Opinion: Don’t exclude AI-generated art from copyright

betam4x said:

I think the proper approach would be disclosure requirements surrounding the material the model is trained on. If the model was trained on unlicensed, but-copyrighted material, output should NOT be copyrighted. If the company that did the training went through proper channels to license everything, the output should be covered under copyright law.

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I like the idea, but the burden of proof would be interesting, to say the least. Without an easily recognizable watermark making it into the final work, it’d be difficult to prove it was trained only on licensed material or to prove it was not.

I can’t help thinking that everyone should avoid referencing the “Zarya of the dawn” comic in these discussions, and instead try to forget it ever existed. There was a strong argument that the author was reproducing Zendaya’s likeness without permission (as in, wasn’t her name deliberately included as part of the prompts?) so, had copyright been granted, the author would have - rightly - been sued out of existence.

I personally don’t think AI art should be given copyright protection purely on the basis of “a person came up with the prompt” and there needs to be some additional transformative element applied. But if you want to argue that point, I think there are definitely better poster children to reference.

Crappy idea. This could easily lead to AI programs cranking all sorts of “art” in order to gain copyrights which would be effectively held (administrated) by some persons. Using AI in a shotgun approach could yield copyrights to a huge variety of visual expression (this could also be applied to music and poetry). Whole styles could be copyrighted through ‘machine’ output. Again the control of these copyrights would effectively lie in the hands of some persons. Want to effectively control all bird art? Crank up an AI instance and ‘create’ a massive range of depictions. Their all yours, well your pet AI’s.

The same organizations that have set up gigantic bitcoin mining operations could set up ‘art’ mining operations. They will. Set your million AI monkeys to typing.

No fuck off.

Human artists can document the creation process to prove they created it. They will only need to show this if challenged. It's not a big deal. It is absolutely not a wrong decision and not unworkable.

The whole point of copyright is to allow the artist to make a living from their work.

It’s a good decision to decide you can’t art generated by a machine, whether it is based on human work or not.

muchado said:

Even if they are copyrightable, they are derivative. Some copyright may remain in some of the sources. I don’t think it will be as straightforward as Timothy thinks.

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All art is derivative unless someone completely unaware of all of human history were to create something others considered artistic. So is your complaint that computers get to that point faster and with more training material? If so, you're just rehashing the tale of John Henry nearly 200 years later. Just as a reminder, Henry died and machines took over industrial-scale physical labor. The same is coming to generative works. Bans on copyright or lawsuits on training will simply be stopgaps.

Jeakjeak said:

The whole point of copyright is to allow the artist to make a living from their work.

It’s a good decision to decide you can’t art generated by a machine, whether it is based on human work or not.

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Exactly, Timothy makes a philosophical argument based on photography but completely ignores the social impact on society of making AI art copyrightable. Laws don't exist in a philosophical vacuum, they need to be analysed in terms of their impact on society.

Is there a parallel with athletics and performance enhancing drugs?

Sports exist for entertainment, and people seem to find it entertaining as a "fair competition", so the rules exist to ban the use of performance enhancing drugs. Yes, the application of those rules is difficult. In the absence of them, it would prevent people from earning a living as sports entertainers unless they also took such drugs.

Why does Art exist? Why do we allow Art to be copyrighted? Entertainment and leisure, and allowing for people to make a living doing things that others find entertaining.

So, allowing someone to auto generate "all the Art" and automate the copyright process of it... why would we want to do that? How does it benefit us as a society, to allow those with access to capital to engage in a "land rush" effectively?

Why can't Art be reserved for Humans?

As a former computer scientist and current artist, I would encourage folks to examine what the practical effect of copyrighting ML-derived work would be. Scaling up a copyright trolling operation would be trivial if you allow the copyrighting of purely prompted work. Further, an ML model can mimic most aesthetics, so unlike in the wake of photography, artists can’t simply retreat from an aesthetic (in that case, realism and it’s historically related aesthetics, which btw is a thing that did monumental damage to art education, so using the example of photography as something which has sat easily with all other visual arts isn’t that straightforward), but are going to be dealing with a flood of budget look-a-likes in every lane, often with malicious intent to extort behind them or at least attempt to grift clients by the “passive income” crowd.

