and layering, and cropping until I get the result I'm looking for? These feel like important questions to me. Has anyone tested these in a court of law yet?

deleted 3y ago

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rcarr 3y ago

Here's an interesting question: Corridor Digital are getting closer to perfecting AI anime. After the first video, Rock Paper Scissors, they said they got some flak for training the AI on stills from an existing anime movie, so for the second one they hired an artist and trained it from their drawings. Well, what happens if you hire an artist that essentially draws some art work heavily inspired by an existing IP and then you train your AI model on that? Is that infringement, even though the art work you've trained the AI on is now one step removed from official source material, even if it is practically identical? What if you commission another artist to make artwork based on that artwork? And another after that? When does the signal get distorted enough to pass as not being based on pre-existing IP? The whole thing feels like the "grain of sand" philosophy problem. What constitutes enough change to warrant something as not belonging to an IP anymore? Are we going to have to come up with some sort of image comparison algorithm that spits out a comparison percentage and set some arbitrary number as the cut off point? Or are we going to continue with time consuming and costly case by case, human judged comparisons? The whole thing feels ridiculous.

tadfisher 3y ago
> Or are we going to continue with time consuming and costly case by case, human judged comparisons? That will absolutely always be required, because no matter how much we pretend, copyright is not a natural right, any more than capitalism is the natural economic system. You can extrapolate this to the concept of property, and by extension, ownership. The cans of Campbell's Soup don't care that Warhol copied their likeness any more than the trees we felled to build your house care if a squatter takes it over.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Bloomberg tries to get the reader to enable Javascript in order to download a PDF. Not necessary. Here is the opinion. No Javascript required. https://ia601401.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956.24.0.pdf https://ia601401.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.24...

nemo44x 3y ago

It’s so weird how much we rent in courts to make up laws based on their opinions of laws and precedence. It’s fine in a lunch but it’s really an indication congress needs to make laws. And courts determine if they are constitutional. This has been a problem for 75+ years. Courts just making de facto law. It’s not their role.

layer8 3y ago

This seems to be consistent with the Copyright Registration Guidance for Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence [0] previously discussed on HN [1]. [0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05321/copyright-registration-guidance-works-containing-material-generated-by-artificial-intelligence https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim. Because it shows how stupid they really are, but also how eager they are to scam you.

Nellyz 3y ago

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