Artists typically attribute their work.
Artists are generally unlikely to pretend work generated by AI is their own, because their reputation will be damaged.
That would make sense if there is an actual way to enforce the law, the entire conversation is about how to prove that a bad actor is violating copyright law by copyrighting AI art.
Your posts here are very naive. Scamming is widespread, and there are no legal penalties (other than the loss of the filing fee) for false claims of authorship. The only risk to an AI-powered scammer is if they go to the expense of suing someone else for copyright infringement, which they probably won't since scammers like easy money. And there is a lot of easy money to be made, so this is going to keep happening.
I don’t think it’s criminal to copyright something that’s not eligible. The copyright office should turn it down, and it would lose if challenged, but I don’t think it’s illegal to file the claim. I’d welcome info to the contrary.
Sure, because judges are stupid. This kind of thing has been in court before.
If I recall there was some case in which the authorship of some picture was contested, and the judge asked the people involved to draw something right there, in court.
So the same thing would happen. They'd ask you "okay, so how did you draw it? What tools do your use? Can you show us sketches? Can you draw something here, right now?"
Yes, m'Lud. My "brush and palette" are this laptop. <types-in prompt>
My "paint" is software, m'Lud. Some of it is pre-made "paint" that someone else wrote, like tubes of paint from an art-shop; some of it is my own modifications, analogous to grinding your own pigments.
Why wouldn't operators of algorithms that produce novel inventions attempt to patent their output or even automate the process so that the patenting occurs with little to no human intervention?
I'd argue we aren't very far from this point. Computers have already been used to make novel inventions. I think we could see an explosion in computer generated inventions if physical reasoning, reasoning about how objects move with respect to each other, continues to improve. Previously used approaches, such as genetic algorithms, have difficulty solving problems like inventing a new type of lock or clock escapement which require multiple moving parts.
Previous rulings had found that when code itself was copyrighted due to being a work of art (of human labor), the output of that code was indeed copyrightable if the program did the majority of the work in producing that output. This ruling seems at odds with that previous interpretation.
No, weights are data, just like transformation matrices used by graphics code. The data has no meaning without the code, and the code is what creates and manages it based on its inputs, as an aid to generating some output. So it's perfectly accurate to talk about the code as the main (or only) actual mechanism.
The distinction that data has no meaning without code is unconvincing.
The code has no meaning without a compiler or interpreter.
The compiler and interpreter have no meaning without a CPU.
If I store x86 CPU instructions in a Postgres database, is that data or code?
It’s also a worth viewing this in light of different computing models. The main mechanism may look quite different if you’re looking at a CPU, GPU, or DSP model of computing.
I believe code holds meaning even without a compiler or interpreter. I can read code and discern its functionality. I can even recognize existing algorithms such as quicksort. I can achieve the same understanding with pseudocode, which lacks an existing compiler. Similarly, prompts possess meaning; I can comprehend the task delegated to a machine learning model by reading the prompt.
I agree that both code and data are akin in terms of meaning. Transitioning from Assembly language to Python liberates us from concerns about registers and low-level intricacies. Python directs our attention to the problems we aim to solve, in contrast to low-level languages where a significant effort is spent on specifying hardware operations. High-level languages emphasize outcomes, enabling us to focus on the result rather than meticulously instructing the hardware. AI propels us further along this trajectory.
In this sense, I view a prompt and code as rather similar.
Data has no meaning without spec. It's a quite big difference. Code has no meaning without spec too.
var a = 1 + 1 << 2;
wihout a spec how do you know "+" is not overridden? Maybe it means string concat and implicit casting and 1 + 1 is "11"? How do you know the precedence of operators? << runs first or +?
Using a Gödel like encoding every program is also a number. So it seems that numbers that are complex enough that they are isomorphic to a copyrightable program should be copyrightable. I tend to think of the neural net weights as a different instruction set, just how Intel and ARM are also different instruction sets.
I fully well realize that lawmakers and the judiciary will be the final arbiter here (although I hope some logic will be part of the process).
From the link: 'It was suggested that copyright protection afforded to the computer program may also extend to the output files if the program does the “lion’s share of the work” in creating the output files and the user’s input is “marginal.”'
Even if you consider the user input to be marginal, the issue from the link is the copyright of the program extending to the code, not that of the user.
