5 ms·

Who owns copyright to Deep Dream images?

44 points by somerandomness 11y ago

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
FTA: Q: So, Andy, who owns the copyright to DeepDream images? [...] A: Basically, "no one does," because AIs don't have legal personhood. Meanwhile, William Gibson 31 years ago: "That's a good one," the construct said. "Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI." Gibson was very, very right when he said "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." He just neglected to mention that the future is also really friggin' weird.
- mhink 11y ago
  Where is that Gibson quote from? I'm intrigued. :)
  - escap 11y ago
    it's from Neuromancer
  - lfowles 11y ago
    Google: Neuromancer
  - primaryobjects 11y ago
    That's from Neuromancer, when the hologram (like a chat bot) is having a conversation with the main character.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
vernie 11y ago
Do blur filters have legal personhood?
- jtmcmc 11y ago
  Exactly. Calling this NN AI (as in general / strong AI) is ludicrous.
rm999 11y ago
I tried reading that article, but for a topic that I find interesting (especially as someone who has studied AI and machine learning) I hoped it would be more approachable and easier to read. Can anyone explain the last few sentences for me? >The increasing sophistication of generative software and the reality that all creativity is algorithmic compel recognition that AI-authored works are less heterogeneous to both their human counterparts and existing copyright doctrine than appearances may at first suggest. AI authorship is readily assimilable to the current copyright framework through the work made for hire doctrine, which is a mechanism for vesting copyright directly in a legal person who is acknowledged not to be the author-in-fact of the work in question. Through this legal fiction, the machinic creativity of generative code can be recognized for what it really is—something other than (but owing to) the human creativity of its coder
- sp332 11y ago
  AI should be considered legal "persons". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_personality This is not treating them like humans, but for example businesses can be legal persons as well. It's an entity that can own things and enter into contracts. Instead of making some new, complex law about AI owning copyrights, we can recycle the "work-for-hire" doctrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire That's where a person makes something (e.g. a book) as their job, and the person who hired them ends up owning the copyright. That way, the AI is "hired" to produce images for the operator, and the operator owns the images.
jfoster 11y ago
In the eyes of the law, wouldn't the images be considered derivative works of all the data the Neural Net was trained with?
- tantalor 11y ago
  And the input image.
kolme 11y ago
This is just a neural network fed with some dog pictures, it's not really "thinking", it doesn't "create" anything. In other words, it's not (yet) artificial general intelligence. As I see it, it's just some software which creates an output given an input. In essence, a tool. So I guess, unless otherwise stated in the license of said software, the ownership lays on the operator. Maybe, one can argue that the engineers who "fed" the NN do have the rights of the output. But the software is not clever enough for me to see here a similar case to that of wikipedia, the photographer and the monkey.
- flebron 11y ago
  To a sufficiently advanced alien species, _we_ are neural networks fed with some pictures (and sounds, smells, touches, and tastes) :)
- sp332 11y ago
  You don't have to have general intelligence to be creative. Different networks can create different results with the same inputs. It's not as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32GnAI3nrsQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32GnAI3nrsQ
- rtkwe 11y ago
  It is affected by that case though because of the policy and guidelines it spawned. > “Because copyright law is limited to ‘original intellectual conceptions of the author,’ the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work,” said the US Copyright Office in its latest compendium of practices published Tuesday. “The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants.” and > In new guidance the USCO has ruled that only works created by a human can be copyrighted under US law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention. Source [0] This feels like it falls into the 'by machines without human intervention.' There's no meaningful contributions from a human. All that said this will eventually be an issue (hopefully) when machine intelligence actually takes off or human uploads become a viable operation. Though maybe by then we'll be less obsessed with every idea having to have an owner, but that's neither here nor there. [0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey-business-macaque-selfie-cant-be-copyrighted-say-us-and-uk http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey-bus...
SilasX 11y ago
>Q: And [who owns the copyright to DeepDream images], according to [my law school mentor]? >A: Basically, "no one does," because AIs don't have legal personhood. Wait, what? So if you build a tool that helps you build the final product, the tool counts as the creator, since the tool doesn't have legal personhood? Do we argue that easels and spirographs don't have legal personhood so if you use that stuff in your work then no one has the copyright? Reminds me of the quip: "Dismissing a graphic artist's work because it was computer-generated is like dismissing Michaelangelo's work because it was brush-generated."
- FigBug 11y ago
  If you used a spirograph to create art, you would own the copyright. If you created a spirograph that was robot controlled and could automatically create art then nobody would own the copyright. I don't see how an easel count create art on it's own.
  - qopp 11y ago
    The distinction is arbitrary. The only difference between the spirograph and the robot is you are touching the spirograph while it's operating.
  - blintzing 11y ago
    If I write a computer program (say a Processing sketch) that generates an image, who owns the copyright to the image?
