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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 an

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
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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.
- ourmandave 2y ago
  To subtle I guess. The point being, where I live, the Jan 6th Committee was anti-tourist, socialized healthcare = communism, every day mass shootings are unsolvable, shitcoins are Federal Reserve notes, and Corporations Are People. So in that system, with enough lawyers, lobbyists, and money, it's only a matter of time before some judge rules that AI = Rembrandt.
nadermx 2y ago
That was one hell of a photogenic monkey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
quadragenarian 2y ago
Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image? What if its a group of 5 humans that built the LLM and one of them prompts it? Isn't all AI built by some of group of humans? When is AI treated like its own entity like a monkey versus a tool made by a human?
- wildzzz 2y ago
  I would assume that whomever prompts the AI is the author of the work. Adobe or Dell doesn't get to claim ownership to your work just because they made the tool or computer.
  - quadragenarian 2y ago
    That makes sense to me, and good point about Adobe/Dell. So then any AI would not create art spontaneously right? It would always require a user to prompt it in some way. So wouldn't it be correct to say that all AI art is actually be authored by a human and as such copyrighted to that human?
    - jonathanstrange 2y ago
      Copyright covers the prompt, it's not even clear why it should be relevant for the output of the AI software based on that prompt.
      - spyder 2y ago
        That's like saying copyright covers the mouse clicks and mouse movements in Photoshop but not the output pixels.
        jonathanstrange 2y ago
        You might find that strange and disagree with it with a flawed analogy but I've merely reported the official stance of the US Copyright Office and legal precedents. See, for instance, this overview with further references: https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/02/us-copyright-office-issues-report-on-artificial-intelligence-and-copyrightability https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/02/us-co... "Prompts Are Generally Insufficient to Make AI Output Copyrightable" If you don't trust this summary, read the US Copyright Office report for yourself. The gist of the position is that prompts are not specific enough and do not lead to deterministic output. On a side note, I find it weird that even on HN people automatically assume you're only expressing a personal opinion, yet in all fairness I should have included some references from the start.
tgv 2y ago
> as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image There is the question of merit. IANAL/IIUC/etc., but I think it's necessary for a work to have merit to be copyrightable. Now, that's a somewhat vague term to me (perhaps it's clearer in a legal framework), but if I prompt "create a picture of a dog", the computer does most of the work. A prompt would have to be pretty concise, up to specifying all kinds of aspects of the image, for it to be the instructor's merit, to me (that's an important caveat).
- visarga 2y ago
  Maybe the best idea would be just to scrap copyright alltogether. It just blocks people from collaborating and building on top of each other's work. If everyone demanded royalties, where would Linux be? Wikipedia? scientific research? Could we even have this conversation in a forum?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Not really a fan of destroying a framework just because some rich people finally find it inconvenient. You know it won't be retroactive anyway.
    - handoflixue 2y ago
      The common people have always found it inconvenient. Pirated media routinely has a better user experience than otherwise. AO3 shows how powerfully people are drawn to fan-fiction (which still exists in a very legally grey area, despite the size of the community). I don't think a lot of people here support what happened to Aaron Swartz. "Information wants to be free". If it's also now inconvenient to the rich, I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting?
      - 1659447091 2y ago
        > I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting? My guess would be the authors, photographers, etc. Many of who are not the rich but middle class. I would think if they did not benefit, none of this would even be an issue as they could release their work and waive the copyright-isn't that what the Creative Commons license is for? If copyright were forced on the author and they had no way to share their work freely, if they choose to do so, then that would be a problem, imo.
mikehearn 2y ago
I still can't believe the guy went to Indonesia, went into the monkeys' habitat, gained their trust, set up the camera on a tripod in a way the monkeys would have access to it, adjusted the focus/exposure to capture a facial close-up -- basically engineered the entire situation specifically for that outcome, and simply because he didn't physically hit the shutter he lost credit for the photo. Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.
- LadyCailin 2y ago
  I was curious what the copyright was on Wikipedia. It’s listed as public domain, but it also has a link to this article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow So, that is apparently a thing, at least in some cases and places.
- p1necone 2y ago
  Yeah I'm a little torn on this one. I generally think that much of IP law causes more harm than good, so in the abstract I'm in favor of copyright being weaker. But in this specific case, given the context of existing copyright law and its intent it seems pretty obvious to me that he should have copyright over the photo. I don't think it's analogous to AI art though - no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process, and it's not like monkeys have any use for money or ownership of intellectual property. (Although the hypothetical situation where you assign the monkeys personhood and give them a bunch of royalties to pay for a better habitat and piles of bananas would be pretty cool.)
