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US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Does this apply to all LLM outputs? (i.e., training a model on outputs from another model, a-la-DeepSeek?
• SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  > Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright Act is that human authorship is required for registration This is going to be a very selective judgment.
  • phyzix5761 2y ago
    As all interpretations of law are. That's why there's the profession of lawyer and they make very good money if they can convince a judge and jury of their interpretation of the law. As a software engineer I see the dangers of such an inexact system. Where we can put people in jail for the rest of their lives or let others go free just because there's so much gray area in the interpretation of the law.
    • yifanl 2y ago
      The inexactness of law is what makes it possible to extend it to novel situations like this. We don't live at the end of history.
    • capital_guy 2y ago
      This is a point of hubris I see among SWEs very frequently, for some reason. People like to think they could make a better system, one that's black and white. The truth is the use of judgement and context is essential to a good legal system.
    • vharuck 2y ago
      Exact systems that put people in jail would be much more terrifying, because they'd achieve simplicity by ignoring complexity. The existence of the state and federal supreme courts in the US shows the need for careful consideration of how laws interact with one another and an ever-changing world.
    • dave4420 2y ago
      As a software engineer I see the dangers of a nominally exhaustively-specified system. Where people would spend their lives in jail or go free depending on whether a majority of legislators had considered that particular edge case. It’s better than judges have some discretion.
  • j_w 2y ago
    It may not be you doing the work to generate it, but if you are distributing illegal content that is still illegal no matter how you generated it.
  • delusional 2y ago
    That is not what the ruling says Two quotes from the judgement > On the application, Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author and himself as just the work’s owner. and > Nor do we reach Dr. Thaler’s argument that he is the work’s author by virtue of making and using the Creativity Machine because that argument was waived before the agency. Make it very clear that this is NOT an opinion on if a human being can be said to be the author of a work that they used an AI to generate. Dr. Thaler listed the machine itself as the author on the original application, and has therefore conceded that he is not the author. The courts cannot concluded that he filled out the form in error, and must accept the facts as given. This judgment says that if you decide that the machine is the author, then you can't claim copyright. It says nothing about what happens if you claim that you are the author. This would of course not carry over when we talk about liability, since the defendant doesn't get to decide what the claim is in those cases.
  • elmerfud 2y ago
    No that is not the logical take that is an extremely illogical extension of what was said. What was upheld was narrowly tailored in regards to copyright protections. If you're saying that the AI created deep fake cannot be copyrighted well then you would be in line with what the court said. If you are saying that there is a logical extension that a machine created something at the behest of a human that that human cannot be held responsible for the creation, that is not what is being said at all. As a matter of fact there is a long history of things and not being able to be copyrighted but people can still be held criminally liable for.
• tehjoker 2y ago
  interesting, i bet AI assisted art is copyrightable though (i.e. have AI do the "boring" parts and have the human do the interesting parts) here's one way I think that could be helpful. I read an interview with the final fantasy 6 director where he said doing a final fantasy 6 remake would probably take 20 years because the amount of content (and various art decisions) would take so much longer to make under today's expectations. I wonder if projects like that would be closer to possible if artists could get AI to do maybe 10-20% of the work for them, like a 1st pass at background scenery or a 3d model or something or fixing a small flaws in motion capture that said, i sympathize with the artists because i want to control every penstroke and every keystroke, maybe AI assisted art is a more difficult problem than it sounds. most likely AI assisted art will look less like prompting and more like advanced photoshop tools (like take this line sketch + a prompt and rough shade it for me).
  • wildzzz 2y ago
    I'm guessing it's something like 80% of the tasks only take 20% of the time. I'm sure AI generated textures could speed some of the development work up but I'm sure the majority of the work would still involve the small adjustments and tuning of the models. AI gets the gist right but the devil is in the details so designers may end up spending more time fixing what's wrong versus just doing it the traditional way.
    • tehjoker 2y ago
      Maybe it would be more useful in adding a different kind variation to proceduraly generated content, but on the other hand, when you don't precisely know what you're going to get, it's hard to reason about how it will be used. i could kind of see some potential in something like based on the different kinds of choices a player makes in the game, it could generate different portraits or character designs, but you can also do that with a large library of human art or with art with modular pieces. the thing AI can do is create something custom and individualized for a player, but on the other hand, by being too personalized, you destroy commonalities in the game that people can appreciate together.
  • sophrocyne 2y ago
• kristopolous 2y ago
  "affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law" Does that exist? What would that even be? A "random2image" model?
