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You are not missing anything: you are asking the key question in that process. We don’t have an answer. As a society, we agree that you, a human, copying art y
by bertil 3y ago
You are not missing anything: you are asking the key question in that process. We don’t have an answer.
As a society, we agree that you, a human, copying art you’ve seen is original (or at least derivative enough that it warrants a new copyright).
We agree that a photocopy machine, or rather a human operating one, is copying art in a way that is not creative enough to warrant a copyright — so the human goes to jail.
As a society, we have not agreed upon how transformative a “work” from a generative AI has to be to count as original, or even if it can. A recent decision claimed that no machine work without human effort would count — ignoring the effort to find good prompts, pick an image and edit it further. An AI is different because no much was “trained” to make art before AIs: some animals were (elephants famously), and who owns their work is tricky — there’s a case of a photo, a selfie actually, taken by a macaque that is really interesting in that regard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
My recommendation would be to have a similar system to what we have for music (and I think plays) where there are two or three “authors”: the person who wrote the score, optionally the person who wrote the lyrics, and the interpret: the singer. It gets really fun when you have orchestras, animals involved in making music, or sound-sampling like in RnB.
We could have original human authors and AI adaptors, each paid based on use. If I like your work, I could commission OpenAI to make “a portrait in the style of alistairSH” based on your DeviantArt work, but of my mother (whom you’ve never met), using photos that I’ve uploaded of her. I can pay OpenAI, who would pay you. Style vs. theme could be separated with current AI technology, although that could get just as complicated as every intellectual property process very fast.
- alistairSH 3y agoIf I build a Rube Goldberg painting machine and somebody else "pulls the trigger" to start the machine, who owns the output? Me or the other person? In the case of today's AI models, I could see arguing that the creator of the AI or the creator of the prompt have some rights to a specific output, but not the AI itself. The monkey case seems fairly cut-and-dry to me - the monkey didn't steal the camera (as often reported) - the photographer engineered a situation to get the result (he set up the camera, the tripod, and held onto the tripod so the monkey wouldn't steal the whole rig). It's his art. If the monkey actually stole the camera, then it's nobody's art - just a random occurrence. If an artist orchestrates a group of humans to create art, the art belongs to the artist, not the group (as far as I know - I'd love to hear otherwise). I guess for me, given today's technology, I don't see an "AI" as any different than a Rube Goldberg machine hurling paint at a wall. A human had to create the AI and a human had to prompt the AI, one or both of them own the art. And in all cases, the art is always based on something the human saw previously. No art exists in a vacuum. And I agree that a system like music rights might be appropriate. The AI author, the AI prompter, and probably anybody involved in the training data, all have some right to the output. Then the question is what % to each, but that's solvable.
- bertil 3y agoThe best equivalent in this case would be the engineers working on Photoshop for Adobe: they write Rube-Goldbergian code to detect shapes, colors, and let artists click once to detour, cast shadows, adjust palette, etc.
- wanderingstan 3y agoExcellent point regarding the famous Monkey selfie, which I think points to the emerging issue of biological vs artificial agents. It presents a sort of mirrored view of the GenAI issue: The human photographer does not get credit because the monkey is deemed to be the "agent of intent" rather than him, presumably because it's a living thing. If a photograph was triggered instead by a human tossing a rock onto the shutter, no one would claim that the rock now holds the copyright! Interesting thought experiment to replace the monkey with other "organic agents" and some method for them to trigger a photo: A squirrel? A lizard? A cockroach? A slime mold? At what point is the organism so "simple" that you say it was just part of the system/mechanism? Then on the artificial side, to replace the monkey with different mechanisms (as was your point): A photocopier seems quite different to a GenAI model. At what point does the human who set up the situation stop being the "agent"? Relevant concept of the Intentional Stance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance EDIT: Or at the far end of the spectrum, what about "art" that is made from DNA activity?! Does the copyright belong to the DNA? https://www.labiotech.eu/trends-news/gene-craft-laurie-ramsell-gina-czarnecki/ https://www.labiotech.eu/trends-news/gene-craft-laurie-ramse...
- bertil 3y agoThe concept of "agent of intent" definitely empowers the person using a GenAI too