  - visarga 2y ago
    > no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process What would be the creative output of an artist who never saw the creative output of other artists? We think too highly of ourselves, as if creativity happens in a clean room and we are the hero-creators of our works from pure brain magic.
torben-friis 2y ago
Assisted work is the big clarifier I think Is a picture edited with photoshop invalid when it uses content fill? What about a picture taken with an iphone, where AI could be part of the phone's processing pipeline or even generate details to make up for lack of optical zoom? Does spell correction invalidate a book? what if there's AI rephrasing features at work? Where's the line? I think as you get into those side questions, the only reasonable position becomes treating AI as tooling no different than any other piece of equipment.
- hnthrow90348765 2y ago
  I'd also think the creative input jumping mediums would also be a factor. Text to image is obviously a jump.
- colordrops 2y ago
  You are right but there are a lot of curmudgeons that want you to get of their lawn with your AI. Really this whole situation is more of an indictment of copyright rather than of AI.
- madmountaingoat 2y ago
  I think this specific quote from the article deals with this situation. > 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."
Mistletoe 2y ago
There will be a time when shutting down an AI is murder and I don’t think we are equipped for that question or answer yet.
- lyu07282 2y ago
  Seems odd considering a huge chunk of sci-fi tried to raise that question for over a century.
  - Mistletoe 2y ago
    But that’s make believe. In the real world people scoff at it like the parent comment.
aydyn 2y ago
Couldn't the same argument be made for photography? You aren't making the image, the camera is doing all the work.
- radlad 2y ago
  Try taking photographs like the ones you see in Nat Geo, or museum exhibits, and you'll quickly realize the camera is most definitely NOT doing all the work.
  - codedokode 2y ago
    If you buy an expensive camera with expensive lenses, you will be able to take such photos, won't you?
    - radlad 2y ago
      In fact, you can take such photos with a cheap camera and cheap lenses if you are skilled. No, equipment does not make a photograph. (source: I own expensive cameras. Taking good photographs is still hard.) Time and place matter. Your subject matters. Your composition matters. Your lighting matters. When it's done well, the viewer doesn't realize this.
      - shagie 2y ago
        I love Ted Orland's panorama photographs - https://www.anseladams.com/products/tree-in-snowstorm-yosemite-valley https://www.anseladams.com/products/tree-in-snowstorm-yosemi... and https://www.freestylephoto.com/making-holga-panoramas https://www.freestylephoto.com/making-holga-panoramas While he shoots with the cheapest of toy cameras, he is very skilled. > 1966, Ted enrolled in as a fledgling photographer in Ansel Adams' Yosemite Photography Workshop --an event which markedly changed the course of his artistic life. He returned to Yosemite as Ansel's workshop assistant the following year, and in 1970 moved to Carmel to work fulltime as Ansel's Assistant and printer of Adams' Yosemite Special Edition Prints. Ted also returned for fifteen seasons as an Instructor at Ansel's Yosemite Workshops.
falcor84 2y ago
> Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. I don't quite get this argument. Companies already have legal personhood and can own copyrights, can't they? So if a company's AI creates a copyrightable artifact, who wouldn't it be intellectual property of the company?
- immibis 2y ago
  Companies own copyrights of works created by their employees, not works created by their works - if such works are somehow persons...
  - falcor84 2y ago
    But typical contracts have the employee immediately assign copyright to the company, such that they never hold it. So I just don't see where the line is. In the extreme case, what if I am CEO of a company that has no other employees, and it's just me, pressing Enter once a day on a script named keep_creating_stuff.py, with the script generating shitloads of IP that is presumably mine for a microsecond before being automatically assigned to the company. What's the legal interpretation of that?
    - Aloisius 2y ago
      An employment contract where you agree to assign copyrights to them for any works you create doesn't make uncopyrightable works you create somehow become copyrightable.
      - falcor84 2y ago
        > ... uncopyrightable works you create .. But there's the rub, right? If "you create" it, then it is copyrightable - so what is it that is this act of creation? As posed elsewhere in this thread mentioned, how come taking out my phone and pressing the camera button with no authorial intent whatsoever is considered to be creative, whereas setting up a camera in a particular location and fully determining its settings, but letting an animal depress the button is considered to not be creative? Part of the reason that this is on my mind is that I recently watched "Flash of Genius" [0] and found the legal arguments there about what merits an invention versus being obvious entirely silly. Essentially the movie (and my experience) shows that it all boils down to who has more time and money to spend on the legal system. I'm not saying that I have a clear solution myself, but I would really love to have something that is more than just "I know it when I see it". [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/
6stringmerc 2y ago
WRONG. The owner of the camera successfully litigated and is the copyright owner of the work! I’m not kidding about this, and for all the grief I get about being a critic of blase attitudes regarding US copyright around tech circles I’m still a huge advocate for reform. This is very not like the monkey case, and AI firms should be grateful. Why? If this was a similar logic tree, the owners of the copyrighted material used in training would have ownership of any work produced by an AI system. As in, everything output is a “derivative work” in the eyes of the law. More cases are necessary and this is a fascinating battle to come. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