  • shadowgovt 2y ago
    The plaintiff is asserting it exists. He could easily resolve the issue by listing himself, not the AI, as the creator of the work, but he's pushing the point to concretize it into law.
  • kopecs 2y ago
    As a matter of law? Sure it does. Thaler said the image at issue was "autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine". He's been trying to walk that back for the last couple of years though. See Thaler v. Perlmutter, 1:22-cv01564-BAH (ECF #24), D.D.C. (Aug. 18, 2023).
    • visarga 2y ago
      How about selection? If I select the good image from 1000 others? Curation is also a contribution to art.
      • ZeroTalent 2y ago
        I would say curation and editing are much more important than creating the art itself, but that might be a very unpopular opinion.
        • johnnyanmac 2y ago
          Perhaps. The argument here is that neither was done, however.
      • dragonwriter 2y ago
        The argument about whether human selection would make the human the author of the work is irrelevant, because the human in this case isn't claiming authorship, by selection or otherwise.
• anticristi 2y ago
  These judges are going to be in serious trouble once AI turns against us. #AIRights
  • luqtas 2y ago
    i think you'll be in great trouble by gossiping about the AI takeover /s
• flowerthoughts 2y ago
  So are distillation models copyrightable? Can't wait until models generate models and we are finally free of the copyright and software patent troll extorsion rackets.
  • ronsor 2y ago
    There's a fair chance models of any kind are not copyrightable.
    • shagie 2y ago
      My take on it... The models are not copyrightable, they are a derivative work of the collection of works that went into producing them as they are a mathematical transformation of that data. Related to the other famous example - https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-12-22-14.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-12-22-14.pdf > The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings although the Office may register a work where the applicant or the deposit copy(its) state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit. > Examples: > • A photograph taken by a monkey. It then goes on... > Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. I believe that taking a bunch of photographs (or other works) and producing a model falls into that category of a machine or mechanical process that operates without creative input. However I do also believe that a model is sufficiently transformative that it, in of itself, is not an infringement... and however again, the output of the model is not copyrightable itself and it may be infringing upon the works used to produce it.
• bogwog 2y ago
  I think that's a good ruling. Say I create a website that just sells AI generated logos. I set up some automation so I'm constantly generating millions of logos per day. I also have a bot that scrapes the web to try and find anyone using a logo similar to the ones on my website, and then send legal threats demanding payment for copying my artwork. I'm sure more imaginative scammers will find a way to copyright troll using AI.
  • kopecs 2y ago
    I don't think it takes that much imagination here. Not sure what good the first step is actually doing you. Might as well just AI-generate your racketeering demand letters without doing that part.
    • bogwog 2y ago
      If I just send fake letters, it's illegal (I assume). If I have a legitimate website selling logos, and point to the product page for the logo I accused you of copying, and I can claim copyright ownership over AI generated art, then I have the law on my side even if I get taken to court (I assume). I'm not a lawyer though, so I'm probably wrong. At the very least, the legitimate website makes the threatening letter look more believable.
  • robertlagrant 2y ago
    This is doing it the long way round. Just set up a website that generates every combination of pixels as you scroll down it. Or just scrape logos, barely change them, and publish them and threaten legal action.
    • bogwog 2y ago
      I like this idea. It's like the library of babel (https://libraryofbabel.info https://libraryofbabel.info), but for logos.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >Just set up a website that generates every combination of pixels as you scroll down it. Sure. I guess when it finishes your great great grand-children (I might be very generous here too) can deal with the fallout of such a brute force algorithm.
• wildzzz 2y ago
  This is pretty much the exact same case as the monkey that took a photo. The photo is now in the public domain as the monkey cannot be an author of the photo and since the photographer didn't take the photo, neither is he the author. The US Copyright Office clarified that "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention". If you placed some food on a camera trigger and the animal reached for it, taking a photo in the process, that would likely be human intervention. I feel as if this applies to AI as well. A computer cannot be the author but as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author. Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a rest.
  • Klomikij 2y ago
    [dead]
  • ourmandave 2y ago
    Can they still try the Corporations Are People angle?
    • kopecs 2y ago
      In what way do you think corporate personhood is relevant here?
      • pnut 2y ago
        Obviously corporations are a legal fiction and not biological human entities with inherent intelligence and agency. They are tools to enable the wills of specific human beings, so the comparison seems fair?
        • kopecs 2y ago
          What comparison do you think the parent comment is making? They just vaguely gesture at corporate personhood and say "what about that?" My best reading of it is "can 'they' say that corporations can author works?" and excepting works for hire, no, "they" can't.