    - Retric 11y ago
      Unless your directly influencing the output you own the copyright to the program not the output. Basically, if your code generates a random image you don't get copyright, which is useful as generating say every English haiku is actually possible. It's under ~(15,831 syllable candidates) ^ 17.
    - spc476 11y ago
      Here's a real case: The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, a book released in 1984. The prose and poetry was written by Racter, a computer program written by William Chamberlain. The illustrations were done by Joan Hall, and the introduction to the book was written by William Chamberlain. So it's clear that Joan Hall owns the copyright to the illustrations, and William Chamberlain the introduction. But what of the rest of the book?
michael_storm 11y ago
The article (or the parts I've read so far; it's long and dense) assumes two things: 1) "An AI" should be considered a person. (This one is more subtle; I don't believe the author says it outright.) 2) "An AI", being a person, should be considered the author of its output. Both of these suppositions are quite debatable, but the article doesn't bother to debate them: The law as it is currently configured cannot vest ownership of the copyright in a procedurally generated work in the work’s author-in-fact, because the work’s author-in-fact—a generative software program—has no legal personhood. Intuition and the principle of transitivity both suggest that the programmer of generative software is the logical owner of the copyright in the works generated by his or her software. Whose intuition? Not mine. My intuition says that Deep Dream is a tool, and that by running the tool, I am the author-in-fact of the work. Or maybe that doesn't require enough human creativity for a court, and if not, fine -- the creators of the images that my instance of Deep Dream sourced to create its nightmare-scape are the authors-in-law. But Deep Dream is not the author, and the programmers of Deep Dream are not the authors. That's _my_ intuition (possibly quite wrong!). The article would do better to distinguish intuition from fact.
- ctdonath 11y ago
  Some time ago I had to address this kind of issue with fonts. Summary: the program generating text on the screen was copyrighted, but the procedural generated shapes (typeface text) was not.
  - visarga 11y ago
    Yes, but who plugged the computer into the socket and paid for its electricity? Does that count? It's just a minor contribution, but essential. Also, who configured the software - shouldn't the work performed by humans be considered a contribution to the end result? Alternatively, why not attribute the Pixar movies to their rendering engines? Aren't they using enough neurons or procedural generation? I am sure there are lots of smart agents there in their procedural generation of trees, grass and minor characters.
- _lce0 11y ago
  > "An AI", being a person, should be considered the author of its output. I guess "copyright holder" is a better term. I can think of Music records, or Hollywood companies, which are not human but are definitely "persons" that hold tons of copyrighted material, and even some of those created that material. I can't see why not a program that creates digital works couldn't hold the copyright of its output
rl3 11y ago
Obviously presuming Deep Dream images to be the output of a strong AI or an otherwise sentient being is absurd, but it does raise a very good point. That being: where do you draw the line in terms of what constitutes electronic sentience? The short answer is nobody knows. We only have vague ideas, and for all we know those may be completely wrong. It becomes difficult in that the cognitive architecture of artificial intelligence is not bound by biological limitations, and thus may be quite alien in nature relative to mammalian cognition. As such, our existing ethical frameworks may be completely unsuitable if applied to artificial beings. What I personally find unsettling about the Deep Dream images is their striking visual similarity to that of what a human sees on hallucinogenic drugs. The underlying algorithms utilized are themselves are heavily rooted in biological intelligence. It's not a huge leap of logic to say that if you were somehow able to excise part of a living human's visual cortex and hook it up such that it could receive input and generate output, you might see similar results. It's also worth noting that attempting to grow human brain tissue to any large degree of scale or complexity within a laboratory environment would be considered a highly unethical horror show, despite the fact that we almost certainly have the technology to do such a thing today. By the same token, one could do the exact same thing in digital form and the perception would be entirely different. This brings up a lot of issues, including the possibility that artificial agents of the future could potentially suffer in silence on unimaginable scales, double standards with regards to artificial versus biological intelligence, as well as fundamental questions about what constitutes artificial suffering and sentience in the first place.
imh 11y ago
I think it's a much more interesting question to ask who owns the output if it is trained on copywritten data. It works by iteratively tweaking the image to look more like whatever it looks most like. It's not hard to imagine that a simpler model that has only seen one picture of a dog might iterate a mildly dog-like image into exactly that dog training image. Clearly that should belong to whomever the original photo belongs to. So then what about the grey areas beyond that simple thought experiment?
visarga 11y ago
A neural net is just software, like Photoshop. Who owns the images created with Photoshop? The one who is paying for the electricity.
visarga 11y ago
And this comment is copyrighted by my "Left and Right hands", because it was them that typed, letter by letter. You know, my hands are so smart, they have lots of sensors and neural networks in them.
dlss 11y ago
This analysis is insane. It's just a very advanced photoshop filter.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