I genuinely see why people want to embrace this shiny new tech but, I think as tech folks it behooves us to take a moment and notice that no one who has called themselves an artist from before this ML explosion wants this stuff and no one wants it legally protected . I hesitate to speak in universals, there are exceptions, but having been increasingly immersed in the arts for 5 years, they’re truly minimal exceptions. And while disruption of “insiders” is the usual logic behind tech proliferation, quite literally what’s happening is entry level jobs in art are going extinct as companies us ML models to eliminate the sort of work that allows people to survive as artists, grow their craft, and make their way through the commercial and/or fine arts world.

I think listening and noticing the full court press from everyone who makes a living creating art, film, the written word, music, etc to prevent this stuff from getting legal protection without any admixture of skilled labour, and the cases of large scale abuse by grifters that are already plaguing the world show we need to take HARD look at ourselves before foisting this tech on the world.

And before the inevitable “the cat is out of the bag” talk, I’d encourage folks to have empathy and think about what is it would feel like for an industry of folks who are famously under regulated show up, wreck your ability to make a livelihood on your decades of craft with wild mass production of stuff that’s often below a professional quality bar, and then shrugged and said “well it’s too late to do anything about it…” when you deigned to get angry.

Regardless of philosophical arguments, in the end AI-generated art will become copyrightable for the sole reason that the media industries want to use AI so that they don't have to pay as many staff, and they won't release products they can't copyright, so they'll throw as many "donation" dollars around as it takes to get what they want.

Excuse my ignorance, but does copyright really need to be registered in the US? Or is this something special the artist tried to apply for?

Over here in my small, European country, copyright is just “yours” if you make something. Trademarks, logos, inventions, etc., are things you apply for at the patent office.

I think the sheer speed at which AI art can be generated could overwhelm everything else.

Sit down, start connecting some different scripts together, and just let the AI art generation tools rip. Trying different prompts from fiction, stuff ripped from the headlines, stuff ripped from TV Guide, and just go for it. Generate hundreds of thousands of pictures an hour, millions per day, just go for it. Copyright it all.

Then wait for someone pathetic human to generate some art, get some acclaim, and look for the picture your system has already generated that it looks like. Then sweep in for the kill. Art doesn't need to be an exact copy for infringement to be found.

Allowing the copyright on the output of an algorithm feels akin to allowing someone to copyright the solution to an equation.

Copyrighting the prompt might be the closest analogue to the photography example. It's the part that captures the "minds eye", captures the human part of the creation. I see it as akin to copyrighting a poem. Unless it too was created by an AI text generation algorithm, but how would one prove that?

The problem with your "lets use the photography example" argument from my perspective is how does one prove the level of effort/craft that the human undertook in creating the image.

coremelt said:

No they just take some photos with their phone at various stages of the artwork. You're making something thats easy and already commonly done into a non existent problem.

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The problem is making artists prove themselves against massively mass produced synthetic art. Visual art, music, poetry, literature. All of these can be poached.

The industry of asserting sketchy patent claims demonstrates an existing scheme that can easily be applied against artists.

Jeakjeak said:

The whole point of copyright is to allow the artist to make a living from their work.

It’s a good decision to decide you can’t art generated by a machine, whether it is based on human work or not.

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No, the whole point of copyright is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Compensating creators is a means, not the goal.

TechCrazy said:

We need to overhaul copyright, trademark, patent law from the ground up.

1. Which means no more generational ownership and no more transferring ownership. Ownership can only be granted to the original author.

This would solve most problems;
Artists being taken advantage of.
Patent trolls
Infinite monopolies
etc.

2. Corporations can no longer have any ownership

This is really important, it means the power of ownership goes to the individual or group which gives them leverage to negotiate terms. It also prevents a massive corporation from simply using an Ai art generator making trillions of pictures and copywriting them all.

3. The amount of ownership an individual can own is limited to 10
For more, they need to move the previous ones to Open license.

Again preventing an individual from hoarding, preventing companies from hoarding.


These 3 fundamental changes will not be popular - especially to those that abuse them. Corporations will hate it, since it means the individual owner is more powerful than the corporation.

