6 ms·

US judge: Art created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted

55 points by carride 3y ago

jtode 3y ago
There are rational people in the system still. Good to see.
westurner 3y ago
"[Art,] Copyrights cannot be assigned to the AI software a human used to create the work" which may or may not be sufficiently transformative, fair use, or apparently derivative
b3morales 3y ago
I'm still not sure how I feel about the actual copyright issue, but this was a bad test case. Thaler is trying to have his cake and eat it too; his position is inconsistent (this similar to a previous comment I've made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783707). He wants credit for creating the AI, and he wants to that AI to be recognized as autonomous and independent by getting the Copyright Office's imprimatur. But at the same time he wants to treat the art created by the AI as if it were his, or at least to act on behalf of the AI as if it were not autonomous.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  If anyone wants a better test case I've started using the best AI work I could find in all my works too, without attribution, and it makes me money. I recently added AI music to a website, which I found on youtube and got with a youtube downloading script, really drives engagement I also don't care if someone does the same to works I generated in Midjourney, which I display in my various presentations. The Executive branch and now Judicial branch are pretty clear about this (so far), so its a free for all
throwaway5959 3y ago
Fine, I’ll crop it and copyright that instead.
- sacado2 3y ago
  Let's pretend you can. What would be the point? I'll crop it slightly differently, and copyright it too.
swid 3y ago
My understanding is the ruling actually says the copyright cannot be granted to the AI. But that might not mean a human cannot claim copyright for AI art. Assuming the AI has a vast number of outputs, many which are uninteresting; a human can select a few outputs as being worthy of being called art or suitable for their purposes. So an AI can create an image, but the process of selection constitutes an editorial process, and a person can the claim copyright for images they generate and choose to distribute. This seems to be somewhat similar to copyrighting a found object as art, or taking a photo of a building and owning the copyright to that. It would not make sense to give the copyright to the camera, which is what this ruling confirms.
- Detrytus 3y ago
  The reasoning in the ruling is a bit different: copyright was invented to give humans a financial incentive to create art. Machines need no incentive, so they do not need copyright :) So, if the basic distinction here is: - if AI can create something all by itself, then it is not copyrightable (due to "machines need no incentive" rule) - if AI still needs human help, then it is just a tool (like a brush, or computer with Photoshop installed), and the human is the real author. It's not just about an "editorial process" - book editors do not have any copyright even after they fix hundreds of typos and grammar mistakes of the original author. Also, the plaintiff is making contradictory claims: when applying for copyright he said that AI was fully autonomous, but then, in the lawsuit he tries to change his story and say that his role in creating the piece of art was crucial. Probably just desperately fighting to make any money from this.
- sacado2 3y ago
  Editors do not own the copyright on the work they edited (unless the author explicitely licensed it, of course.)
  - swid 3y ago
    I guess I used the term inappropriately since the other commenter picked up on it as well, but I did compare it to deciding what to take a picture of as opposed to editing something written. There is some decision making and we don’t award the copyright to the architect or camera, but the photographer.
karmakaze 3y ago
> 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. This seems perhaps easy for the simplest cases, but what if the prompts get much longer? Where's the dividing line? Even in music production, the machine can be instructed to generate a semi-random-sequence following some loose constraints, would trying a bunch and selecting one be authorship, why? What if this is repeated for several parts? Again, where's the dividing line?
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  More discussion over here from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188791
barnabee 3y ago
> Giving prompts to AI not enough for human authorship If, as some predict, everything is soon done by people feeding prompts to AI, a great bonus would be if it all became uncopyrightable. Shame neither is really going to happen.
juris 3y ago
Just spitballing here, because this is very fun to think about. If I reproduce the likeness of Mickey Mouse via an AI, then because an AI made it, is there no defensible claim from Disney to own the copyright? That doesn't make intuitive sense, as we 'sort of know' that Disney owns the likeness. Meanwhile, if I produce one single image that I own via copyright, and feed it to the AI as a prompt and receive a derivative of that image back, per this ruling I would not own the proceeds. It makes some sense-- an AI made it, and further, I did not produce enough instances of this art and the branding behind it for its likeness to be sufficiently "mine". I don't quite own the "mindshare", so people would not recognize the brand as being anybody's, really. So this is different from the way that Mickey Mouse is recognized. But what if a bunch of artists were to band together to create a license of sorts for the use of an AI they altogether build? Suppose they collectively own a portfolio of copyrighted materials, characters, etc, that they use to feed the AI. Wouldn't they own the proceeds of the likenesses produced by the AI, as would provide legal justification for their licensing of the AI, and to defend their collective works in the same way that Disney can?
- coolspot 3y ago
  I believe what this ruling actually tries to defeat is an automated bulk art generation. Just fire some H100 in a loop iterating over various ~random prompts, save it all on a website and then sue anyone producing anything remotely similar. Problem is, bad actors will say all of this art was generated by a human with mere AI assistance.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    I think it's the only logical assumption you can make when AI dide not request copyright clearance. Unless an AI generator proves it owns all related copyright material, how can it claim the output under the same law. It's basic CC ally a copyright blackhole. The laws of copyright doesn't survive.
  - juris 3y ago
byteknight 3y ago
Does this effectively save SAG and such? By not being copyrightable why would studios do that? Or am I missing something?
getarofilter 3y ago
[dead]

55 points by carride 3y ago

There are rational people in the system still. Good to see.