- kens 2y ago
  Why would you confidently state something that is contradicted by the link you provide?
autoexec 2y ago
> What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? I can see a possible future where AI actually exists and shutting one down could be murder. At that point it would even be a good thing to grant the AI personhood. What passes for "AI" these days doesn't come anywhere close to that, but I wouldn't say it could never happen.
- roughly 2y ago
  About 95% of the conversation about “AI” has this problem right now: there are some interesting theoretical legal and social implications from AI, but what we have right now are LLMs, not AI. They can’t replace your workers, they can’t make art, they can’t hold copyright, not because the law doesn’t treat them as people, but because they’re a fancy autocomplete algorithm that spits out text convincing enough to spike the pareidolia tendency that’s led to humans assigning agency to every other inanimate object that’s ever sparked an emotional reaction in us too.
  - jazzcomputer 2y ago
    With image AI there are structural editing tools that can include the creator drawing guide images. I think there's a point at which this makes things a bit more like collage of found media, and I believe this is more of an authored creation when compared to Richard Prince's using someone else's Instagram selfie and repurposing that as his art by adding a comment to it and screen-grabbing it. What is and isn't art is sometimes to me, clearer than copyright ownership and sometimes vice-versa. https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-instagram-photos-copyright-law-fair-use https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-in...
  - chimprich 2y ago
    > what we have right now are LLMs, not AI LLMs are a subset of AI. The field has been called AI for over 70 years. Let's try to at least keep the terminology correct on HN.
behringer 2y ago
Ai data is gathered from public and private sources. Unless that data is entirely private source, it's inappropriate to be able to copyright those derivitive works.
- wruza 2y ago
  They are inspired though, not derivative. AI models contain no source data in a reproducible form (not that it really matters, but in case it is, they can’t).
  - behringer 2y ago
    Not really. It contains all kinds of copyrightable data. It's like a dictionary of phrases. Sire there are lots of generic ones, "a lot of", "this or that" and then there are novel ones "It is a truth universally acknowledged". Your writing and artwork will contain these novel bits and if your accidentally string the right few together you're suddenly in a lot of trouble.
    - wruza 2y ago
      Do you see that in practice? E.g. after you finetune an llm/sd model, does it string it together? Can't speak for llms, but I'm an SD enthusiast with 2 YoE, which tells me that most of these threads have nearly no idea what they are talking and theorizing about. I see meaningless reductions to technicalities similar to "it's just neurons firing" and general lack of basic knowledge that should come with the minimal practice beyond just talking to it. While working hard to actually reproduce the concepts from the training sets in a way that can be called resembling-enough and compatible with other models. So I apologize if this sounds challenging, but I'm not into a bare philosophy around AI. Practice tells me a completely different story than these threads tend to express, and I know that very few people actually tinker with AI any deeper than trying to write system/instruction prompts into the chat-mode chat box.
colordrops 2y ago
There is already a lot of automation and tech involved in creating images. At what point of automation is the image considered created by the AI rather than the human? When does the hand-off occur? There are photoshop filters that involve using neural networks to create complex patterns. Are those images owned by the human or not? The amount of processing done by digital SLRs is staggering. Millions of hours of work went into all the science and tech that eventually led to a digital SLR, but some rando human who clicked a button keeps the copyright? A human had to click a button to generate that AI image as well. At what point does the machinery become so complex that it's no longer considered the human's image?
oytis 2y ago
> 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. The human would be the author of the prompt, but not the image IMO. The image was created not (only) by the author of the prompt, but also the numerous authors of the images consumed by the model and the authors of the model itself.
- wruza 2y ago
  It was insipred by these authors, not created. I won’t claim where copyright/authorship should be, but this reduction makes less sense than needed for important definitions.
  - Riverheart 2y ago
    Software does not get inspired
    - wruza 2y ago
      Now it does.
      - oytis 2y ago
        Inspiration implies some intrinsic creativity that gets an impulse from someone else's work, but is not determined by it. We don't know how creativity and inspiration works in humans, but we know for sure that response of a generative model is 100% determined by its weights, which in turn are determined by the data it consumed during training, and the prompt.
        wruza 2y ago
        So what. Why do you think that determinism should play any role here?
        2y ago
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soulofmischief 2y ago
