to reinforce the claim of jhbadger
Which did not refute my comment, which pointed out these things often start out open source, but eventually the market moves into proprietary corporate control and the open source offerings decline in usage. There’s billions involved here, I can almost guarantee you this will happen. 75% of the graphic market is owned by Adobe products alone, not open source titles like GIMP or Paint.net.
6 Likes
A person or group of people made the algorithm. They are the authors of the work.
If this was not the case then any generative artwork such as Brian Eno’s work could not be cooperative.
The fact that the system used to create generative art in this case is termed “artificial intelligence” shouldn’t make any different.
Or Option 3:
As the work is based on human-created works used to “train” the network the copyright remains with the artists who were plagiarised.
I’m rooting for the Robot Monkeys.
7 Likes
Interesting choice of phrase. Is it human hands or human minds that are the source of copyrightable creativity?
(Let’s remember the many artworks ‘created’ by and copyrighted by famous artists, whose actual physical creation may have involved their team of assistants - and their hands.)
1 Like
Yeah, that kinda crap makes me want to take a permanent break from BB, not just a one week break. This place is turning into reddit.
But that is NOT what happened in this case. One fact not in dispute in this case is that the work was entirely AI generated, without any human modification. So unless Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters was generated by AI, that example is not relevant here.
8 Likes
Microsoft as owners of the human-created algorithm-driven Office Suite would be very interested in stretching this line of logic. To what extent does the power of the algorithms contribute to the creative process? Or are the programs simply tools for editing - the digital equivalent of the pen in “putting pen to paper”? I wonder if there is existing case law of a software company attempting to claim copyright (whole or partial) on an author’s work that was created using their software.
I would not imagine that would be in a the manufacturers interest. Nobody is going to buy a tool if they don’t have copywrite of what they make with it
That is slightly beside the point though.
The claim here seems to be that it is impossible for a piece to be copyrighted if an artwork results from an AI system developed by people. but where do draw the line? The output of all coded artworks are the product of the code. The computer generates direct pixels each time a generative visual artwork is run. So the does copyright apply to those outputs where there is no AI and if so why not when there is AI involved?
That’s quite a stretch. Why should the people who created the algorithm get credit for the work instead of (for example) the writers/artists/etc. who created the work the algorithm was trained on?
5 Likes
That assumes they trained it using the work of others.
Are you aware of any generative AIs that aren’t trained on the works of others? If so, which ones?
6 Likes
Since AI generated art is plagiarism in the first place, of course it shouldn’t be copyrightable.
3 Likes
Both @danimagoo and @jhbadger are correct?
I don’t think @jhbadger was saying that the judge ruled incorrectly or that the artwork in question wasn’t 100% AI-created. They were raising that AI outputs are often modified by humans, and that may be all that is needed to satisfy the requirement that the work be created by human beings and therefore copyrightable.
That said, The Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters analogy isn’t perfect because the judge isn’t talking about whether something has entered the public domain or not, she is talking about whether it can be copyrighted to begin with. The “monkey selfie” was never eligible for copyright. The difference may be academic to an extent, but @danimagoo is likely correct that the extent of alteration matters. If there has been caselaw on this already in reference to AI that would be useful to know.
Eventually we might see attempts to recognize AI personhood, which isn’t so far fetched since humans have granted personhood to corporations for centuries, and there are ever growing attempts to achieve personhood for animals. If that were to occur, perhaps AI generated artwork could be copyrighted?
1 Like
Huh, I feel like I disagree with this specific case.
This wasn’t a case of someone asking Midjourney to produce a completely random piece of art and then claiming copyright over it. This was made using a custom AI model created by the artist, producing as very specific series of distinctive works based on a theme. (See art and article here.) Clearly there’s a lot of the artist in this work.
I think the issue simply came down to the fact that the artist wanted (for artistic reasons) to submit the piece with the AI as the “creator” as a “work-for-hire” for him, like an artist would if they were paying an assistant. The issue before the judge, as I read it (I could well be wrong) was simply that the AI itself could not be the “creator,” since that must be a human. I think if the artist had simply claimed the copyright himself, it’s unlikely there would have been an issue.
To my mind, creating an AI model with specific parameters and then making it produce art with those parameters would be like Jackson Pollock setting up a bunch of machines to throw paint at a canvas. Even if Pollock decided to hook up a 1950 mainframe with an “AI” to decide when to throw the paint, it would still clearly be his work. But he probably couldn’t submit it to the copyright office with the machine being the “creator” of the work.
2 Likes
It is entirely possible to use AI to generate art in other ways. Out of copyright imagery could be used as well as imagery generated by the authors. There are also an immense number of potential Ai approaches that do not really on training with existing imagery. This about a legal concept not a specific example.
Well the artist himself has nobody else to blame for that framing of the question because, per an article in The Verge, that was his whole goal:
5 Likes
I don’t know that that’s true. The court here is not saying that this is some mere technicality, that because the AI is listed as the creator rather than a human, it doesn’t warrant protection. It is saying that the work doesn’t warrant protection because it was, in fact, created entirely by AI. It does not matter that the AI was created by a human. The human can then get some IP protection on the AI itself. Although, as is pretty common knowledge at this point, copyright and patent protections for software are fairly limited. Regardless, if the human’s creativity lies in the creation and programming of the AI, then that is what should qualify for protection, not the art that the AI creates.
7 Likes
They did.
“AI” doesn’t ‘create’ anything out of thin air; it remixes already existing works.
6 Likes
Did you read my whole post? I am not talking about this case I am talking about the concept of whether ANY Ai produced art can have a copyright and who owns it. That was a hypothetical “they”.
Just because AI is currently being used to generate images in one way does not mean other methods of creating art with AI are not possible, they are.
Actually, I would say that your framing is anthropomorphizing the AI – indeed, in the direction the artist wanted by claiming the AI as the “creator,” which was the very thing the judge said it couldn’t be.
The AI is just a program. If I create a computer program to draw something based exactly on my specs, I’m of course the artist. It doesn’t matter that I used the program as my paint brush. If I add a random-number generator to it, it’s still my art. If we agree that the AI isn’t conscious, then just because I call my really-really-fancy program an “AI” doesn’t mean it can legally be the creator. It doesn’t have personhood, so legally can’t be the creator.
I’m not even certain it’s saying this, and I think people are reading the case wrong (though again, I could be wrong myself!). I’m pretty sure the issue is simply that the artist listed the AI as the “creator,” and the copyright office said a work of art have an AI as the creator.
Thanks for the context, yes, this seems like precisely the issue.
4 Likes
