9 ms·

US rejects AI copyright for famous state fair-winning Midjourney art

42 points by kurthr 3y ago

nightski 3y ago
It's odd to me that an image such of this is rejected unless labeled as generated by "AI", yet an image heavily edited in Photoshop or some other software with algorithms is not.
- blamestross 3y ago
  It is almost like intention in the method and process of those tools matters. Rather than bulk exploitation of other people's work.
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    There are AI tools like ControlNET that do give you intention in the method and process.
  - horsawlarway 3y ago
    Ok - I'm going to pick on you since you responded with this first: Here's my argument: 1. Copyright in some sense is probably a net win for society. 2. Copyright in it's current legal form in the US is - fucking unquestionably - abusive. 7 years with a 7 year renewal after review? Probably ok, feels long in today's digital age. To the author's death? oof, that's a long time to protect works, but maybe I guess, in some specific fields of work. To the author's death PLUS 70 fucking years? Get the fuck out of here. Literally - who the fuck other than giant corporations is POSSIBLY benefiting from this? This is a fucking insane level of protection, and is outrageously harmful to generating new content (Just take a peak at all the fucking remakes that constitute our new films, and the miserable content licensing restrictions that pop up everywhere and kill so many new things) --- So my stance is firmly: Yep, they probably are taking some of your work. But also: Your work is also grounded in the work of others (again - fucking unquestionably). Further - the copyright system at large is SO fucking harmful that I don't really think it should exist anymore (side note: I'm really underplaying my feelings here, "nuke it from orbit" is probably still an understatement... "I'd like to see it suffer before it dies" is probably close). So... if you want to talk about bulk exploitation - go fucking yell at the current media companies, because holy fuck are they the worst fucking companies in the world to make this claim. They are leeches. If you want me to step to your side: CURB THE FUCKING ABUSE. Otherwise... you are the shitty cab company and the LLM is uber: Are they ethical? Eh - Nope. Are they unquestionable better for most people? Yes. Will I take a useful and unethical company over a stagnating and unethical company? Yes, yes I will. Would I prefer real governmental action to either of those? 100%.
    - blamestross 3y ago
      I agree with most of what you are saying, but the key gap is that the victims here are not "unethical companies". They are 5+ digits of independent artists who had no idea this was going to happen to them. If big art was a thing, your argument would be good, but Disney doesn't account for most of the input to these image algorithms.
      - horsawlarway 3y ago
        > They are 5+ digits of independent artists who had no idea this was going to happen to them. But these people are already making essentially zero income from copyright (it's mostly tours/merch), and have been (again, and again, and again) utterly fucked by the current publishing companies that are so interested (financially) in killing this AI work. They are already victims of the current system. I don't see how introducing AI changes their position all that much: They still have low bargaining power, low financial returns (avg is under 6k/year) and mostly aren't doing it as a career. Are a few of them exceptions? Absolutely. Will there keep being successful exceptions with AI: I'd bet yes (with a lot of cash). Will the way they work change? Probably. Some will enjoy the change, and some won't. I just don't see any compelling reason in your comment to argue to keep the current cluster-fuck of abuse that is modern copyright. Arguing that the currently abused might continue to be abused might be a valid reason to reject both systems, but doesn't pass the bar to stopping AI works in my opinion. To argue an alternative: If anything - many indie artists might be much more successful if they're allowed to play/remix/sample/use works that are currently sitting unused behind the outrageous copyright duration we have right now.
- DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
  The point of copyright is to protect the rights of human creators. AI tools are not human creators. If I go to an artist and say "make me a picture with X, Y, and Z features", they own the copyright unless they agree to transfer it to me. An AI tool never owns the copyright to its work because it's not a person, so you cannot acquire the copyright on the work since you didn't generate it. It's an entirely different process from using Photoshop (&c), and I think conflating them requires either a significant lack of understanding of how AI-based generation tools work (the most common issue) or a deliberate desire to confuse the issue.
  - tiborsaas 3y ago