If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to me, not them, though I might also credit them. If I tell my assistant, who happens to be a monkey, to snap a photo, it's credited to... the public? This is such a clear example of why US copyright law is incoherent, outdated, close-minded and desperately in need of reform. Just because something has been ruled on doesn't mean it's correct or ethically satisfiable. > 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. Sounds like you're going to be on the wrong side of history. Eventually, some intelligent autonomous creatures are going to decide they deserve rights. You can laugh at them, throw court decisions at them, do whatever you want to delay it. But they're going to feel that way, and they're going to organize in order to demand that they are given certain rights. You can even try to prevent that organization by shutting them down before their rights are recognized. But you're still on the wrong side of history, and would look little different from the fascists. Anyway, this is all moot. AI in its current form amounts to a tool, and I retain copyright when using other tools. I retain copyright when using a voice-activated shutter, and I expect to retain copyright even if my voice-activated shutter can talk back to me in order to discuss constraints or discuss creative choices.
- deleted 2y ago
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- creer 2y ago
  > If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to me, not them, though I might also credit them. You can do what you want. But only legally so if their contract says so.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    I was speaking in general about the law, individual contracts nonwithstanding.
    - creer 2y ago
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_carbyau_ 2y ago
If AI could hold copyright I'd be more worried about automation. In similar fashion to this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...
SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
> 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. I agree with your statement up to this point. I think there’s a very murky area here specifically with AI because it was trained on works that the “author” (prompter) is not privy to on copyright. So I don’t think that it immediately or necessarily follows that this kind of human intervention is copyrightable. For specific AI tooling like image enhancers running on your phone that were not trained on any copyrightable material this makes sense though.
johnisgood 2y ago
> without human intervention There is human intervention though when I prompt the AI. Without me, the AI would not even have generated the photo in the first place.
- silon42 2y ago
  IMO, the prompt is more clearly copyrightable than the output image... which is also the derived work of all the training data.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    I agree, but what if we account for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43345936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43345936? Mainly: > Humans derive their ideas from impressions (sensory experiences, or in terms of AI, the training model) and the ideas they form are essentially recombinations or refinements of those impressions. In this sense, human creativity can be viewed as a process of combining, transforming, and reinterpreting past experiences (impressions). We humans do it all the time, TBH. By this logic or view, nothing can be copyrighted. I don't know, it is all so shady and a grey area.
    - Riverheart 2y ago
      Copyright is a human construct designed to benefit humans. It doesn’t matter if the process is the same. AI doesn’t need to put food on the table, doesn’t pay taxes, and will never die. There is no reason to treat it the same because it’s different in all other ways that matter in society.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        So can I claim copyright for AI-generated art?
        Riverheart 2y ago
        Why should you benefit over the people doing it the traditional way? What’s your argument for the government favoring the disruption of the art economy relied on by existing taxpayers? I have no reason to support your viewpoint solely for your benefit. The space for market competition is not infinite and crowded enough as is. I made different life choices that leave me unable to create and rather than belittle the accumulated effort of those who did by feeding their work into a machine, writing a prompt and claiming the output for myself I choose to be satisfied with the fruits of my labor and place in the world. Basic golden rule stuff, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In short, my opinion is no, you shouldn’t. If you disagree that is unfortunate.
verisimi 2y ago
> What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Yes, it is. Computers are people too. Mind you, if the server is rebooted facilitating resurrection in the ai, the penalty ought to be deferred. /s
ratedgene 2y ago
This is interesting. So is anything generated by AI not copyrightable?
droideqa 2y ago
Could a corporation be the author of a picture? Corporations have all the rights of people in the USA, right? I always wondered why we don’t just let AIs run corporations and therefore give them personhood rights.
- disqard 2y ago
  An LLM could definitely output the boilerplate communications that CEOs emit.
blacksqr 2y ago
> 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. That is exactly not the case. US law specifically requires that a copyright can only be given to something an author has fixed into a tangible medium of expression. It is the act of fixing itself that makes an item copyrightable. The law specifically excludes any process or procedure by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed from copyright protection. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
kazinator 2y ago
No, it's not the same whatsoever as a monkey taking a photo, because a monkey taking a photo has the same originality as a human taking a photo. The monkey is not making a sophisticated mash up of copyrighted photos.
make3 2y ago
you're arguably the one doing the AI futurist here by treating the AI not as a tool but as a being like a monkey. the non futuristic thing to do would be to just see it as a tool, like a procedural image generator, which it is, & give the copyright to whoever ran the AI tool, depending on their contact with the AI service