Yet it will fix overwhelming vast majority of issues in the current system.

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Was with you until the number 10. Say if you have 12 songs for an album. Or say if you're Steven King or Danielle Steel, or say the band Electric Six who released something like 15 studio albums in 17 years.

Yes, denying copyright on AI creations has some negatives. However, the alternative has far greater negative consequences.

Until recently, the only way to produce decent art was for humans to invest significant time into the work. This limited the rate of output and any artist trying to make a living from their art has to invest significant time in each creation. And that’s only after years of honing their craft to be good enough to make a living.

It’s trivial to do what AI artists do. In fact you can train another AI to do the prompting and another to weed through the vast quantity of output to find something appealing.

If we allow it, it will put most professional artists out of business.

And worse, it won’t be people that end up with a plethora of copyrighted work, it will be big corporations with an army of lawyers, acting as copyright trolls just like the current patent trolls. F*** that!

Maybe the mistake isn't disallowing copyright on AI generated art, but that snapping the photo button on my phone at any random scene grants me 100+ years of being able to wield the legal system against others?

Maybe there can be a space in culture for just sharing lower effort art, without worrying about whether somebody includes your particular photograph of a poodle on their blog, or how artists can get a payday out of OpenAI or how the P.E. firms can mass copyright every musical jingle?

There's a fair bit of that argument which is down to the amount of paperwork it'll require to track. As people have already mentioned that cuts both ways.

If you allow copyright without it then as has been mentioned a couple scripts later and you've a content mill for farming free copyright suits. Only requiring documentation is going to side step that. "I spent weeks tying prompts" Vs "I wrote a script".

If artists get blanket copyright on ai output no questions asked you'll get those farms running by the end of the month. They'd win a battle and lose the war.

Copyright is completely broken for a lot of reasons. Any way of reducing its scope is a positive step.

Polama said:

Maybe the mistake isn't disallowing copyright on AI generated art, but that snapping the photo button on my phone at any random scene grants me 100+ years of being able to wield the legal system against others?

Maybe there can be a space in culture for just sharing lower effort art, without worrying about whether somebody includes your particular photograph of a poodle on their blog, or how artists can get a payday out of OpenAI or how the P.E. firms can mass copyright every musical jingle?

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I hadn't read this when I commented, but I actually agree with this. I just recognise how it's basically impossible to seriously reform the copyright system at this point, so therefore equal human creative input should be treated equally. But my preference would be that copyright be seriously cut down in power and scope from where it is now.

Polama said:

Maybe the mistake isn't disallowing copyright on AI generated art, but that snapping the photo button on my phone at any random scene grants me 100+ years of being able to wield the legal system against others?

Maybe there can be a space in culture for just sharing lower effort art, without worrying about whether somebody includes your particular photograph of a poodle on their blog, or how artists can get a payday out of OpenAI or how the P.E. firms can mass copyright every musical jingle?

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Right, that's my question, back to the article:

But notably, Fairey didn’t argue that the photograph wasn’t eligible for copyright at all—probably because that argument would have been laughed out of court. Everyone agrees that a photograph like Garcia’s is eligible for copyright—even though Garcia did not pose Obama in front of the camera, select or arrange Obama’s clothes, set up the background or lighting, or suggest what expressions Obama should make.

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Moments earlier the article described how those were exactly the criteria used by the earlier supreme court decision, and I thought oh ok, makes perfect sense. Fast forward a bunch of decades and apparently that criteria is out the window. Even the later clarification:

Photographers “choose where to point the camera, when to snap the image, and how to adjust a bunch of camera settings,

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That last one barely applies for many pictures taken today so we're down to the act of pointing and shooting confers copyright. Is that really how it works?

coremelt said:

Exactly, Timothy makes a philosophical argument based on photography but completely ignores the social impact on society of making AI art copyrightable. Laws don't exist in a philosophical vacuum, they need to be analysed in terms of their impact on society.

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This is exactly what the writers guild and the actors are on strike. By enabling AI copywrite you effectively put writers out of work. Also being able to use actors digital likenesses without additional compensation is exactly why we have the current laws.

The current copywrite law is fine as is. If people want to play with ML art generation thats fine with me but it shouldnt be copywriteable.