• Leary 2y ago
  So OpenAI's ChatGPT output cannot be copyrighted and it's legal to distill it?
  • flowerlad 2y ago
    Just because the output of the model cannot be copyrighted doesn’t mean the model itself can’t be copyrighted.
  • kube-system 2y ago
    No, the court did not say that AI output cannot be copyrighted. They said that a machine cannot hold the copyright.
• intrasight 2y ago
  What, if any, practical implications does this have? Why would a real person or company want to specify a non real person as an author?
  • cvoss 2y ago
    The practical implication is you can't copyright something that your AI generated. As the article notes, copyright applications are also being rejected in cases where a human asserts authorship over an AI generated work.
    • intrasight 2y ago
      That's a legal implication. I'm asking what is it a practical implication. Why would an AI want to copyright their work?
      • anigbrowl 2y ago
        So that you can run an AI company, churn out enough material to flood a particular market, and leverage copyright protection to cash in. Like say you call it the Kittenator, and then do automated keyword search for anything involving kittens - kitten in a box, kitten wearing socks, kittens on the rocks, kitten versus fox - and generate 25 different images for any given keyword combination, and push them out to major image-sharing platforms. The stock imagery market is pretty large but if you have the copyright enforcement in your pocket you can go after it in chunks.
        • jachee 2y ago
          Pretty sure Adobe is doing exactly this.
        • kube-system 2y ago
          You don't need an AI assigned copyright to do that. Companies have humans at them too.
• numpad0 2y ago
  Why are topics of image generator AI always so chock full of '0x3F', confusion, rage, and hatred, often attributed to hand-wavy strawman "luddites"? As if, I mean I'm suspecting that, exposure to generative image output is triggering model collapse even for us humans?
• deleted 2y ago
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• jedberg 2y ago
  I'm not sure how this actually matters. Knowing this ruling exists, why would anyone ever claim an AI created their art without human assistance? Even if the AI created the art just from the prompt, the human still made the prompt. Even if the prompt was "make art". I just don't understand how you could ever have AI art without human intervention. Is there a legal definition of "human intervention" that has some minimum amount of work?
  • bilbo0s 2y ago
    Pretty sure this wouldn't pass the merit part unless the prompt was unusually long and precise. the human still made the prompt What I can guarantee, is that series of prompts itself would be copyright-able. (The series of prompts that ultimately created the image.) No matter how little they may weigh any one of those prompts in isolation. That is, assuming the EULA of the LLM doesn't require you to essentially place your prompts in the public domain. And of course, <s> everyone reads the EULA. Right? </s>
    • kopecs 2y ago
      > What I can guarantee, is that the prompt itself would be copyright-able. That's non-obvious to me. Even if the prompt is extremely long and precise, if it is somehow purely functional, it seems possible for it to not be (although in practice, I agree that most prompts could be).
      • sgc 2y ago
        It is basically pseudo-code, and should have the same copyright as other code if it is sufficiently complex to pass the typical test for copyright. One might think code should not have copyright, but that is a different conversation.
        • deleted 2y ago
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        • kopecs 2y ago
• iamleppert 2y ago
  So just don't tell anyone you used AI? How exactly are they going to prove it? And does this mean any works created with the assistance of graphics software, like Photoshop, are not copyrightable? What is the definition of AI here? They failed to define what AI means, which means that if there is no test, the ruling can't stand on its own.
  • internetter 2y ago
    there are a lot of ways to detect AI generated imagery with low false-positives (though false-negatives are a risk)
  • favorited 2y ago
    It's not the appeals court's job to "define what AI means," their job is to rule on the case in front of them. This particular case involved someone asserting copyright over an image that he claimed was generated by a sentient[0] AI. This image was not created by a human, and only works created by humans can be copyrighted under US law, so they ruled against him. [0]https://thenewstack.io/stephen-thaler-claims-hes-built-a-sentient-ai/ https://thenewstack.io/stephen-thaler-claims-hes-built-a-sen...
    • borgdefenser 2y ago
      Thank you. That sounds perfectly sensible.
  • amelius 2y ago
    I suspect in the future we will have a jury consisting of people who are good at prompting. They will load a model that existed at a given time (e.g. when the "author" claimed they came up with the design), and then try to get similar art by just using prompting. Then a judge checks if the art looks similar, and if the prompts were simple enough. We could have a similar approach with patents.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • kube-system 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
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• Vt71fcAqt7 2y ago
  The title seems to be editorialized? The title I see is "US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator"
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Maybe it was deliberately trimmed - HN titles have a length limit.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• behindai 2y ago
  Interesting, what if I create my art using AI (Photoshop AI fill or ChatGPT)
• kerblang 2y ago
  I think there needs to be legal delineation between "I wrote a program that helps me create artwork" vs. "I wrote a program that scrapes the internet so I can plagiarize other people's artwork" i.e. AI.