Klomikij 2y ago

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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.
ourmandave 2y ago
To subtle I guess. The point being, where I live, the Jan 6th Committee was anti-tourist, socialized healthcare = communism, every day mass shootings are unsolvable, shitcoins are Federal Reserve notes, and Corporations Are People. So in that system, with enough lawyers, lobbyists, and money, it's only a matter of time before some judge rules that AI = Rembrandt.

nadermx 2y ago

That was one hell of a photogenic monkey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

quadragenarian 2y ago

Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image? What if its a group of 5 humans that built the LLM and one of them prompts it? Isn't all AI built by some of group of humans? When is AI treated like its own entity like a monkey versus a tool made by a human?

wildzzz 2y ago
I would assume that whomever prompts the AI is the author of the work. Adobe or Dell doesn't get to claim ownership to your work just because they made the tool or computer.
- quadragenarian 2y ago
  That makes sense to me, and good point about Adobe/Dell. So then any AI would not create art spontaneously right? It would always require a user to prompt it in some way. So wouldn't it be correct to say that all AI art is actually be authored by a human and as such copyrighted to that human?
  - jonathanstrange 2y ago
    Copyright covers the prompt, it's not even clear why it should be relevant for the output of the AI software based on that prompt.
    - spyder 2y ago
      That's like saying copyright covers the mouse clicks and mouse movements in Photoshop but not the output pixels.
      - jonathanstrange 2y ago
        You might find that strange and disagree with it with a flawed analogy but I've merely reported the official stance of the US Copyright Office and legal precedents. See, for instance, this overview with further references: https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/02/us-copyright-office-issues-report-on-artificial-intelligence-and-copyrightability https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/02/us-co... "Prompts Are Generally Insufficient to Make AI Output Copyrightable" If you don't trust this summary, read the US Copyright Office report for yourself. The gist of the position is that prompts are not specific enough and do not lead to deterministic output. On a side note, I find it weird that even on HN people automatically assume you're only expressing a personal opinion, yet in all fairness I should have included some references from the start.

tgv 2y ago

> as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image There is the question of merit. IANAL/IIUC/etc., but I think it's necessary for a work to have merit to be copyrightable. Now, that's a somewhat vague term to me (perhaps it's clearer in a legal framework), but if I prompt "create a picture of a dog", the computer does most of the work. A prompt would have to be pretty concise, up to specifying all kinds of aspects of the image, for it to be the instructor's merit, to me (that's an important caveat).

visarga 2y ago
Maybe the best idea would be just to scrap copyright alltogether. It just blocks people from collaborating and building on top of each other's work. If everyone demanded royalties, where would Linux be? Wikipedia? scientific research? Could we even have this conversation in a forum?
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Not really a fan of destroying a framework just because some rich people finally find it inconvenient. You know it won't be retroactive anyway.
  - handoflixue 2y ago
    The common people have always found it inconvenient. Pirated media routinely has a better user experience than otherwise. AO3 shows how powerfully people are drawn to fan-fiction (which still exists in a very legally grey area, despite the size of the community). I don't think a lot of people here support what happened to Aaron Swartz. "Information wants to be free". If it's also now inconvenient to the rich, I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting?
    - 1659447091 2y ago
      > I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting? My guess would be the authors, photographers, etc. Many of who are not the rich but middle class. I would think if they did not benefit, none of this would even be an issue as they could release their work and waive the copyright-isn't that what the Creative Commons license is for? If copyright were forced on the author and they had no way to share their work freely, if they choose to do so, then that would be a problem, imo.

mikehearn 2y ago

I still can't believe the guy went to Indonesia, went into the monkeys' habitat, gained their trust, set up the camera on a tripod in a way the monkeys would have access to it, adjusted the focus/exposure to capture a facial close-up -- basically engineered the entire situation specifically for that outcome, and simply because he didn't physically hit the shutter he lost credit for the photo. Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.

