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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

by 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.
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      Well you do if someone rejects a copyright claim on the grounds that the image is AI-generated, and a court backs them up.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        The court did not say AI generated images are not eligible for copyright. They said machines cannot be assigned copyrights. That’s because only humans are eligible. If you are a human who creatively uses a tool to generate something, you’d get copyright protection.
visarga 2y ago
> you can't copyright something that your AI generated Seems like a loophole, if I generate synthetic data with a model trained on copyrighted works, the synthetic data is copyright free? So I can later train models on it?
- rlpb 2y ago
  You can't "launder" copyright away like that. The court will see straight through it. See "What color are your bits?" at https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
  - visarga 2y ago
    There are over 200K language modeling datasets on Hugging Face, I bet a large portion of them were generated with LLMs, and all LLMs to date have been trained on copyrighted data. So they are all tainted. But philosophically, I wonder if it's allright to block that, it techincally follows the definition of copyright. It does not carry the expression, but borrows abstractions and facts. That's exactly what is allowed. If we move to block synthetic data, then anyone can be accused of infringement when they reuse abstractions learned somewhere else. Creativity would not be possible. On the other hand models trained on synthetic data will never regurgitate the originals because they never saw them.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> The practical implication is you can't copyright something that your AI generated. No, its not. This is not a case of the human trying to claim copyright as the author of a work made using AI tools. > As the article notes, copyright applications are also being rejected in cases where a human asserts authorship over an AI generated work. That is true (although at least one has been accepted by the copyright office, IIRC), but it is not an outcome of this case (even in the sense that this ruling might support it) because this case does not concern human claims of authorship at all. It concerns undisputed solely-AI creation.

by cvoss 2y ago

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.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    Well you do if someone rejects a copyright claim on the grounds that the image is AI-generated, and a court backs them up.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      The court did not say AI generated images are not eligible for copyright. They said machines cannot be assigned copyrights. That’s because only humans are eligible. If you are a human who creatively uses a tool to generate something, you’d get copyright protection.

visarga 2y ago

> you can't copyright something that your AI generated Seems like a loophole, if I generate synthetic data with a model trained on copyrighted works, the synthetic data is copyright free? So I can later train models on it?

rlpb 2y ago
You can't "launder" copyright away like that. The court will see straight through it. See "What color are your bits?" at https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- visarga 2y ago
  There are over 200K language modeling datasets on Hugging Face, I bet a large portion of them were generated with LLMs, and all LLMs to date have been trained on copyrighted data. So they are all tainted. But philosophically, I wonder if it's allright to block that, it techincally follows the definition of copyright. It does not carry the expression, but borrows abstractions and facts. That's exactly what is allowed. If we move to block synthetic data, then anyone can be accused of infringement when they reuse abstractions learned somewhere else. Creativity would not be possible. On the other hand models trained on synthetic data will never regurgitate the originals because they never saw them.

dragonwriter 2y ago

> The practical implication is you can't copyright something that your AI generated. No, its not. This is not a case of the human trying to claim copyright as the author of a work made using AI tools. > As the article notes, copyright applications are also being rejected in cases where a human asserts authorship over an AI generated work. That is true (although at least one has been accepted by the copyright office, IIRC), but it is not an outcome of this case (even in the sense that this ruling might support it) because this case does not concern human claims of authorship at all. It concerns undisputed solely-AI creation.