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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'
by 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 agoSome 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 agoYes, 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
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- visarga 11y agoDon't forget to consider the fact that humans select the best outputs from their NNs, thus, contributing with their esthetic sense to the final result. I am sure not all images generated from NN are worthy of Smithsonian yet. Also, it's humans who took the input pictures and fed them to the NN.