  • Lerc 2y ago
    Your comment represents a common oversight that people seem to have in this debate. Training a model on data is a different thing to scraping data. Generating output from a model is a different thing to training a model. Each aspect of these things can and should be evaluated individually, furthermore, each relationship between them should be evaluated individually. Make an argument for what things are good or bad and then make an argument for how the relationships between them influence each aspect.
• jmward01 2y ago
  I doubt this will settle the issue. We are about to enter the age of AI generated X (movies, games, etc. 'I want to watch a western tonight.' ...'generating'...). Would the end user own the copyright on that since they prompted it? We are very early days still so the deep implications of the direction and potential of this technology aren't even remotely understood well enough yet.
  • smeeger 2y ago
    such an important topic right here. are we really going to enter an age of media that is AI generated or are we entering an age where media bifurcates into two broad categories: AI sloppish brain rot and more refined products that are hand made.
    • lyu07282 2y ago
      > two broad categories: AI sloppish brain rot and more refined products that are hand made If we graph it: Sloppishness is the Y axis and if we then put progres-in-AI on the X axis, the two lines will eventually touch each other. With some segment¹ of the population not being able to tell the difference sooner than others, slowly reducing available budget of handmade media, increasing it's slop over time. Therefore progress in AI will reduce the quality of even handmade media. ¹ https://pleated-jeans.com/2024/07/15/boomers-fooled-by-ai-facebook-pictures/ https://pleated-jeans.com/2024/07/15/boomers-fooled-by-ai-fa...
  • protocolture 2y ago
    So far it seems that in 99% of cases the user who generated the content owns it. The issue is that, for the US in particular, the bar is a bit higher on how much human input is required. But generally, some human labor needs to be mixed with the result for it to be yours. Every jurisdictions going to come up with a different standard, and then there will be an international treaty on it and then everyone will pipe down.
• ssalka 2y ago
  I think the headline is overly broad, especially considering: > As a matter of statutory law, the Copyright Act requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Dr. Thaler’s copyright registration application listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author, even though the Creativity Machine is not a human being. As a result, the Copyright Office appropriately denied Dr. Thaler’s application. It seems like Dr. Thaler's argument was just weak, since generative AI works often are authored in the first instance by a human being. For instance, any Midjourney or Stable Diffusion-generated image will be sourced from a prompt, which is typically written by a human. Anyone who has spent a little time trying to craft the perfect prompt knows there is a creative process therein that represents real work being done by a human. Similarly for img2img workflows, using a real photograph taken by a human. There, AI is only being used to transform a copyrightable input. Therefore such works – though certainly not all AI works – should be eligible for copyright, IMO.
  • creer 2y ago
    Thaler seems to go out of his way to claim no human intervention and authorship by the AI - So yeah, that's a very specific ruling that has little to do with AI as a tool. It's really more about AI personhood. What's potentially more of a problem is the mention of artists using Midjourney and denied copyright - and very much separate cases from Thaler.
    • Suppafly 2y ago
      >Thaler seems to go out of his way to claim no human intervention and authorship by the AI - So yeah, that's a very specific ruling that has little to do with AI as a tool. It's really more about AI personhood. This, it was a poorly concocted scheme. People do stuff like this all the time, but even when they manage to confuse one branch of the government, the rest of the government isn't suddenly obligated to go along with it.
      • creer 2y ago
        I don't feel that it was a misguided attempt to "get copyright". Wasn't the attempt specifically to get copyright attributed to the AI (rather than to Thaler)? So it was some grand scheme about AI personhood or business plan about selling software that would own its output. Who knows. Whatever. Not relevant to copyright for AI as a tool.
• golemotron 2y ago
  This is clearly a case where we need new legislation. The US Copyright Act needed to be amended to cover photography. Prior to that photos were not copyrightable. It seems like we are on the same trajectory now. The real problem is that Congress is institutionally incapable of making simple amendments to law. Everything gets delegated to agency rule making regardless of whether anyone likes the outcome.
  • amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    And then the supreme court tosses out the agency rulemaking. And then the president makes his own executive order. Then the courts block that. It's kind of a mess right now. Congress is pretty broken.
    • golemotron 2y ago
      No truer words have been said.