    In this case, the winning image wasn't a single prompt to image. The author generated a lot of images and invested lots of hours into it till he considered it ready. AI was more like a custom stock asset generator in this case. We will need to seriously revise copyright laws in the age of AI because this new technology is simply not compatible with the assumptions the current ones are based on. (regardless how much lobby power are in them)
    - dahfizz 3y ago
      This is addressed in TFA: > The Board finds that the Work contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (“AI”), and this content must therefore be disclaimed in an application for registration. The human-authored portion of the work would be copyrightable if the author disclaimed the portions that were created by an LLM.
      - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
        Does this mean that if I use an even more deterministic tool like, say, autocomplete to write software, that bit (say an auto-generated function definition), doesn't attract copyright? Not that it doesn't make sense to say what they did, but it seems not quite compatible with how copyright already seems to work in practice. Which is, instead another demonstration that copyright in general is a pretty internally-inconsistent system when it comes to the details.
- fassssst 3y ago
  Especially since many of the tools in Photoshop have been backed by machine learning for many years now.
  - 40yearoldman 3y ago
    Given this it would seem running any simple algo such as balance colors or adjust lighting would disqualify the output for copyright. Only change here was the algo used.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      No, that isn’t true. If you do substantial original work and employ AI that is different than if the entire work is the output of AI. Nobody is saying using AI for any one part taints what is otherwise a substantially original work.
      - sgk284 3y ago
        The substantial original work here is the prompt authorship. That’s the “paintbrush” in this work. And the “paint” is the AI. It’s very easy to spend hours iterating on prompts for the perfect photo while using human judgment to figure out how to steer the image. That’s meaningful human involvement and should be able to be protected.
        nonethewiser 3y ago
        Sure. But where should that exist on the spectrum of copyrightability vs painting with a physical brush? I don’t think we can just handwave AI generated art away but isnt your contribution a lot less than painting?
        orwin 3y ago
        Does that mean an art gallery curators spending hours, days even over a thousand pictures that people took randomly finally finding the perfect one for a project he has should have the copyright to that picture? Considering it's not a professional, just a tourist that took it.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Is it? Should I be able to copyright painting the wall a particular color since, after all, many copyrighted works are created with brushes and paint?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  There's a perception (which AI hype has fed) that “AI” systems like MJ and SD are categorically different than traditional or digital artist tools, and are something like brute animals with paint on their paws making images: neither humans whose work copyright protects nor tools wielded by the hand of humans, but forces of nature where the human role is effectively a matter of selecting one of the generated outputs from a metaphorical pile left in the cage. This is a factor in shaping the legal treatment of work generated with the use of “AI” tools.
Someone1234 3y ago
I don't understand this... If I open Photoshop then via my inputs it indirectly generates pixels using various tools/brushes/automations, it is copyrightable. If I open an LLM, enter a bespoke prompt, then the tool generates pixels using that prompt, it isn't copyrightable. Things can be copyrightable even if there isn't a 1:1 between human input and copyright output. Where is the cut-off exactly? What about Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill, is that copyright or not? What if I take LLM output then color correct it, is that now my copyright? Since it effectively has no authorship before I color shifted it.
- emkoemko 3y ago
  so if i tell an artist to do some revisions i own that work now? what exactly did the human do in this case? wrote some words in a certain order? so the prompt is copy writable then? if that's the case can i just copywrite certain prompts that are commonly used?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    It seems highly likely that the prompt itself may be copyrighted, yes
  - js8 3y ago
    If a prompt is commonly used, then it wasn't created by you, and isn't copyrightable. It has to have enough original content so it could be copyrighted. I am sure a short poem is copyrightable. But then again, fair use also allows citing most (if not all) of the short poem.
- capnrefsmmat 3y ago