"[Art,] Copyrights cannot be assigned to the AI software a human used to create the work" which may or may not be sufficiently transformative, fair use, or apparently derivative

b3morales 3y ago

I'm still not sure how I feel about the actual copyright issue, but this was a bad test case. Thaler is trying to have his cake and eat it too; his position is inconsistent (this similar to a previous comment I've made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783707). He wants credit for creating the AI, and he wants to that AI to be recognized as autonomous and independent by getting the Copyright Office's imprimatur. But at the same time he wants to treat the art created by the AI as if it were his, or at least to act on behalf of the AI as if it were not autonomous.

yieldcrv 3y ago
If anyone wants a better test case I've started using the best AI work I could find in all my works too, without attribution, and it makes me money. I recently added AI music to a website, which I found on youtube and got with a youtube downloading script, really drives engagement I also don't care if someone does the same to works I generated in Midjourney, which I display in my various presentations. The Executive branch and now Judicial branch are pretty clear about this (so far), so its a free for all

throwaway5959 3y ago

Fine, I’ll crop it and copyright that instead.

sacado2 3y ago
Let's pretend you can. What would be the point? I'll crop it slightly differently, and copyright it too.

swid 3y ago

My understanding is the ruling actually says the copyright cannot be granted to the AI. But that might not mean a human cannot claim copyright for AI art. Assuming the AI has a vast number of outputs, many which are uninteresting; a human can select a few outputs as being worthy of being called art or suitable for their purposes. So an AI can create an image, but the process of selection constitutes an editorial process, and a person can the claim copyright for images they generate and choose to distribute. This seems to be somewhat similar to copyrighting a found object as art, or taking a photo of a building and owning the copyright to that. It would not make sense to give the copyright to the camera, which is what this ruling confirms.

Detrytus 3y ago
The reasoning in the ruling is a bit different: copyright was invented to give humans a financial incentive to create art. Machines need no incentive, so they do not need copyright :) So, if the basic distinction here is: - if AI can create something all by itself, then it is not copyrightable (due to "machines need no incentive" rule) - if AI still needs human help, then it is just a tool (like a brush, or computer with Photoshop installed), and the human is the real author. It's not just about an "editorial process" - book editors do not have any copyright even after they fix hundreds of typos and grammar mistakes of the original author. Also, the plaintiff is making contradictory claims: when applying for copyright he said that AI was fully autonomous, but then, in the lawsuit he tries to change his story and say that his role in creating the piece of art was crucial. Probably just desperately fighting to make any money from this.
sacado2 3y ago
Editors do not own the copyright on the work they edited (unless the author explicitely licensed it, of course.)
- swid 3y ago
  I guess I used the term inappropriately since the other commenter picked up on it as well, but I did compare it to deciding what to take a picture of as opposed to editing something written. There is some decision making and we don’t award the copyright to the architect or camera, but the photographer.

karmakaze 3y ago

> 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. This seems perhaps easy for the simplest cases, but what if the prompts get much longer? Where's the dividing line? Even in music production, the machine can be instructed to generate a semi-random-sequence following some loose constraints, would trying a bunch and selecting one be authorship, why? What if this is repeated for several parts? Again, where's the dividing line?

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe]

ChrisArchitect 3y ago
More discussion over here from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188791

barnabee 3y ago

> Giving prompts to AI not enough for human authorship If, as some predict, everything is soon done by people feeding prompts to AI, a great bonus would be if it all became uncopyrightable. Shame neither is really going to happen.

juris 3y ago

Just spitballing here, because this is very fun to think about. If I reproduce the likeness of Mickey Mouse via an AI, then because an AI made it, is there no defensible claim from Disney to own the copyright? That doesn't make intuitive sense, as we 'sort of know' that Disney owns the likeness. Meanwhile, if I produce one single image that I own via copyright, and feed it to the AI as a prompt and receive a derivative of that image back, per this ruling I would not own the proceeds. It makes some sense-- an AI made it, and further, I did not produce enough instances of this art and the branding behind it for its likeness to be sufficiently "mine". I don't quite own the "mindshare", so people would not recognize the brand as being anybody's, really. So this is different from the way that Mickey Mouse is recognized. But what if a bunch of artists were to band together to create a license of sorts for the use of an AI they altogether build? Suppose they collectively own a portfolio of copyrighted materials, characters, etc, that they use to feed the AI. Wouldn't they own the proceeds of the likenesses produced by the AI, as would provide legal justification for their licensing of the AI, and to defend their collective works in the same way that Disney can?

coolspot 3y ago
I believe what this ruling actually tries to defeat is an automated bulk art generation. Just fire some H100 in a loop iterating over various ~random prompts, save it all on a website and then sue anyone producing anything remotely similar. Problem is, bad actors will say all of this art was generated by a human with mere AI assistance.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  I think it's the only logical assumption you can make when AI dide not request copyright clearance. Unless an AI generator proves it owns all related copyright material, how can it claim the output under the same law. It's basic CC ally a copyright blackhole. The laws of copyright doesn't survive.
- juris 3y ago

byteknight 3y ago

Does this effectively save SAG and such? By not being copyrightable why would studios do that? Or am I missing something?

getarofilter 3y ago

[dead]