  • kopecs 2y ago
    Why do you think that? This obviously does not preclude copyright interests from existing in works which were generated using "AI" as a blanket rule; rather, this is about the fact that the applicant persistent in insisting that the author of the work was an "autonomous[] computer algorithm". Do you think autonomous computer algorithms (to the extent we could suppose they exist, for the sake of argument) should have a statutory right to copyright?
    • golemotron 2y ago
      No, I just think that the space can be cleared up with legislation. It's a weird world where works created with a prompt are not creative enough for protection but pictures taken by randomly pointing smartphone cameras (which use significant amounts of AI internally, btw) are copyrightable.
  • frankus 2y ago
    Stepping back, would granting a time-limited exclusive license to the output of generative AI "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? In other words is there important AI art that society would be missing out on because the originator deemed it not worth the effort without some protection against unauthorized copies being made?
• CaffeineLD50 2y ago
  Awesome!!!! I have trouble finding public domain pics & vids
• alistairSH 2y ago
  Is there AI art that didn’t involve human intervention? At minimum, somebody entered a prompt,right?
  • elpocko 2y ago
    At minimum, somebody pressed a button. You can generate AI art that doesn't involve a prompt, using only random noise and sampler settings as input. It's a good way to test for bias in the training material or overfitting for a specific style/type of content.
• beepbooptheory 2y ago
  There is so much IP discussion on here all the time, mostly trending, rationally, toward it being silly, harmful, benefiting the worst people. I just don't understand when this issue comes up we get this very specific intersection of the venn diagram where people are pro-IP, but only for AI art. Why is this anything other than a good thing? I just can't imagine people being starving artists with their medium being stable diffusion.. That's kind of a funny thought I guess, but doesn't this at the end of the day (perhaps symbolically) only further the possibilities and precedent around training models on all art? Because if their outputs aren't copywritable, who is going to care? Why is this anything other than a win? Who is the population harmed specifically with this ruling, actually?
• deleted 2y ago
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• lxe 2y ago
  Good. I think copyright law is in general bad. Nothing should be copyrighted.
• jarsin 2y ago
  This is old news. The copyright office already ruled that AI generative outputs are not copyrightable in January [1]. I think many have not understood the implications of the CO ruling. This means anything you build with llms you don't own. Your company doesn't own. If your using copilot and you have a copyright notice at the top of your source file if that ever goes to court you will learn that copyright is not valid. You cant even put an open source license on the output, like the GPL, because...drumroll...you don't own the copyright. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
  • protocolture 2y ago
    It doesnt say that, it says that anything thats solely produced by simply prompting is not owned. I have seen very few works that want copyright and are solely prompts. From your own link: "“To be sure,” the Court further explained, “the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice." "The Office agrees that there is an important distinction between using AI as a tool to assist in the creation of works and using AI as a stand-in for human creativity. " "The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. " Where the US ruling differs from others: "Repeatedly revising prompts does not change this analysis or provide a sufficient basis for claiming copyright in the output." Where China has had 2 cases where it supported multiple prompt changes + watermark Also they dont rule out a change: "There may come a time when prompts can sufficiently control expressive elements in AI-generated outputs to reflect human authorship. If further advances in technology provide users with increased control over those expressive elements, a different conclusion may be called for" ^ I would (and have) suggested that the above would likely cover the masking tools available in most image generators. Its certainly not a case that "AI generative outputs are not copyrightable".
    • jarsin 2y ago
      You left out the big "but". But if ai gets more optimized and automated our current conclusion will be more bolstered.
• jaco6 2y ago
  No one wants AI or AI companies to get credit for AI generated art. That would be like giving the camera company a share of movie royalties. The AI is a tool to aid in artistic output. Even if someone does nothing more than write the prompt and then stick their name at the top, they wrote the prompt, which is a creative act, and so under current copyright logic they deserve credit for profits associated with the work.
• dragonwriter 2y ago
  Note that this is a deliberately extreme edge case, where the human involved claims that the work is completely AI authored, but wants a copyright anyway. The interesting cases will be the ones where the boundaries of copyrightability for works where a human claims copyright for works created using AI-assistance are hammered out.
• 6stringmerc 2y ago
  “U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being."” This is fantastic news. A unanimous decision, and the correct one in my view, means an appeal is fighting uphill. A minor victory but I hope it sends a chilling effect through the growing industry of AI generated music - copyright runs that industry with an iron fist. I hate the RIAA with a passion. I have never signed away my rights to 6StringMercenary and I reap the minor rewards. 10k Spotify streams is a small number for income purposes, but that’s because the RIAA and Spotify colluded to give independent artists a fraction of the revenue to split among themselves. What a good, solid ruling for the protection of an already exploited class.