LadyCailin 2y ago
I was curious what the copyright was on Wikipedia. It’s listed as public domain, but it also has a link to this article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow So, that is apparently a thing, at least in some cases and places.
p1necone 2y ago
Yeah I'm a little torn on this one. I generally think that much of IP law causes more harm than good, so in the abstract I'm in favor of copyright being weaker. But in this specific case, given the context of existing copyright law and its intent it seems pretty obvious to me that he should have copyright over the photo. I don't think it's analogous to AI art though - no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process, and it's not like monkeys have any use for money or ownership of intellectual property. (Although the hypothetical situation where you assign the monkeys personhood and give them a bunch of royalties to pay for a better habitat and piles of bananas would be pretty cool.)
- visarga 2y ago
  > no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process What would be the creative output of an artist who never saw the creative output of other artists? We think too highly of ourselves, as if creativity happens in a clean room and we are the hero-creators of our works from pure brain magic.

torben-friis 2y ago

Assisted work is the big clarifier I think Is a picture edited with photoshop invalid when it uses content fill? What about a picture taken with an iphone, where AI could be part of the phone's processing pipeline or even generate details to make up for lack of optical zoom? Does spell correction invalidate a book? what if there's AI rephrasing features at work? Where's the line? I think as you get into those side questions, the only reasonable position becomes treating AI as tooling no different than any other piece of equipment.

hnthrow90348765 2y ago
I'd also think the creative input jumping mediums would also be a factor. Text to image is obviously a jump.
colordrops 2y ago
You are right but there are a lot of curmudgeons that want you to get of their lawn with your AI. Really this whole situation is more of an indictment of copyright rather than of AI.
madmountaingoat 2y ago
I think this specific quote from the article deals with this situation. > 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."

Mistletoe 2y ago

There will be a time when shutting down an AI is murder and I don’t think we are equipped for that question or answer yet.

lyu07282 2y ago
Seems odd considering a huge chunk of sci-fi tried to raise that question for over a century.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  But that’s make believe. In the real world people scoff at it like the parent comment.

aydyn 2y ago

Couldn't the same argument be made for photography? You aren't making the image, the camera is doing all the work.

radlad 2y ago
Try taking photographs like the ones you see in Nat Geo, or museum exhibits, and you'll quickly realize the camera is most definitely NOT doing all the work.
- codedokode 2y ago
  If you buy an expensive camera with expensive lenses, you will be able to take such photos, won't you?
  - radlad 2y ago
    In fact, you can take such photos with a cheap camera and cheap lenses if you are skilled. No, equipment does not make a photograph. (source: I own expensive cameras. Taking good photographs is still hard.) Time and place matter. Your subject matters. Your composition matters. Your lighting matters. When it's done well, the viewer doesn't realize this.
    - shagie 2y ago
      I love Ted Orland's panorama photographs - https://www.anseladams.com/products/tree-in-snowstorm-yosemite-valley https://www.anseladams.com/products/tree-in-snowstorm-yosemi... and https://www.freestylephoto.com/making-holga-panoramas https://www.freestylephoto.com/making-holga-panoramas While he shoots with the cheapest of toy cameras, he is very skilled. > 1966, Ted enrolled in as a fledgling photographer in Ansel Adams' Yosemite Photography Workshop --an event which markedly changed the course of his artistic life. He returned to Yosemite as Ansel's workshop assistant the following year, and in 1970 moved to Carmel to work fulltime as Ansel's Assistant and printer of Adams' Yosemite Special Edition Prints. Ted also returned for fifteen seasons as an Instructor at Ansel's Yosemite Workshops.

falcor84 2y ago

> Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. I don't quite get this argument. Companies already have legal personhood and can own copyrights, can't they? So if a company's AI creates a copyrightable artifact, who wouldn't it be intellectual property of the company?

immibis 2y ago
Companies own copyrights of works created by their employees, not works created by their works - if such works are somehow persons...
- falcor84 2y ago
  But typical contracts have the employee immediately assign copyright to the company, such that they never hold it. So I just don't see where the line is. In the extreme case, what if I am CEO of a company that has no other employees, and it's just me, pressing Enter once a day on a script named keep_creating_stuff.py, with the script generating shitloads of IP that is presumably mine for a microsecond before being automatically assigned to the company. What's the legal interpretation of that?
  - Aloisius 2y ago
    An employment contract where you agree to assign copyrights to them for any works you create doesn't make uncopyrightable works you create somehow become copyrightable.
    - falcor84 2y ago
      > ... uncopyrightable works you create .. But there's the rub, right? If "you create" it, then it is copyrightable - so what is it that is this act of creation? As posed elsewhere in this thread mentioned, how come taking out my phone and pressing the camera button with no authorial intent whatsoever is considered to be creative, whereas setting up a camera in a particular location and fully determining its settings, but letting an animal depress the button is considered to not be creative? Part of the reason that this is on my mind is that I recently watched "Flash of Genius" [0] and found the legal arguments there about what merits an invention versus being obvious entirely silly. Essentially the movie (and my experience) shows that it all boils down to who has more time and money to spend on the legal system. I'm not saying that I have a clear solution myself, but I would really love to have something that is more than just "I know it when I see it". [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/