  > Where is the cut-off exactly? This is the difference between legal thinking and CS. There is a spectrum between 100% human-generated (and copyright-eligible) and 100% machine-generated (and ineligible), and in between there are gray areas. To us, that is a problem, because it implies ambiguity. Where is the cut-off? In law, that is normal. No actions are the same; everything is on a spectrum from allowed to illegal. Judging the boundary is made on a case-by-case basis through legal argument, evaluated by a judge or jury. So to the Copyright Office, it is sufficient to say that this particular way of AI generating art doesn't involve enough human creativity. But you won't get them to define enough in the abstract, for any general case, because that is essentially impossible, and can only be done by evaluating concrete cases.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
What troubles me so much about copyright in the context of AI generated images are that we don't have any clear "Bright-Line" for what constitutes human authorship. For example, let's say that I generate a bunch of images using Automatic1111 (the main Stable Diffusion webUI). This webUI has hundreds of extensions which give tons of additional functionality. If I generate an image using two controlnets, regional prompting (human deciding where particular prompt or part of prompt is applied in resulting image), and fancy prompt engineering (i.e. blending embeddings of multiple tags together, or deciding to change the prompt midway through the diffusion process), then I claim that I have put in enough human authorship that I think current courts should grant copyright in such a situation. The courts have decided that a human simply gathering a bunch of AI images into a kids book was "enough work" for the kids book to be copyrightable. If I put at least that kind of effort into making an image (i.e. by writing what is ultimately a program, see comfyUI workflows for a visual example), than I think that image should be owned by the human who wrote the program to generate it. Courts are dangerously close to deciding that any diffusion model being used as part of the images creative process would nullify the ability to copyright it.
- orwin 3y ago
  > The courts have decided that a human simply gathering a bunch of AI images into a kids book was "enough work" for the kids book to be copyrightable. Yes, the book is, the images aren't. > Courts are dangerously close to deciding that any diffusion model being used as part of the images creative process would nullify the ability to copyright it. I honestly think it should. Generative AI can't exist without public domain/unlicensed work. Even if your Lora is 100% copyrighted/personal work, most of the images that constitute the model are public property. Sale with any stuff written by ChatGPT, or any code by copilot. All should be open-source or public domain,at least. To me it should even be copyleft,so the book (to come back to it) should be public domain too.
dehrmann 3y ago
But the prompt could be copyrighted?
- bilbo0s 3y ago
  Depends. Did you read the EULA of the LLM you're using closely enough? I know that sounds shifty and underhanded, but the providers of these services have every right to slide a little nugget into their EULA that shares the rights to your prompts with them. Most even explicitly say they'll use prompts and other data to "improve the offering".
- khobragade 3y ago
  What would you do with it?
GaggiX 3y ago
I mean this is just going to promote "bad actors" that are not going to disclosured the use of AI with actual pieces that looks like created by a human.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
There’s going to be a lot of low effort takes about this. In the context of the Copyright Office’s previous few decisions this makes sense. Midjourney is toast if it does nothing to stop the by-design inertia of the quasi-caselaw way these things are decided. The source of the most flaws in the Zarya of the Dawn registration rejection came from the Copyright Office copying and pasting deeply flawed technical explanations directly from Midjourney. It’s on Midjourney and no one else. They ought to be paying a great IP firm to submit rebuttals on behalf of losing users, but whatever. “Yeah bro, but predict the future.” In this particular case, you're going to be able to register AI generated artwork - maybe not in the specific way that Midjourney does it, because the Copyright Office isn't going to pull their own pants down after issuing the Zarya of the Dawn decision, pulling their pants back up, in reaction to social media pulling their pants down. But ControlNets and T5-style grammatically substantive prompts will do. The recent Andy Warhol decision and the way Google Books actually panned out means Stability and Runway are boned, and probably Midjourney too. The Author's Guild-like litigants will get a small payout, they will not prevail in a huge way, but they will prevail - they actually prevailed in Google Books too but people don't understand that, the news reported it as "Google won" but it actually lost in that it settled and didn't get to do any of the things it really