FTA: Q: So, Andy, who owns the copyright to DeepDream images? [...] A: Basically, "no one does," because AIs don't have legal personhood. Meanwhile, William Gibson 31 years ago: "That's a good one," the construct said. "Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI." Gibson was very, very right when he said "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." He just neglected to mention that the future is also really friggin' weird.

mhink 11y ago
Where is that Gibson quote from? I'm intrigued. :)
- escap 11y ago
  it's from Neuromancer
- lfowles 11y ago
  Google: Neuromancer
- primaryobjects 11y ago
  That's from Neuromancer, when the hologram (like a chat bot) is having a conversation with the main character.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

vernie 11y ago

Do blur filters have legal personhood?

jtmcmc 11y ago
Exactly. Calling this NN AI (as in general / strong AI) is ludicrous.

rm999 11y ago

I tried reading that article, but for a topic that I find interesting (especially as someone who has studied AI and machine learning) I hoped it would be more approachable and easier to read. Can anyone explain the last few sentences for me? >The increasing sophistication of generative software and the reality that all creativity is algorithmic compel recognition that AI-authored works are less heterogeneous to both their human counterparts and existing copyright doctrine than appearances may at first suggest. AI authorship is readily assimilable to the current copyright framework through the work made for hire doctrine, which is a mechanism for vesting copyright directly in a legal person who is acknowledged not to be the author-in-fact of the work in question. Through this legal fiction, the machinic creativity of generative code can be recognized for what it really is—something other than (but owing to) the human creativity of its coder

sp332 11y ago
AI should be considered legal "persons". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_personality This is not treating them like humans, but for example businesses can be legal persons as well. It's an entity that can own things and enter into contracts. Instead of making some new, complex law about AI owning copyrights, we can recycle the "work-for-hire" doctrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire That's where a person makes something (e.g. a book) as their job, and the person who hired them ends up owning the copyright. That way, the AI is "hired" to produce images for the operator, and the operator owns the images.

jfoster 11y ago

In the eyes of the law, wouldn't the images be considered derivative works of all the data the Neural Net was trained with?

tantalor 11y ago
And the input image.

kolme 11y ago

This is just a neural network fed with some dog pictures, it's not really "thinking", it doesn't "create" anything. In other words, it's not (yet) artificial general intelligence. As I see it, it's just some software which creates an output given an input. In essence, a tool. So I guess, unless otherwise stated in the license of said software, the ownership lays on the operator. Maybe, one can argue that the engineers who "fed" the NN do have the rights of the output. But the software is not clever enough for me to see here a similar case to that of wikipedia, the photographer and the monkey.

flebron 11y ago
To a sufficiently advanced alien species, _we_ are neural networks fed with some pictures (and sounds, smells, touches, and tastes) :)
sp332 11y ago
You don't have to have general intelligence to be creative. Different networks can create different results with the same inputs. It's not as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32GnAI3nrsQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32GnAI3nrsQ
rtkwe 11y ago
It is affected by that case though because of the policy and guidelines it spawned. > “Because copyright law is limited to ‘original intellectual conceptions of the author,’ the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work,” said the US Copyright Office in its latest compendium of practices published Tuesday. “The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants.” and > In new guidance the USCO has ruled that only works created by a human can be copyrighted under US law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention. Source [0] This feels like it falls into the 'by machines without human intervention.' There's no meaningful contributions from a human. All that said this will eventually be an issue (hopefully) when machine intelligence actually takes off or human uploads become a viable operation. Though maybe by then we'll be less obsessed with every idea having to have an owner, but that's neither here nor there. [0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey-business-macaque-selfie-cant-be-copyrighted-say-us-and-uk http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey-bus...

SilasX 11y ago

>Q: And [who owns the copyright to DeepDream images], according to [my law school mentor]? >A: Basically, "no one does," because AIs don't have legal personhood. Wait, what? So if you build a tool that helps you build the final product, the tool counts as the creator, since the tool doesn't have legal personhood? Do we argue that easels and spirographs don't have legal personhood so if you use that stuff in your work then no one has the copyright? Reminds me of the quip: "Dismissing a graphic artist's work because it was computer-generated is like dismissing Michaelangelo's work because it was brush-generated."