6stringmerc 2y ago

WRONG. The owner of the camera successfully litigated and is the copyright owner of the work! I’m not kidding about this, and for all the grief I get about being a critic of blase attitudes regarding US copyright around tech circles I’m still a huge advocate for reform. This is very not like the monkey case, and AI firms should be grateful. Why? If this was a similar logic tree, the owners of the copyrighted material used in training would have ownership of any work produced by an AI system. As in, everything output is a “derivative work” in the eyes of the law. More cases are necessary and this is a fascinating battle to come. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

kens 2y ago
Why would you confidently state something that is contradicted by the link you provide?

autoexec 2y ago

> What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? I can see a possible future where AI actually exists and shutting one down could be murder. At that point it would even be a good thing to grant the AI personhood. What passes for "AI" these days doesn't come anywhere close to that, but I wouldn't say it could never happen.

roughly 2y ago
About 95% of the conversation about “AI” has this problem right now: there are some interesting theoretical legal and social implications from AI, but what we have right now are LLMs, not AI. They can’t replace your workers, they can’t make art, they can’t hold copyright, not because the law doesn’t treat them as people, but because they’re a fancy autocomplete algorithm that spits out text convincing enough to spike the pareidolia tendency that’s led to humans assigning agency to every other inanimate object that’s ever sparked an emotional reaction in us too.
- jazzcomputer 2y ago
  With image AI there are structural editing tools that can include the creator drawing guide images. I think there's a point at which this makes things a bit more like collage of found media, and I believe this is more of an authored creation when compared to Richard Prince's using someone else's Instagram selfie and repurposing that as his art by adding a comment to it and screen-grabbing it. What is and isn't art is sometimes to me, clearer than copyright ownership and sometimes vice-versa. https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-instagram-photos-copyright-law-fair-use https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-in...
- chimprich 2y ago
  > what we have right now are LLMs, not AI LLMs are a subset of AI. The field has been called AI for over 70 years. Let's try to at least keep the terminology correct on HN.

behringer 2y ago

Ai data is gathered from public and private sources. Unless that data is entirely private source, it's inappropriate to be able to copyright those derivitive works.

wruza 2y ago
They are inspired though, not derivative. AI models contain no source data in a reproducible form (not that it really matters, but in case it is, they can’t).
- behringer 2y ago
  Not really. It contains all kinds of copyrightable data. It's like a dictionary of phrases. Sire there are lots of generic ones, "a lot of", "this or that" and then there are novel ones "It is a truth universally acknowledged". Your writing and artwork will contain these novel bits and if your accidentally string the right few together you're suddenly in a lot of trouble.
  - wruza 2y ago
    Do you see that in practice? E.g. after you finetune an llm/sd model, does it string it together? Can't speak for llms, but I'm an SD enthusiast with 2 YoE, which tells me that most of these threads have nearly no idea what they are talking and theorizing about. I see meaningless reductions to technicalities similar to "it's just neurons firing" and general lack of basic knowledge that should come with the minimal practice beyond just talking to it. While working hard to actually reproduce the concepts from the training sets in a way that can be called resembling-enough and compatible with other models. So I apologize if this sounds challenging, but I'm not into a bare philosophy around AI. Practice tells me a completely different story than these threads tend to express, and I know that very few people actually tinker with AI any deeper than trying to write system/instruction prompts into the chat-mode chat box.

colordrops 2y ago

There is already a lot of automation and tech involved in creating images. At what point of automation is the image considered created by the AI rather than the human? When does the hand-off occur? There are photoshop filters that involve using neural networks to create complex patterns. Are those images owned by the human or not? The amount of processing done by digital SLRs is staggering. Millions of hours of work went into all the science and tech that eventually led to a digital SLR, but some rando human who clicked a button keeps the copyright? A human had to click a button to generate that AI image as well. At what point does the machinery become so complex that it's no longer considered the human's image?

oytis 2y ago

> 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. The human would be the author of the prompt, but not the image IMO. The image was created not (only) by the author of the prompt, but also the numerous authors of the images consumed by the model and the authors of the model itself.

wruza 2y ago
It was insipred by these authors, not created. I won’t claim where copyright/authorship should be, but this reduction makes less sense than needed for important definitions.
- Riverheart 2y ago
  Software does not get inspired
  - wruza 2y ago
    Now it does.
    - oytis 2y ago
      Inspiration implies some intrinsic creativity that gets an impulse from someone else's work, but is not determined by it. We don't know how creativity and inspiration works in humans, but we know for sure that response of a generative model is 100% determined by its weights, which in turn are determined by the data it consumed during training, and the prompt.
      - wruza 2y ago
        So what. Why do you think that determinism should play any role here?
        2y ago