• squidsoup 2y ago
  I understand the intent of this ruling, but it seems that real artists like Refik Adanol who trains his own models and produces work that I would consider to be uniquely his, are getting the short end of the stick here.
  • Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    Yes, he can file a complaint next to Carolee Schneemann masterpiece Interior Scroll. This style of "art" is performative rather than expressive. Personally, I wouldn't commission either of them to clean my floor. =3
  • dragonwriter 2y ago
    They aren't getting any end of the stick here, because this suit does not address the boundary of claims of copyrightability of works with claimed human authorship using AI assistance.
• kube-system 2y ago
  The title here is very misleading. They didn't say that if you use AI generation, you cannot claim copyright. They basically said "if you claim not to have made something, then you don't get copyright". That is a pretty obvious and sane conclusion. If you are stupid enough to go to a court and say "I didn't make this painting, the paintbrush did!", don't be surprised when they roll their eyes and say "well, your paintbrush isn't a human and therefore doesn't qualify".
• deadbabe 2y ago
  Can someone just tell me: if I make an AI photo then do some tweaks in photoshop do I now have a copyright claim since I worked on this photo and it had no author? If I use the AI photo as a reference to make a painting by hand it’s also my copyright since the original photo isn’t owned?
  • shagie 2y ago
    (1) ask a lawyer if your tweaks were sufficiently creative to justify a copyright. (2) the work produced by the AI photo generator may itself be sufficiently derivative of other works that your work is also derivative and the original author may have a copyright claim against you since only they can authorize the distribution of derivative works. (3) If you use the AI photo as a reference for a painting, this again falls into the "it may be derivative of another work." For example, if I asked "Create a realistic black and white photograph of a moon rising over Half Dome in Yosemite." and it generated an image that was derivate of https://articles.anseladams.com/story-of-moon-and-half-dome/ https://articles.anseladams.com/story-of-moon-and-half-dome/ and then you used that image as a reference for your own, your image may be considered derivative of the Ansel Adams image. Just because the AI can't claim copyright on an image doesn't mean that the image it generated is not derivative of another that you would potentially be infringing on.
    • deadbabe 2y ago
      Can’t do shit anymore
• Habgdnv 2y ago
  Is "Avatar" in the public domain now? I guess they just told a computer to simulate water, and no real creative work was done by humans?
• rjurney 2y ago
  Well... that's one solution the the problem.
• lowbloodsugar 2y ago
  That’s not what it says, right? The ruling is that an AI cannot be assigned copyright ownership. That’s very different than the claim of the headline that AI generated work cannot be copyrighted.
• cess11 2y ago
  If that holds in the most supreme court it would likely kill the effort from the entertainment industry to replace artists with machines, no? I don't really see the difference between asking Midjourney or whatever for an image, and asking my phone to fill a buffer from the camera sensors and fix that up into a "photograph".
• qwertox 2y ago
  Would this mean that ILM / Pixar will be unable to copyright their AI-generated movies? Assume that they generate the entire movie in low poly count with flat shading, enough to properly prime an AI to generate incredible-looking movies. It simply cannot be true that they would lose the copyright to it just because they immersed it in AI.
  • anikom15 2y ago
    They can certainly copyright a derivative work from AI-generated content.
• hintymad 2y ago
  What about the series of really creative and complex prompts that an artist uses to create the AI-generated art? That is, the creativity and the associated values will be in the prompts.
• kemitchell 2y ago
  The current Reuters headline is "US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator". That's still kind of clickbaity, but far more accurate and correct than the link I see here on HN. This whole case has been a dumb waste of time for anyone but scurrilous headline writers. The plaintiff insisted on filling out the copyright app with their "creation" in the author field. Every legal opinion since has had to start assuming that's true, making "no copyright for you" legally obvious. The plaintiff apparently tried to walk that back on appeal, to argue he authored the work using the software. There's a paragraph right near the beginning where the court points out it simply doesn't consider that argument, since it wasn't brought up to the Copyright Office, back when the plaintiff was insisting on the opposite.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Frivolous but sadly common. Someone need to nail down the legal language. As you can see here though, it's clearly not an unanimously obvious ruling though.
    • kemitchell 2y ago
      I encourage you to read the opinion. There was nothing to nail down here. The Copyright Office rejected the registration. The Review Board affirmed. The trial court affirmed. Three appeals court judges affirmed. No dissenting opinion.