wanted to do. Meta will be forced to stop distributing its tainted LLaMA, express permission will be needed for all intents and purposes, but academics will be "fair use." I don't know if there's going to be some loophole to academize their work, it's just going to be hard to argue that compute resources and devops - the things Stability's, Runway's, Meta's teams really bring to the table compared to the academy - mean they ought to benefit from the same protections as a traditional education institution, in spite of being commercial entities. It remains to be seen what will happen with Adobe's efforts. Nobody would be talking about latent diffusion models or pixel diffusers or whatever if it weren't for the fact that they were trained on content that wasn't expressly permitted. So it doesn't matter if Adobe got express permission for the training inputs of its models, so long as it's also using this code that maybe wasn't "trained" (in the ML sense) on unpermissioned content in this particular case but was definitely authored in the context of unpermissioned content in an equally essential way. It's the same reason you can't conduct unethical human research and launder it into something clean. It taints everything. Anyway, I doubt Adobe trained their own text encoder unencumbered. It's acutely obvious with these community efforts at "training" stable diffusion "checkpoints" on "CC0" content. My dudes, you're using CLIP, which is trained on LAION 2b. It's just so painfully low information. Adobe will not prevail. But Adobe surely will convince the low information bros that their way is bulletproof. In an intellectually honest way, nobody using diffusers or transformers with permissioned content will just get away with it.
ssalka 3y ago
While we're at it, why not reject copyright on photographs? After all, it's just a machine capturing whatever's in front of it, all the human does is push a button. /s
bananapub 3y ago
seems fine? copyright exists in the US under this clause in the constitution: > “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” not sure how letting people copyright the output of a program that ate the work of a million other people would "promote the progress of science and useful arts"? or how there's an author to reward? or how there's writings or discoveries? of course this also applies to the US endlessly extending copyright also - nothing Congress can do, no matter how well intentioned, is going to encourage Walt Disney himself to produce anything new of value, nor did keeping Happy Birthday copyrighted until 70 years after the last Hill sister died assist any of them in coming back to life to come up with a second hit. the dumb optimistic part of my dreams that having matrix multiplications shitting out words and pictures will cause a reassessment of why we let IP laws get so fucked up to begin with, but of course, it won't - it'll just mean Disney and Warner et al will find some way to keep selling tv shows and movies and the humans who produced the art who get shoved into the matrices get shafted.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  How do you prove something wasn't AI generated so you can claim copyright on it? What does this mean for code generated by GitHub Copilot and friends, and IP assignment contracts?
  - bananapub 3y ago
    dunno. how do you prove you wrote a particular novel?
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      You never had to before, this could lead to the end of the current copyright law. Will wait and see what Disney thinks of this.
    - doctorpangloss 3y ago
      > how do you prove you wrote a particular novel? The forensics for that are easy. The forensics here are hard: how does a plaintiff in the USA prove that an AI, and not a person, wrote a novel, when the authors live in China?
rendall 3y ago
I think this decision is incorrect, even after reading the decision itself. There is human intervention at every step. Midjourney was made by humans. Were I to construct a robot that wandered about randomly snapping hundreds of photos, then I select one of the photos, apply Photoshop filters and then win an award, it sounds like the review board would reject registration. If I trained an AI model only on my own illustrations alone, it sounds like they would reject copyright registration. In all of these cases, humans were involved at every step.
bsenftner 3y ago
I'm somewhat curious about the legal status of publicly using / exhibiting and/or selling uncopyrightable media, such as AI generated imagery and video. If it is uncopyrightable, is it also a free for all - as in once publicly exhibited it is "free media" anyone can take and remix? What about AI generated media that includes / incorporates copyrighted elements, but used the legal loophole of parody? As parody, anyone can include copyright protected elements of others in their original works under US copyright law because satire is protected speech. If someone were to create a "satire AI" does that completely break copyright law?
JaneJLocane 3y ago
Thanks a lot!