Forget AI for a minute. Let's say I write a program to generate cool images using Penrose tiles or space filling curves or some other algorithmic process, maybe deterministic, maybe (pseudo-)random. Under that ruling, it sounds like all of the outputs of my program would also fall under the copyright of the original program, unless the creator could prove that they did substantial work in addition to what the program did.
Which then leads to the next question of: what is the "lion's share"? Does it matter if I randomly punch in some parameters and get a nice result on the first try, or if I spend hours trying different parameter combinations to find some thing that looks the way I want it to? Even if the outcome is still considered owned by the software author, is my particular parameter choice copyrightable by me, being my own creative output?
If you think about it, the modern generative "AI" systems are more or less the same thing, but where the input parameter space is something like the entire space of written language, rather than a couple drop-down menus with algorithm settings and a seed for a PRNG. Does it matter if I slap in a simple prompt and get a nice result, or if I spent hours engineering a perfect prompt?
If anything, it should be unambiguous that the prompts are copyrightable just like any other written work, being actual free-form human-readable text. So at least AI artists have that going for them.
It will be really interesting to see what happens as more court rulings unfold.
Suppose I manufacture a compass or a protractor that you use to make beautiful curves in your art - surely my effort is greater than yours. You cannot create an accurate arc without my tool. Surely I deserve the lion's share of credit and profit. Incidentally, my friend the paintbrush maker would like to speak with you.
I'm being facetious of course. I suspect this technology is going to rapidly push us into radically rethinking how copyright works, but it'll be delayed some 20-30 years by incumbents desperately clinging to their hordes of existing IP.
First, there's a bunch of (non-creative) people that just want free creative assets. They don't like it, when creatives insist on being paid for the [considerable] time, effort, education and experience that goes into the creative asset.
Those people are jumping for joy.
Then, we have the creatives, themselves, who may have attended the correct schools, and have the appropriate education, to produce quality assets. They don't want people to just take their work. This looks like a side-jacking. If someone sees a nice picture that was done by a creative, then they can prompt MidJourney to produce one that looks a lot like it, for the cost of the MJ subscription. They don't particularly care (yet)[0] about copyright.
Then, we have the portfolio holders, who are often not creatives, but still hold the copyrights on a lot of creative work. Think Disney, or Universal. Their portfolios are an investment. They don't want to lose that investment.
Then, we have the crooks, who want to make cheap, crappy copies of creative assets, regardless of who owns the copyright. At the moment, there is an element of risk, as they could get caught and punished.
They are also jumping for joy.
[0] I said "yet," because one of the problems with a "wild west" copyright and trademark atmosphere, is that it is extremely easy to make "almost-like" copies, and if you don't protect your IP (or can't), then it is "up for grabs."
This is done now, but it's illegal, and can be stopped; especially if trademark is involved. I was at a Chinese restaurant, once, and was listening to the music. I noticed that there were many strains of hugely popular (and copyrighted) songs, like Scarborough Fair, and Moondance, all mashed together into a continuous stream. The owner confirmed what I suspected. He subscribed to a service that sends legal "muzak" to his restaurant. He had been mugged by ASCAP, once, and never wanted to go through that again.
I've noticed that "free everything" people often insist that everything except their own work should be "freed."
> First, there's a bunch of (non-creative) people that just want free creative assets.
Would you consider a 3D artist generating a texture for his model to be a non-creative? What about a concept artist who mashes together AI generated images? How would you classify Corridor Digital’s Anime Rock Paper And Scissors series?
To me it seems like there’s legions of creative people who are excited to use AI in their works.
Yes, and that is exactly what I was not talking about.
I was talking about a coder that can’t draw, using assets for icons and backgrounds, or a CEO that can’t draw or program, using AI for their entire company. I already know of examples of both.
I’m an artist[0]. When I was younger, I even considered making a living at it. I haven’t done any real artwork in decades, though.
But I’m not a particularly skilled graphic designer. I know enough to be dangerous, but most practicing designers can run circles around me.
3D artists are pretty awesome[1]. I think they will benefit from AI.
A coder that can't draw, becomes a creative when s/he uses tools for drawing. I don't think the argument is in this, it's that the tools embody the collective creativity of all the world's previous-gen artists.
> the tools embody the collective creativity of all the world's previous-gen artists.
And doesn’t reward them for their contributions, thus, removing the “feeder” creativity. Soon, schools stop teaching art, because no one wants to become one, and the algorithms end up using the output of other algorithms as their input, and original creation dies.
