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Purely AI driven art is already defacto public domain in the US in that it is not copyrightable. See https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-of

Purely AI driven art is already defacto public domain in the US in that it is not copyrightable. See https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off... There is a spectrum of what AI generated means. At one end is simply photoshopped pictures. In many cases these were touched by AI, in that some algorithm decided on the specific pixels, but the image was largely directed by a person and is generally considered copyrightable. On the other end is the uncopyrightable case where a person just typed in a prompt and out comes art. Where the line is in between has yet to be decided. What if I spend hours tweaking an image generated initally by an AI. At what point does it become copyrightable? What if I spend hours creating a complex graph? That's similar to source code of a computer program, and the output of compilers is protected... From the other direction, at what point does something copyrightable manipulated by AI lose it's protected status?

creer 3y ago
That ruling doesn't say that AI driven art is not copyrightable
- EgoIncarnate 3y ago
  I tried to explain that AI was ruled not copyrightable if a human wasn't meaningfully involved. Meaningfully involved being a bit blurry, with art generated from a prompt being the only explict thing so far ruled not copyrightable. Do you have a different take?
  - creer 3y ago
    My impression is that in all these rulings, the humans doing the filings go out of their way to claim that the author was the AI or machine or animal ("machine" thereafter), or the owner of the patent or copyright is the machine, or the plaintiff in a copyright court filing is the machine. With usually the human acting on behalf of the machine, or the machine transfering their copyright to the human, etc. They have an agenda which is NOT about generating art mechanically. It's more about "machine personhood light" - perhaps as a first step to full machine personhood. These people are not trying to "copyright AI-generated stuff", they are trying to make a legal person of the machine. And the copyright office or the courts are not ready to go there - certainly not for a BS copyright claim. In this 2022 ruling, the human further goes out of their way to provide a note saying they didn't have anything to do with it! - they just want to own the copyright on the "work of authorship of the machine". So anyway, I don't think any of these rulings preclude a human clicking five times in a generative AI tool (basically just logging in and saving one image they choose out of a dozen - perhaps even saying "I will claim the first image" before logging in) and then filing for copyright protection - as long they they claim human authorship. That is, none of these rulings seem to demand significant human intervention in the use of a tool, as long it is filed with the human as the author and copyright owner and financially impacted entity (for a court filing). And this would be consistent with the art world view that art is whatever the (self-described) artist says is art. That is, anyone can call themselves an artist, and then by definition if they say they created something and that this something is art then it's art. And they certainly don't need to do any of the manual work themselves - that's what assistants, contractors, dumb luck etc are there for. It's possible that there will be eventually some ruling that "more human intervention" is needed but I haven't seen that. There has been mention of "element of human creativity needed" but - as far as I can tell - not in a clean case where there wasn't some other agenda or shenanigans going on.

creer 3y ago

That ruling doesn't say that AI driven art is not copyrightable

EgoIncarnate 3y ago
I tried to explain that AI was ruled not copyrightable if a human wasn't meaningfully involved. Meaningfully involved being a bit blurry, with art generated from a prompt being the only explict thing so far ruled not copyrightable. Do you have a different take?
- creer 3y ago
  My impression is that in all these rulings, the humans doing the filings go out of their way to claim that the author was the AI or machine or animal ("machine" thereafter), or the owner of the patent or copyright is the machine, or the plaintiff in a copyright court filing is the machine. With usually the human acting on behalf of the machine, or the machine transfering their copyright to the human, etc. They have an agenda which is NOT about generating art mechanically. It's more about "machine personhood light" - perhaps as a first step to full machine personhood. These people are not trying to "copyright AI-generated stuff", they are trying to make a legal person of the machine. And the copyright office or the courts are not ready to go there - certainly not for a BS copyright claim. In this 2022 ruling, the human further goes out of their way to provide a note saying they didn't have anything to do with it! - they just want to own the copyright on the "work of authorship of the machine". So anyway, I don't think any of these rulings preclude a human clicking five times in a generative AI tool (basically just logging in and saving one image they choose out of a dozen - perhaps even saying "I will claim the first image" before logging in) and then filing for copyright protection - as long they they claim human authorship. That is, none of these rulings seem to demand significant human intervention in the use of a tool, as long it is filed with the human as the author and copyright owner and financially impacted entity (for a court filing). And this would be consistent with the art world view that art is whatever the (self-described) artist says is art. That is, anyone can call themselves an artist, and then by definition if they say they created something and that this something is art then it's art. And they certainly don't need to do any of the manual work themselves - that's what assistants, contractors, dumb luck etc are there for. It's possible that there will be eventually some ruling that "more human intervention" is needed but I haven't seen that. There has been mention of "element of human creativity needed" but - as far as I can tell - not in a clean case where there wasn't some other agenda or shenanigans going on.