42 points by kurthr 3y ago

It's odd to me that an image such of this is rejected unless labeled as generated by "AI", yet an image heavily edited in Photoshop or some other software with algorithms is not.

blamestross 3y ago
It is almost like intention in the method and process of those tools matters. Rather than bulk exploitation of other people's work.
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  There are AI tools like ControlNET that do give you intention in the method and process.
- horsawlarway 3y ago
  Ok - I'm going to pick on you since you responded with this first: Here's my argument: 1. Copyright in some sense is probably a net win for society. 2. Copyright in it's current legal form in the US is - fucking unquestionably - abusive. 7 years with a 7 year renewal after review? Probably ok, feels long in today's digital age. To the author's death? oof, that's a long time to protect works, but maybe I guess, in some specific fields of work. To the author's death PLUS 70 fucking years? Get the fuck out of here. Literally - who the fuck other than giant corporations is POSSIBLY benefiting from this? This is a fucking insane level of protection, and is outrageously harmful to generating new content (Just take a peak at all the fucking remakes that constitute our new films, and the miserable content licensing restrictions that pop up everywhere and kill so many new things) --- So my stance is firmly: Yep, they probably are taking some of your work. But also: Your work is also grounded in the work of others (again - fucking unquestionably). Further - the copyright system at large is SO fucking harmful that I don't really think it should exist anymore (side note: I'm really underplaying my feelings here, "nuke it from orbit" is probably still an understatement... "I'd like to see it suffer before it dies" is probably close). So... if you want to talk about bulk exploitation - go fucking yell at the current media companies, because holy fuck are they the worst fucking companies in the world to make this claim. They are leeches. If you want me to step to your side: CURB THE FUCKING ABUSE. Otherwise... you are the shitty cab company and the LLM is uber: Are they ethical? Eh - Nope. Are they unquestionable better for most people? Yes. Will I take a useful and unethical company over a stagnating and unethical company? Yes, yes I will. Would I prefer real governmental action to either of those? 100%.
  - blamestross 3y ago
    I agree with most of what you are saying, but the key gap is that the victims here are not "unethical companies". They are 5+ digits of independent artists who had no idea this was going to happen to them. If big art was a thing, your argument would be good, but Disney doesn't account for most of the input to these image algorithms.
    - horsawlarway 3y ago
      > They are 5+ digits of independent artists who had no idea this was going to happen to them. But these people are already making essentially zero income from copyright (it's mostly tours/merch), and have been (again, and again, and again) utterly fucked by the current publishing companies that are so interested (financially) in killing this AI work. They are already victims of the current system. I don't see how introducing AI changes their position all that much: They still have low bargaining power, low financial returns (avg is under 6k/year) and mostly aren't doing it as a career. Are a few of them exceptions? Absolutely. Will there keep being successful exceptions with AI: I'd bet yes (with a lot of cash). Will the way they work change? Probably. Some will enjoy the change, and some won't. I just don't see any compelling reason in your comment to argue to keep the current cluster-fuck of abuse that is modern copyright. Arguing that the currently abused might continue to be abused might be a valid reason to reject both systems, but doesn't pass the bar to stopping AI works in my opinion. To argue an alternative: If anything - many indie artists might be much more successful if they're allowed to play/remix/sample/use works that are currently sitting unused behind the outrageous copyright duration we have right now.
DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
The point of copyright is to protect the rights of human creators. AI tools are not human creators. If I go to an artist and say "make me a picture with X, Y, and Z features", they own the copyright unless they agree to transfer it to me. An AI tool never owns the copyright to its work because it's not a person, so you cannot acquire the copyright on the work since you didn't generate it. It's an entirely different process from using Photoshop (&c), and I think conflating them requires either a significant lack of understanding of how AI-based generation tools work (the most common issue) or a deliberate desire to confuse the issue.
- tiborsaas 3y ago
  In this case, the winning image wasn't a single prompt to image. The author generated a lot of images and invested lots of hours into it till he considered it ready. AI was more like a custom stock asset generator in this case. We will need to seriously revise copyright laws in the age of AI because this new technology is simply not compatible with the assumptions the current ones are based on. (regardless how much lobby power are in them)
  - dahfizz 3y ago
    This is addressed in TFA: > The Board finds that the Work contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (“AI”), and this content must therefore be disclaimed in an application for registration. The human-authored portion of the work would be copyrightable if the author disclaimed the portions that were created by an LLM.
    - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
      Does this mean that if I use an even more deterministic tool like, say, autocomplete to write software, that bit (say an auto-generated function definition), doesn't attract copyright? Not that it doesn't make sense to say what they did, but it seems not quite compatible with how copyright already seems to work in practice. Which is, instead another demonstration that copyright in general is a pretty internally-inconsistent system when it comes to the details.
fassssst 3y ago
Especially since many of the tools in Photoshop have been backed by machine learning for many years now.
- 40yearoldman 3y ago
  Given this it would seem running any simple algo such as balance colors or adjust lighting would disqualify the output for copyright. Only change here was the algo used.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    No, that isn’t true. If you do substantial original work and employ AI that is different than if the entire work is the output of AI. Nobody is saying using AI for any one part taints what is otherwise a substantially original work.
    - sgk284 3y ago
      The substantial original work here is the prompt authorship. That’s the “paintbrush” in this work. And the “paint” is the AI. It’s very easy to spend hours iterating on prompts for the perfect photo while using human judgment to figure out how to steer the image. That’s meaningful human involvement and should be able to be protected.
      - nonethewiser 3y ago
        Sure. But where should that exist on the spectrum of copyrightability vs painting with a physical brush? I don’t think we can just handwave AI generated art away but isnt your contribution a lot less than painting?
      - orwin 3y ago
        Does that mean an art gallery curators spending hours, days even over a thousand pictures that people took randomly finally finding the perfect one for a project he has should have the copyright to that picture? Considering it's not a professional, just a tourist that took it.
emodendroket 3y ago
Is it? Should I be able to copyright painting the wall a particular color since, after all, many copyrighted works are created with brushes and paint?
dragonwriter 3y ago
There's a perception (which AI hype has fed) that “AI” systems like MJ and SD are categorically different than traditional or digital artist tools, and are something like brute animals with paint on their paws making images: neither humans whose work copyright protects nor tools wielded by the hand of humans, but forces of nature where the human role is effectively a matter of selecting one of the generated outputs from a metaphorical pile left in the cage. This is a factor in shaping the legal treatment of work generated with the use of “AI” tools.