Original creative output can be ugly and disturbing, but it is original human creation.
Tools can help this (my example is 3D modeling. When the tools were still “raw,” then only engineers could produce 3D art, and it showed. Once the tools and standards progressed, real trained artists started to use them, to produce awesome creations).
I hear, all the time, non creative people drooling over not having to pay or deal with creative folks.
This is nothing new. Just a new venue for typical human greed and laziness.
We’ll figure it out, and, I guarantee, some creative folks will figure out how to use these tools to become quite successful.
And those non creative folks are still gonna have to pay them.
> And doesn’t reward them for their contributions, thus, removing the “feeder” creativity. Soon, schools stop teaching art, because no one wants to become one, and the algorithms end up using the output of other algorithms as their input, and original creation dies.
This implies that without a support structure, people are not interested in creativity. Which is absurd. People are still interested in creating even if they're not compensated for it. Many people are proactively creative at great personal expense.
People painted long before it was taught in a formal setting, and people will continue to paint even if they can't use it to pay the bills (as - quite frankly - most painters do)
But they don't like having people treat their work like crap.
I know of what I speak. BTDT, got the T-shirt. One of the issues with noncreatives, is they have this illusion that creatives don't work hard, or don't "earn" their money (which can sometimes, be a great deal).
I run into that attitude on a regular. I'm routinely asked to do $20,000 worth of work for free, "because it's fun for me."
I suspect that a lot of us have dealt with that. Development of software and hardware is a creative (and valuable) effort, but people sometimes think we don't work hard at it, because our fingernails aren't cracked.
In my career, I've worked with some of the top people in the design field (and my company paid them a lot of money). They were worth every nickel.
One of the problems with being good at something, is that we make it look easy, so people think it will be easy.
I posted this a while back:
There's the old story I've heard about the retired engineer (apocryphal, I'm sure):
This engineer worked for a corporation for 40 years, and retired.
A few months into his retirement, his old company frantically calls him, begging him to come in, and help fix an issue with the system he worked on. Apparently, the new team had managed to hose it, and couldn't figure out how to fix it.
He comes in, sits down at a terminal, looks at it for five minutes, and says "Here's the issue. If you do this, it should be fixed..."
He then presents an invoice for $10,000.
The beancounters go "There's no way we can pay $10,000 for five minutes work! Itemize it!"
He sits down, scribbles a bit, and presents an invoice that says:
Time to fix bug: Five minutes. $20
Six years of college, and forty years of experience, so I can fix a bug in five minutes: $9,980
Lots of people, on this very forum, would love creatives to do their work for free, so they can grab that work, and use it for stuff they will sell.
There's an unfortunate culture of "Everyone [but me] should do work for free, and publish it on the Internet, so I can use it, and make money [because my own work will never be free]."
In the latest episode of the Adam Regusio podcast [1], Adam was speculating that a nonprofit organization could create a program that generates every single possible melody or chord progression in order to release it with a creative Commons license. The idea was that record labels have been suing artists who create similar chord progressions recently to songs from 50 years ago and that he could and the madness.
> If anything, it should be unambiguous that the prompts are copyrightable just like any other written work, being actual free-form human-readable text. So at least AI artists have that going for them.
Hell no. I can't tell if you're serious about this. You know prompt is sometimes literally a single English word right? Like literally just "pig"? If that's copyritable then it's officially the end of copyright.
>> Previous rulings had found that when code itself was copyrighted due to being a work of art (of human labor)
Traditionally code would be written as a tool to achieve a specific output. If you automate the task of generating a particular piece of code, you still did all the work, or at least defined it pprecisely. While I don't see AI as an independent mind (yet) it seems independent enough from the person who prompts it to say the prompter doesn't own the output. I'm so 100 percent on what I just wrote, but it seems reasonable enough to say the precedent you mention may not apply.
I'm pretty sure if the output of the code could be seen as deterministic, that is to say the code just makes what will be produced 1000 times quicker, then the work would be copyrightable but if the output is not deterministic then we cannot say to whom the copyright should belong.
The code here isn't producing a specific, designed, or planned output. It is effectively doing refined data analysis and interpretation of an intermediate format (the weights) that is exclusively dependent on its input data not on the code itself.