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  All branches of government and the lower court has been consistent on this I think its a good trade! I’ve made a lot of money on AI generated works and it was never from selling or licensing the copyright
• imchillyb 2y ago
  I think a deeper question to ask is: Can AI create at all? By our own human definitions of creation, does anything spit-out by LLM, ML, AI, have any merit as a created -thing-? Can the sum of what is learned by a model become more, and if so, can that create something? Anything?
• idonotknowwhy 2y ago
  Holy shit, did they just make every photo taken from an iPhone (AI enhancement) public domain? And spellchecker for text? What about movies like Deadpool3, where AI wrote part of the script?
• api 2y ago
  Ultimately I think AI models and their outputs should not be copyrightable unless they were only trained on data for which the trainer had appropriate rights (or was public domain) including the right to resell model results. These things are basically like JPEGs for knowledge and text. If I make a JPEG of a work I do not strip copyright from it. Of course since the trained model is a cumulative set of all inputs the rights are the set disjoint of the rights the trainer had on the data. If we allow these things to be copyrightable it allows what amounts to for-profit corporate piracy and unlicensed resale of all works.
  • Aerroon 2y ago
    >If I make a JPEG of a work I do not strip copyright from it. Because anyone could point point out that your jpeg contains a copy of the work. It's a lot harder to point out a copy of any work in an AI model. They're trained on so many images that you can't even represent one pixel worth of data per image.
• parasense 2y ago
  I'm sure many of you remember the Monkey selfie from a few years ago... meh! I'm also sure many of you understand the farther reaching implications of this ruling, especially how it relates to software code written by AI. All that code written by AI cannot be licensed as anything besides public domain. Just think of all the code people have checked into git, that they did not write! Next, please consider the implications towards the open source community if ever there is controversy about Linux kernel code that was AI generated, and then suddenly cannot be covered by the GPL. I think the neck-beard people over at NetBSD can sometimes be eccentric about many things, but this topic was deserved when they loudly banned all AI generated code from their repos.
• protocolture 2y ago
  >Stephen Thaler So this guy is arguably doing more damage than anyone to AI. The rulings against him are inarguable. He wants his custom AI to be included as an author. People take these rulings, misunderstand them and assume all AI tools create work that cannot be copyrighted, when plainly, every other AI tool lists the user as the author, and not the tool.
• TZubiri 2y ago
  >>The artists argued they were entitled to copyrights for images they created with AI assistance -- unlike Thaler, who said that his "sentient" system created the image in his case independently. That's a factually incorrect and legally inconvenient claim. Turns out you can convince the court of whatever you want if that means you lose your case: "Yes your honour, I was both at my home and at the crime scene at the same time as I am omnipresent" Doesn't mean alibis are no longer valid in court
• deviantbit 2y ago
  Wait until they get to code generated by AI. All of this Rust code that people are using and sticking in various Linux services. It won't be covered under the GPL. It will flat out be public domain.
• CMay 2y ago
  Unless every aspect of AI generated art is required to be marked or labeled as such in some way, it will likely still gain the benefits of copyright assumptions in the sense that if you mix copyrightable and uncopyrightable material together you will surely deter people at least within your own country or on a platform that respects copyright from using it due to the ambiguity. Another situation is simply making "significant" manual copyrightable manipulations to your AI generated work to make it copyrighted. Outside of situations where the author doesn't really care whether the work is copyrighted (blog images, twitter memes), it may just slow down the process rather than stopping it. I'm more concerned about the ingestion side of things. I can't deny that the technology is awesome and generally transformative, but it's hard to deny that it intuitively feels wrong to just process all of an artist's work into a database of numbers and use it however you want. If artists gain widespread benefit from it too, maybe it's not as bad, but that doesn't help those who opt to not use it. At the same time, how does this impact those who create AI generated art using models created from artists who signed off on it? Does this mean there's no room for a business to create copyrightable AI generated art and thus funnel money back to the artists the model was populated from? Couldn't that hurt artists even more if the avenues of profiting from the AI shift are cut off, or is the main benefit of that to avoid copyright claims on art that turns out too similar to an existing work you didn't have a license for?
• SergeAx 2y ago
  This is actually great! Let's do the same with code!
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• throwawaynin 2y ago
  So this means the same for code?? Code written by a llm is not copyrightable?
• october8140 2y ago
  This really opens the door for AI spam. If someone is making money selling AI spam images, you can just copy all their art and also post it. You don't even need to generate your own stuff.
• blindriver 2y ago
  Can AI patent things like drug molecules?