FigBug 11y ago
If you used a spirograph to create art, you would own the copyright. If you created a spirograph that was robot controlled and could automatically create art then nobody would own the copyright. I don't see how an easel count create art on it's own.
- qopp 11y ago
  The distinction is arbitrary. The only difference between the spirograph and the robot is you are touching the spirograph while it's operating.
- blintzing 11y ago
  If I write a computer program (say a Processing sketch) that generates an image, who owns the copyright to the image?
  - Retric 11y ago
    Unless your directly influencing the output you own the copyright to the program not the output. Basically, if your code generates a random image you don't get copyright, which is useful as generating say every English haiku is actually possible. It's under ~(15,831 syllable candidates) ^ 17.
  - spc476 11y ago
    Here's a real case: The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, a book released in 1984. The prose and poetry was written by Racter, a computer program written by William Chamberlain. The illustrations were done by Joan Hall, and the introduction to the book was written by William Chamberlain. So it's clear that Joan Hall owns the copyright to the illustrations, and William Chamberlain the introduction. But what of the rest of the book?

michael_storm 11y ago

The article (or the parts I've read so far; it's long and dense) assumes two things: 1) "An AI" should be considered a person. (This one is more subtle; I don't believe the author says it outright.) 2) "An AI", being a person, should be considered the author of its output. Both of these suppositions are quite debatable, but the article doesn't bother to debate them: The law as it is currently configured cannot vest ownership of the copyright in a procedurally generated work in the work’s author-in-fact, because the work’s author-in-fact—a generative software program—has no legal personhood. Intuition and the principle of transitivity both suggest that the programmer of generative software is the logical owner of the copyright in the works generated by his or her software. Whose intuition? Not mine. My intuition says that Deep Dream is a tool, and that by running the tool, I am the author-in-fact of the work. Or maybe that doesn't require enough human creativity for a court, and if not, fine -- the creators of the images that my instance of Deep Dream sourced to create its nightmare-scape are the authors-in-law. But Deep Dream is not the author, and the programmers of Deep Dream are not the authors. That's _my_ intuition (possibly quite wrong!). The article would do better to distinguish intuition from fact.

ctdonath 11y ago
Some time ago I had to address this kind of issue with fonts. Summary: the program generating text on the screen was copyrighted, but the procedural generated shapes (typeface text) was not.
- visarga 11y ago
  Yes, but who plugged the computer into the socket and paid for its electricity? Does that count? It's just a minor contribution, but essential. Also, who configured the software - shouldn't the work performed by humans be considered a contribution to the end result? Alternatively, why not attribute the Pixar movies to their rendering engines? Aren't they using enough neurons or procedural generation? I am sure there are lots of smart agents there in their procedural generation of trees, grass and minor characters.
_lce0 11y ago
> "An AI", being a person, should be considered the author of its output. I guess "copyright holder" is a better term. I can think of Music records, or Hollywood companies, which are not human but are definitely "persons" that hold tons of copyrighted material, and even some of those created that material. I can't see why not a program that creates digital works couldn't hold the copyright of its output

rl3 11y ago

Obviously presuming Deep Dream images to be the output of a strong AI or an otherwise sentient being is absurd, but it does raise a very good point. That being: where do you draw the line in terms of what constitutes electronic sentience? The short answer is nobody knows. We only have vague ideas, and for all we know those may be completely wrong. It becomes difficult in that the cognitive architecture of artificial intelligence is not bound by biological limitations, and thus may be quite alien in nature relative to mammalian cognition. As such, our existing ethical frameworks may be completely unsuitable if applied to artificial beings. What I personally find unsettling about the Deep Dream images is their striking visual similarity to that of what a human sees on hallucinogenic drugs. The underlying algorithms utilized are themselves are heavily rooted in biological intelligence. It's not a huge leap of logic to say that if you were somehow able to excise part of a living human's visual cortex and hook it up such that it could receive input and generate output, you might see similar results. It's also worth noting that attempting to grow human brain tissue to any large degree of scale or complexity within a laboratory environment would be considered a highly unethical horror show, despite the fact that we almost certainly have the technology to do such a thing today. By the same token, one could do the exact same thing in digital form and the perception would be entirely different. This brings up a lot of issues, including the possibility that artificial agents of the future could potentially suffer in silence on unimaginable scales, double standards with regards to artificial versus biological intelligence, as well as fundamental questions about what constitutes artificial suffering and sentience in the first place.

imh 11y ago

I think it's a much more interesting question to ask who owns the output if it is trained on copywritten data. It works by iteratively tweaking the image to look more like whatever it looks most like. It's not hard to imagine that a simpler model that has only seen one picture of a dog might iterate a mildly dog-like image into exactly that dog training image. Clearly that should belong to whomever the original photo belongs to. So then what about the grey areas beyond that simple thought experiment?

visarga 11y ago

A neural net is just software, like Photoshop. Who owns the images created with Photoshop? The one who is paying for the electricity.

visarga 11y ago

And this comment is copyrighted by my "Left and Right hands", because it was them that typed, letter by letter. You know, my hands are so smart, they have lots of sensors and neural networks in them.

dlss 11y ago

This analysis is insane. It's just a very advanced photoshop filter.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]