Here the programmer was trying to make a point that AIs deserve to be marked as authors. I think this ruling is much less broad then the article is implying. Presumably an argument that the programmer deserved the copyright in deference to the creative work used to make the algorithm or that the AI is just a tool like photoshop or a camera might have worked, but the filer here wasn’t interested in that line of thinking and wanted to open up copyright to machines
It's good that he failed. AI personhood is a ridiculous can of worms that we should avoid for as long as we can. Just look at the disaster that is corporate personhood.
That disaster is the legal basis (in common law) for natural persons to sue corporate persons, and for governments to hold corporations accountable to laws separately from every individual member of the corporation, making it much easier to prosecute them.
Conveniently shielding human perpetrators of white collar crime.
This ephemeral fake world of contemporary society is not some sacrosanct construct, or divine mandate. There is no immutable obligation to preserve it.
It is not, the filer here claimed no role in the creation except as the employer of the AI in a work for hire, and was attempting to overturn the Registrar of Copyrights determination that AI could not be an author and that a registration listing the AI as the author was facially invalid.
This case is fundamentally not about whether art in which AI is used as a tool by a human (even if the human role is entirely in programming the AI) is copyrightable as a work of the human, it is solely about whether a piece of software can be an author under copyright law, a very different question.
With LLMs, arguably the code is much less decisive for the specific output than the model, which is data. An interesting question to ask is which human labor contributed to the model. The training data probably would constitute a significant share in that.
There's a subtle distinction which is probably important to seperate the two situations: The case referenced in that article (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...) is to do with the output of a program which has a specific intended input (the text of the Torah) and a completely deterministic output from that input (a bunch of matrixes of a 'bible code'), and the argument is that therefore the output is essentially already represented by the input and the program, and because the output is an inevitable result of the program (which is copyrighted), and the input (which is public domain), the writer of the program has copyright over the output as well. Compare with generative art (even pre-AI) where the output is based on a random seed and any given output is not an completely inevitable result of running the program. In this case the US copyright office at least claims that there is no human authorship, by the writer of the program or by the prompter (at least if the prompter takes no further action with the generated output):
This is of course up for interpretation by a judge (though I think the US copyright office refusing registration may make it de-facto impossible to get it in front of a judge, as I think it's a requirement to actually bring a suit against someone for infringement), but I suspect this is the kind of distinction that they will consider regarding this particular precedent.
> (though I think the US copyright office refusing registration may make it de-facto impossible to get it in front of a judge, as I think it's a requirement to actually bring a suit against someone for infringement)
The copyright office refusing registration counts as copyright registration for the purposes of register-before-suing-for-infringement.
This seems to work only with people that will admin and probably promote their works as AI generated, other people will probably argue how the image or text was actually modified enough by the human to grant him the copyright.
Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
There is nothing accurate about describe it as "stolen", no one is depriving you of your art when training a model, like no human is depriving you of your art when learning from it.
While I wouldn’t describe AI art as stolen I do think it’s fair to claim there has been a loss of potential earning from the creative work that went into developing a style and the marketing that went into evangelizing/popularizing it.
> Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
In the case of a camera, you know how the pohotgraph will turn out. You set and positioned the camera in a specific, creative way to ensure that composition.
In the case of an AI, it's not the paintbrush, it's the painter. The prompts serve less as arms to a brush and more as instructions to a commissioned artist.
So if I stick out the camera from a corner then I don't own the copyright because I don't know how the photograph will turn out, if that's not case then I should own the copyright of an AI generated image because in both cases I have an approximate understanding of what the image would be.
With just a text prompt, no. But there are an increasing number of ways to use human decision-making to strongly and evidently control the outputs (LoRAs, ControlNet, Img2Img) that haven't been legally tested yet.
This applies only to under-specified prompting. I usually go in with a finished image in mind, and use very long prompts and inpainting to make it real. It can take dozens of images to get the prompt to reflect what I have in mind, then several more iterations to polish it. While I can technically produce several images per minute, I usually spend about 30 minutes to 1 hour to get the output I want, and more if it's going to be an extra large or complicated piece.
This is very much like the "is electronic music real music?" debates when people can quickly throw together some presets and hit play.
TLDR it's untested in United States court, but yes, the same principles apply. You very well might not own the copyright on that street-corner photo.