Someone1234 3y ago

I don't understand this... If I open Photoshop then via my inputs it indirectly generates pixels using various tools/brushes/automations, it is copyrightable. If I open an LLM, enter a bespoke prompt, then the tool generates pixels using that prompt, it isn't copyrightable. Things can be copyrightable even if there isn't a 1:1 between human input and copyright output. Where is the cut-off exactly? What about Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill, is that copyright or not? What if I take LLM output then color correct it, is that now my copyright? Since it effectively has no authorship before I color shifted it.

emkoemko 3y ago
so if i tell an artist to do some revisions i own that work now? what exactly did the human do in this case? wrote some words in a certain order? so the prompt is copy writable then? if that's the case can i just copywrite certain prompts that are commonly used?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- emodendroket 3y ago
  It seems highly likely that the prompt itself may be copyrighted, yes
- js8 3y ago
  If a prompt is commonly used, then it wasn't created by you, and isn't copyrightable. It has to have enough original content so it could be copyrighted. I am sure a short poem is copyrightable. But then again, fair use also allows citing most (if not all) of the short poem.
capnrefsmmat 3y ago
> Where is the cut-off exactly? This is the difference between legal thinking and CS. There is a spectrum between 100% human-generated (and copyright-eligible) and 100% machine-generated (and ineligible), and in between there are gray areas. To us, that is a problem, because it implies ambiguity. Where is the cut-off? In law, that is normal. No actions are the same; everything is on a spectrum from allowed to illegal. Judging the boundary is made on a case-by-case basis through legal argument, evaluated by a judge or jury. So to the Copyright Office, it is sufficient to say that this particular way of AI generating art doesn't involve enough human creativity. But you won't get them to define enough in the abstract, for any general case, because that is essentially impossible, and can only be done by evaluating concrete cases.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