• ciconia 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/hX5Mf https://archive.ph/hX5Mf
• cytocync 2y ago
  [dead]
• calibas 2y ago
  So anything authored by an AI is effectively public domain? And does that go for code as well as art? I did a little reading on the subject, and it looks like these questions are still in the process of being answered.
• right2copy 2y ago
  copyright is full of edge cases because it is not a "right" by any natural definition, rather it's an incoherent system of selective legal persecution that denies and oppresses humanity's natural Right to Copy, the true right that we inherit from the fact that we owe our very existence to genetic plagiarism
• mediumsmart 2y ago
  If I paint the monkey taking a photo of the dude that typed the prompt for the scene and post that on instagram as public domain, can Getty Images still sue me for all of it or do they have to split with Adobe?
• dusted 2y ago
  This is excellent news. I'm kind of surprised. I suppose it could also mean that anything else AI generated can't be copyrighted ? So corps generating code and content with AI hopefully can't copyright that? (of course they can, but just imagine the hilarity and panic that'd ensue!)
  • cogman10 2y ago
    Would be pretty funny but practically I don't think it matters that much. Someone could steal my company's entire codebase and, outside potential password leaks, it'd really have little impact on our business. The code itself is less valuable than the coders, the data, and the business connections we've made. Certainly not the case for all software, but I'd wager 90% of the work HN does would fall into this category.
• nvesp 2y ago
  Personally i feel like the prompt itself should be copyrightable but not the resulting image, if you want to write a book go write a book.
• nvesp 2y ago
  Personally i feel like maybe the prompt should be copyrightable but not the resulting image, if you want to write a book go write a book.
• bluecalm 2y ago
  Isn't AI just a tool here like any other? Sounds very inconsistent to me. It would be better to narrow copyright protection but grant it more liberally imo. Non tech people deciding on tech cases. In the next episode we will get AI paintbrush smart enough to help you but dumb enough the court still let's you copyright your work. Top legal minds deciding if it's sufficiently dumb to meet arbitrary standard they came up with when deciding the previous case.
  • dragonwriter 2y ago
    > Isn't AI just a tool here like any other? In this case, no, because the human involved explicit sought a copyright registration listing the AI as the author, and claims that the work was entirely the product of the AI. (In point of fact, yes, the AI is a tool used by a human, and to the extent the work may be copyrightable, copyright should have been sought listing the human author; but that's not what happened, and the case deals with the legality of what was actually sought, not what arguably should instead have been sought.) > Non tech people deciding on tech cases. Almost as bad as non law people commenting on law cases.
    • bluecalm 2y ago
      My comment was in relation to the one about the monkey making a photo. You are right though, I haven't read the case and just relied on comments to assume the court rejected the copyright claim "because it was created by AI" which I now see is not what happened, thank you.
• yash2401 2y ago
  [dead]
• ineedasername 2y ago
  All of these cases are misrepresented in their headlines. They all come down to: "The non-human cannot be the copyright holder." Otherwise, if there was a human in the loop, they can be the copyright holder, if they want to lay claim to it.
• floor_ 2y ago
  It would be fair to say this applies to ai generated code. And seeing how places like google claim over 40% of their code is ai generated it would be fair to say they don't own the code.
• swayvil 2y ago
  Cause-effect was always a broken narrative. Twice-broken when you attach a pricetag.
• m3kw9 2y ago
  Problem is that given the same prompt “cat running” there is a chance the exact photo could be generated again.
• leecarraher 2y ago
  how much of the work can be ai generated, would a minor human copyrightable addition to the artwork constitute an original work. what would stop someone from generating art and popping a watermark or some imperceivable steganographic addition such that the ai part and human part cannot be disentangled.
• blahblahblah77 2y ago
  Create something through human intelligence something that took you man hours to create. Then have an opinion on something you know no one on earth could have invented without your efforts. That is the innovation of human experience. Art is nothing short of this.
• Jamietwatts 2y ago
  If so how does original art go through this style of copyright, shouldn't this work for the original artist not the individuals that create or established a copyright piece of art? Could never add the same value on the eye let on what an artist can do with say a paintbrush
• kazinator 2y ago
  This decision is completely wrongheaded, because AI is making a mash-up out of works which are copyrighted. Works produced by AI are copyrightable, just not newly copyrightable the agent who is executing the AI. If we could identify the "bill of materials" (specimens of training data which were relevant to the generation of a given image) then we could apply to it copyright notice consisting of the catenation of the individual copyright notices. I think that if an artist operates a purely local model, and trains it only on their own art, then the result should absolutely by copyrightable by that artist. It's no different from a binary executable being your copyright if you built it from sources that are your copyright. We don't squabble about compilers not being human.