There is no way of getting around the human authorship and creativity requirement. There's no loophole that AI can sneak though. If AI output does become copyrightable, it will only be because of arguments that the controlling of that AI is sufficiently creative and deliberate to pass the minimum threshold required by law and the outcome isn't a random or uncontrolled result. Saying that it's "just like pressing buttons on a camera" does you no favors, if photography was just pressing a button then it wouldn't be copyrightable.
And in fact, there was an 1884 Supreme Court challenge over photography copyright that was predicated exactly on the argument that photography was a purely mechanical reconstruction of an existing scene (https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2020/09/historic-court-cases...). The argument was rejected not because purely mechanical reconstructions are copyrightable, but because the court disagreed and said that photography was both an act of human creativity and that it had a controlled outcome, similar to "writing" or "engraving".
And note that a critical component of "writing" or "engraving" is intent and control. When you write down something on a page, you get the result that you intended to put on the page; you control the "words" that appear. An important question when discussing AI copyright is what the threshold is where we can say that use is actually controlling the AI. A vague prompt might not qualify, an extremely specific prompt that is itself a creative expression might? A more guided process might? (although it's not certain if this would cover the resulting image or just the prompt itself). This is all untested in current law.
AI is interesting because sometimes it's the paintbrush, sometimes not, and it's very hard for people to tell at a glance.
Right now there's thing like ControlNet which allows you to draw a skeleton for the AI to follow. There are plugins that provide masking. You can draw stuff on top of an existing image. You can draw a sketch for the AI to follow. You can fix details in post.
So there's a multitude of possibilities available.
The interesting thing is that unless you are involved in the scene it's very hard to tell what took the user a lot of work, guidance and retouching to generate, and what popped out just like that.
When prompting an image with AI, it's commong to lay basics things then keep adding things so it looks like your desired outcome.
There can be good unexpected surprise, but most of the time you guide it to the wanted result.
The labor involved is also a lot hairier. With the camera, all the effort put into designing it and manufacturing it had an intended end of a photographer taking pictures. That is the explicit goal. AI is entirely reliant on labor used without consent.
Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so different
Take any good digital came, switch it on, and press the button. Do you get a great photograph? No, because you haven't even removed the lens cap. Photography is not about pressing the button, it's about where you point the camera and how you configure it before you push the button.
I mean these analogies could be applied to AI image gen too. Open up an image gen tool and press generate. Do you get a great image? No, because you didn’t even enter a prompt.
Once you hit the shutter button you do get a great photograph due to all the machine learning and other post processing the photo is exposed to.
I could see an argument that a heavily augmented normal photo is not much different from a photo generated from a prompt. Digital zoom is virtually AI inpainting where it guesses the detail.
> Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
This case was analogous to claiming the camera as the author, and the photographer as a copyright owner only because the camera did the work as a work for hire.
Step two: Very slightly modify it. (Visual art: Apply a color filter, draw in a single element, have a different AI change some details, etc. Music: Subtly change the tempo or add one minor audio effect.)
Step three: Copyright the work as something "made by a human with AI assistance."
If challenged, step four: Claim that humans have been making works of art with all available technical means from the dawn of civilization, and that to draw an arbitrary line in the sand at assisted generation is unprincipled.
The recent Warhol Foundation vs Goldsmith ruling should make this clear. Warhol basically did just put some color filters on a photo by Goldsmith, and the Supreme Court ruled that no, that's not allowed, it's not transformative enough to be fair use, that's still Goldsmith's photo.
That particular ruling was able to be made because the original work was available to make a comparison with. However, it's well established in the US that the author of an adaptive work is generally entitled to copyright over the modified portions.[0] So a work merely has to be presented as an human-authored adaptation of an AI template.
I see this a lot on HN: the idea that courts rule based on principles. It’s a strange viewpoint. There are courts of law. They rule based on law. To the extent law is messy (it is), court rulings will be messy.
There isn’t a court in the world that would make a ruling based on your, my, or anyone else’s principles.
It goes right along with the belief that capitalism is a naturalistic ideal, as opposed to a temporary state of societal organization maintained for the benefit of a few people.
Also, for the reasons you give, copyright itself is devoid of principled logic.
Until capitalism collapses, which is inevitable if we believe Marx's thoughts on the matter, copyright is an important way to protect and pay people who make things so they don't starve.
Big reason why the writer's guild is currently on strike. Super naive view that people who make stuff shouldn't continue to be compensated if someone is getting value from that work. That's part of why programming can be so lucrative.