What troubles me so much about copyright in the context of AI generated images are that we don't have any clear "Bright-Line" for what constitutes human authorship. For example, let's say that I generate a bunch of images using Automatic1111 (the main Stable Diffusion webUI). This webUI has hundreds of extensions which give tons of additional functionality. If I generate an image using two controlnets, regional prompting (human deciding where particular prompt or part of prompt is applied in resulting image), and fancy prompt engineering (i.e. blending embeddings of multiple tags together, or deciding to change the prompt midway through the diffusion process), then I claim that I have put in enough human authorship that I think current courts should grant copyright in such a situation. The courts have decided that a human simply gathering a bunch of AI images into a kids book was "enough work" for the kids book to be copyrightable. If I put at least that kind of effort into making an image (i.e. by writing what is ultimately a program, see comfyUI workflows for a visual example), than I think that image should be owned by the human who wrote the program to generate it. Courts are dangerously close to deciding that any diffusion model being used as part of the images creative process would nullify the ability to copyright it.

orwin 3y ago
> The courts have decided that a human simply gathering a bunch of AI images into a kids book was "enough work" for the kids book to be copyrightable. Yes, the book is, the images aren't. > Courts are dangerously close to deciding that any diffusion model being used as part of the images creative process would nullify the ability to copyright it. I honestly think it should. Generative AI can't exist without public domain/unlicensed work. Even if your Lora is 100% copyrighted/personal work, most of the images that constitute the model are public property. Sale with any stuff written by ChatGPT, or any code by copilot. All should be open-source or public domain,at least. To me it should even be copyleft,so the book (to come back to it) should be public domain too.

dehrmann 3y ago

But the prompt could be copyrighted?

bilbo0s 3y ago
Depends. Did you read the EULA of the LLM you're using closely enough? I know that sounds shifty and underhanded, but the providers of these services have every right to slide a little nugget into their EULA that shares the rights to your prompts with them. Most even explicitly say they'll use prompts and other data to "improve the offering".
khobragade 3y ago
What would you do with it?

GaggiX 3y ago

I mean this is just going to promote "bad actors" that are not going to disclosured the use of AI with actual pieces that looks like created by a human.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