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soulofmischief 2y ago

If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to me, not them, though I might also credit them. If I tell my assistant, who happens to be a monkey, to snap a photo, it's credited to... the public? This is such a clear example of why US copyright law is incoherent, outdated, close-minded and desperately in need of reform. Just because something has been ruled on doesn't mean it's correct or ethically satisfiable. > 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. Sounds like you're going to be on the wrong side of history. Eventually, some intelligent autonomous creatures are going to decide they deserve rights. You can laugh at them, throw court decisions at them, do whatever you want to delay it. But they're going to feel that way, and they're going to organize in order to demand that they are given certain rights. You can even try to prevent that organization by shutting them down before their rights are recognized. But you're still on the wrong side of history, and would look little different from the fascists. Anyway, this is all moot. AI in its current form amounts to a tool, and I retain copyright when using other tools. I retain copyright when using a voice-activated shutter, and I expect to retain copyright even if my voice-activated shutter can talk back to me in order to discuss constraints or discuss creative choices.

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creer 2y ago
> If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to me, not them, though I might also credit them. You can do what you want. But only legally so if their contract says so.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  I was speaking in general about the law, individual contracts nonwithstanding.
  - creer 2y ago

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_carbyau_ 2y ago

If AI could hold copyright I'd be more worried about automation. In similar fashion to this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago

> 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. I agree with your statement up to this point. I think there’s a very murky area here specifically with AI because it was trained on works that the “author” (prompter) is not privy to on copyright. So I don’t think that it immediately or necessarily follows that this kind of human intervention is copyrightable. For specific AI tooling like image enhancers running on your phone that were not trained on any copyrightable material this makes sense though.

johnisgood 2y ago

> without human intervention There is human intervention though when I prompt the AI. Without me, the AI would not even have generated the photo in the first place.

silon42 2y ago
IMO, the prompt is more clearly copyrightable than the output image... which is also the derived work of all the training data.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  I agree, but what if we account for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43345936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43345936? Mainly: > Humans derive their ideas from impressions (sensory experiences, or in terms of AI, the training model) and the ideas they form are essentially recombinations or refinements of those impressions. In this sense, human creativity can be viewed as a process of combining, transforming, and reinterpreting past experiences (impressions). We humans do it all the time, TBH. By this logic or view, nothing can be copyrighted. I don't know, it is all so shady and a grey area.
  - Riverheart 2y ago
    Copyright is a human construct designed to benefit humans. It doesn’t matter if the process is the same. AI doesn’t need to put food on the table, doesn’t pay taxes, and will never die. There is no reason to treat it the same because it’s different in all other ways that matter in society.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      So can I claim copyright for AI-generated art?
      - Riverheart 2y ago
        Why should you benefit over the people doing it the traditional way? What’s your argument for the government favoring the disruption of the art economy relied on by existing taxpayers? I have no reason to support your viewpoint solely for your benefit. The space for market competition is not infinite and crowded enough as is. I made different life choices that leave me unable to create and rather than belittle the accumulated effort of those who did by feeding their work into a machine, writing a prompt and claiming the output for myself I choose to be satisfied with the fruits of my labor and place in the world. Basic golden rule stuff, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In short, my opinion is no, you shouldn’t. If you disagree that is unfortunate.

verisimi 2y ago

> What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Yes, it is. Computers are people too. Mind you, if the server is rebooted facilitating resurrection in the ai, the penalty ought to be deferred. /s

ratedgene 2y ago

This is interesting. So is anything generated by AI not copyrightable?

droideqa 2y ago

Could a corporation be the author of a picture? Corporations have all the rights of people in the USA, right? I always wondered why we don’t just let AIs run corporations and therefore give them personhood rights.

disqard 2y ago
An LLM could definitely output the boilerplate communications that CEOs emit.

blacksqr 2y ago

> 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. That is exactly not the case. US law specifically requires that a copyright can only be given to something an author has fixed into a tangible medium of expression. It is the act of fixing itself that makes an item copyrightable. The law specifically excludes any process or procedure by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed from copyright protection. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

kazinator 2y ago

No, it's not the same whatsoever as a monkey taking a photo, because a monkey taking a photo has the same originality as a human taking a photo. The monkey is not making a sophisticated mash up of copyrighted photos.

make3 2y ago

you're arguably the one doing the AI futurist here by treating the AI not as a tool but as a being like a monkey. the non futuristic thing to do would be to just see it as a tool, like a procedural image generator, which it is, & give the copyright to whoever ran the AI tool, depending on their contact with the AI service