The court can rule that you have copyright only on the modifications you did, and if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it.
> if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it.
If the AI generated portion exists nowhere else, and if it's not _obviously_ an AI-generated work, how would a court know what's generated and what's been modified?
My understanding of how this works is that you own a copyright on the modifications to the original image, but not on the original work produced by the AI. The way you're explaining it isn't consistent with how the law may actually be applied.
The headline doesn’t seem to be what actually happened. The filer was arguing that the ai created the work on its own as a work for hire and thus the ai was the author with the computer scientist merely being the owner of the copyright as it was made for hire. I don’t think the argument that ai is a tool and the human operating it is the author was considered because the filer explicitly didn’t want to consider it.
In the review being appealed here (https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...). It makes it clear that the computer scientist doing the filing was trying to argue this was a work made for hire with the author being the computer. They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn’t how the law works. The summary makes it clear early that it’s just taking their word that the work had no human input and was thus purely the creation of the computer. This seems to be a a better article https://www.millernash.com/industry-news/paradise-denied-cop....
> They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn’t how the law works.
Just a nitpick that this isn't really about copyright assignment, it's about rights that arise as a result of a eligible work by a eligible author being fixed into a tangible medium. These rights aren't assigned to the author, they come into being automatically.
In this case, the ruling seems to be that there was no eligible author, and as such, no rights came into being. Or at least, the claimed author is not an eligible author: had the claim been that the human was the author, using the AI as a paintbrush, that would be a different question.
It would be another matter if a natural person authored a work and wished to assign its rights to a non-person. Which yeah, you pretty much can't do. Under most legal frameworks, ownership is for people, natural or corporate; anything that's not a people is property and property can't own property.
I've always found that ruling so bad. Who pushes the button is the least important part of photography and can be easily automated. It's choosing the subject matter, getting the camera to that location, angles, exposure, lenses, and taking the time to do it all that is the creative part.
For the sake of argument, if a camera had 5 years of storage and battery life and was left running from the factory, should canon own everything it produced? Is pushing the shutter button really the most important question?
> I've always found that ruling so bad. Who pushes the button is the least important part of photography and can be easily automated. It's choosing the subject matter, getting the camera to that location, angles, exposure, lenses, and taking the time to do it all that is the creative part.
Wasn't the point that all those things were absent in that case? If the monkey indeed snatch the camera completely unexpectedly, and then proceeded to take a selfie of itself, then the photographer didn't choose the subject matter, location, angles, exposure, or anything else.
> Thaler’s motion for summary judgment, which Howell denied in the Friday order, argued that permitting AI to be listed as an author on copyrighted works would incentivize more creation, which is in line with copyright law’s purpose of promoting useful art for the public.
Lel.
Its wholly a semantic game. If you say "this machine created this artwork winkwink" the court will deny you because "machines can't have copyright". If you say "I created this artwork, using aid from a computer program" they'll likely let you do just about anything.
The court actually said AIs can’t be authors under copyright law, it takes no stand (becauae the question was not before it) on whether and, if so, in what conditions AI-generated art can be copyrighted by the human using the AI to generate it.
"Absent any human involvement" - so open it in photoshop, add your signature, done. It was created by you, the computer scientist, with the aide of a computer program (like photoshop :D). IANAL. YMMV. See ruling for details.
I'm not clear on what the status of the piece is after the ruling.
As in, let's say I got AI to generate a cartoon character preparatory sketch in black penline.
If I printed that out and used it as a reference to do a "clean room implementation" of the character — do I now own the copyright, since I'm the first person to produce a copyright-eligible rendition of that likeness?
Or since it's a copy of an uncopyrightable work is the character immediately in the public domain, as if it was generated by a human & then given a really permissive license?
Has anyone got a good answer to the question of "how much" human intervention is needed for AI-generated works to be copyrighted?
I type "a racoon wearing a hat" as a prompt and get back an image. It sounds like that's not copyrightable.
How about if I type that into Photoshop generative art, and then apply some filters?
Or how about I run that, and then "a walrus with a bowtie", and then "a platypus on a skateboard", and then arrange those three images together on a page?
What about if I spend literally hours prompting, and re-prompting, and combining, and layering, and cropping until I get the result I'm looking for?
These feel like important questions to me. Has anyone tested these in a court of law yet?