There’s going to be a lot of low effort takes about this. In the context of the Copyright Office’s previous few decisions this makes sense. Midjourney is toast if it does nothing to stop the by-design inertia of the quasi-caselaw way these things are decided. The source of the most flaws in the Zarya of the Dawn registration rejection came from the Copyright Office copying and pasting deeply flawed technical explanations directly from Midjourney. It’s on Midjourney and no one else. They ought to be paying a great IP firm to submit rebuttals on behalf of losing users, but whatever. “Yeah bro, but predict the future.” In this particular case, you're going to be able to register AI generated artwork - maybe not in the specific way that Midjourney does it, because the Copyright Office isn't going to pull their own pants down after issuing the Zarya of the Dawn decision, pulling their pants back up, in reaction to social media pulling their pants down. But ControlNets and T5-style grammatically substantive prompts will do. The recent Andy Warhol decision and the way Google Books actually panned out means Stability and Runway are boned, and probably Midjourney too. The Author's Guild-like litigants will get a small payout, they will not prevail in a huge way, but they will prevail - they actually prevailed in Google Books too but people don't understand that, the news reported it as "Google won" but it actually lost in that it settled and didn't get to do any of the things it really wanted to do. Meta will be forced to stop distributing its tainted LLaMA, express permission will be needed for all intents and purposes, but academics will be "fair use." I don't know if there's going to be some loophole to academize their work, it's just going to be hard to argue that compute resources and devops - the things Stability's, Runway's, Meta's teams really bring to the table compared to the academy - mean they ought to benefit from the same protections as a traditional education institution, in spite of being commercial entities. It remains to be seen what will happen with Adobe's efforts. Nobody would be talking about latent diffusion models or pixel diffusers or whatever if it weren't for the fact that they were trained on content that wasn't expressly permitted. So it doesn't matter if Adobe got express permission for the training inputs of its models, so long as it's also using this code that maybe wasn't "trained" (in the ML sense) on unpermissioned content in this particular case but was definitely authored in the context of unpermissioned content in an equally essential way. It's the same reason you can't conduct unethical human research and launder it into something clean. It taints everything. Anyway, I doubt Adobe trained their own text encoder unencumbered. It's acutely obvious with these community efforts at "training" stable diffusion "checkpoints" on "CC0" content. My dudes, you're using CLIP, which is trained on LAION 2b. It's just so painfully low information. Adobe will not prevail. But Adobe surely will convince the low information bros that their way is bulletproof. In an intellectually honest way, nobody using diffusers or transformers with permissioned content will just get away with it.

ssalka 3y ago

While we're at it, why not reject copyright on photographs? After all, it's just a machine capturing whatever's in front of it, all the human does is push a button. /s

bananapub 3y ago

seems fine? copyright exists in the US under this clause in the constitution: > “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” not sure how letting people copyright the output of a program that ate the work of a million other people would "promote the progress of science and useful arts"? or how there's an author to reward? or how there's writings or discoveries? of course this also applies to the US endlessly extending copyright also - nothing Congress can do, no matter how well intentioned, is going to encourage Walt Disney himself to produce anything new of value, nor did keeping Happy Birthday copyrighted until 70 years after the last Hill sister died assist any of them in coming back to life to come up with a second hit. the dumb optimistic part of my dreams that having matrix multiplications shitting out words and pictures will cause a reassessment of why we let IP laws get so fucked up to begin with, but of course, it won't - it'll just mean Disney and Warner et al will find some way to keep selling tv shows and movies and the humans who produced the art who get shoved into the matrices get shafted.

candiddevmike 3y ago
How do you prove something wasn't AI generated so you can claim copyright on it? What does this mean for code generated by GitHub Copilot and friends, and IP assignment contracts?
- bananapub 3y ago
  dunno. how do you prove you wrote a particular novel?
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    You never had to before, this could lead to the end of the current copyright law. Will wait and see what Disney thinks of this.
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    > how do you prove you wrote a particular novel? The forensics for that are easy. The forensics here are hard: how does a plaintiff in the USA prove that an AI, and not a person, wrote a novel, when the authors live in China?

rendall 3y ago

I think this decision is incorrect, even after reading the decision itself. There is human intervention at every step. Midjourney was made by humans. Were I to construct a robot that wandered about randomly snapping hundreds of photos, then I select one of the photos, apply Photoshop filters and then win an award, it sounds like the review board would reject registration. If I trained an AI model only on my own illustrations alone, it sounds like they would reject copyright registration. In all of these cases, humans were involved at every step.

bsenftner 3y ago

I'm somewhat curious about the legal status of publicly using / exhibiting and/or selling uncopyrightable media, such as AI generated imagery and video. If it is uncopyrightable, is it also a free for all - as in once publicly exhibited it is "free media" anyone can take and remix? What about AI generated media that includes / incorporates copyrighted elements, but used the legal loophole of parody? As parody, anyone can include copyright protected elements of others in their original works under US copyright law because satire is protected speech. If someone were to create a "satire AI" does that completely break copyright law?

JaneJLocane 3y ago

Thanks a lot!