Corridor Digital are getting closer to perfecting AI anime. After the first video, Rock Paper Scissors, they said they got some flak for training the AI on stills from an existing anime movie, so for the second one they hired an artist and trained it from their drawings. Well, what happens if you hire an artist that essentially draws some art work heavily inspired by an existing IP and then you train your AI model on that? Is that infringement, even though the art work you've trained the AI on is now one step removed from official source material, even if it is practically identical? What if you commission another artist to make artwork based on that artwork? And another after that? When does the signal get distorted enough to pass as not being based on pre-existing IP?
The whole thing feels like the "grain of sand" philosophy problem. What constitutes enough change to warrant something as not belonging to an IP anymore? Are we going to have to come up with some sort of image comparison algorithm that spits out a comparison percentage and set some arbitrary number as the cut off point? Or are we going to continue with time consuming and costly case by case, human judged comparisons?
> Or are we going to continue with time consuming and costly case by case, human judged comparisons?
That will absolutely always be required, because no matter how much we pretend, copyright is not a natural right, any more than capitalism is the natural economic system. You can extrapolate this to the concept of property, and by extension, ownership. The cans of Campbell's Soup don't care that Warhol copied their likeness any more than the trees we felled to build your house care if a squatter takes it over.
It’s so weird how much we rent in courts to make up laws based on their opinions of laws and precedence. It’s fine in a lunch but it’s really an indication congress needs to make laws. And courts determine if they are constitutional.
This has been a problem for 75+ years. Courts just making de facto law. It’s not their role.
This seems to be consistent with the Copyright Registration Guidance for Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence [0] previously discussed on HN [1].
I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim.
Because it shows how stupid they really are, but also how eager they are to scam you.
128 comments
[ 39.9 ms ] story [ 1452 ms ] threadThey would be risking contravening the law. Probably not worth it.
Last week there was a book about the Maui fires in the top 100 on Amazon, which looks to have been written entirely by ChatGPT: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/08/17/amazon-...
If I recall there was some case in which the authorship of some picture was contested, and the judge asked the people involved to draw something right there, in court.
So the same thing would happen. They'd ask you "okay, so how did you draw it? What tools do your use? Can you show us sketches? Can you draw something here, right now?"
My "paint" is software, m'Lud. Some of it is pre-made "paint" that someone else wrote, like tubes of paint from an art-shop; some of it is my own modifications, analogous to grinding your own pigments.
I'd argue we aren't very far from this point. Computers have already been used to make novel inventions. I think we could see an explosion in computer generated inventions if physical reasoning, reasoning about how objects move with respect to each other, continues to improve. Previously used approaches, such as genetic algorithms, have difficulty solving problems like inventing a new type of lock or clock escapement which require multiple moving parts.
https://mwhlawgroup.com/can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-...
The code has no meaning without a compiler or interpreter.
The compiler and interpreter have no meaning without a CPU.
If I store x86 CPU instructions in a Postgres database, is that data or code?
It’s also a worth viewing this in light of different computing models. The main mechanism may look quite different if you’re looking at a CPU, GPU, or DSP model of computing.
I agree that both code and data are akin in terms of meaning. Transitioning from Assembly language to Python liberates us from concerns about registers and low-level intricacies. Python directs our attention to the problems we aim to solve, in contrast to low-level languages where a significant effort is spent on specifying hardware operations. High-level languages emphasize outcomes, enabling us to focus on the result rather than meticulously instructing the hardware. AI propels us further along this trajectory.
In this sense, I view a prompt and code as rather similar.
However, code is just data for a compiler.
Data has no meaning without spec. It's a quite big difference. Code has no meaning without spec too.
wihout a spec how do you know "+" is not overridden? Maybe it means string concat and implicit casting and 1 + 1 is "11"? How do you know the precedence of operators? << runs first or +?Using a Gödel like encoding every program is also a number. So it seems that numbers that are complex enough that they are isomorphic to a copyrightable program should be copyrightable. I tend to think of the neural net weights as a different instruction set, just how Intel and ARM are also different instruction sets.
I fully well realize that lawmakers and the judiciary will be the final arbiter here (although I hope some logic will be part of the process).
Even if you consider the user input to be marginal, the issue from the link is the copyright of the program extending to the code, not that of the user.
Forget AI for a minute. Let's say I write a program to generate cool images using Penrose tiles or space filling curves or some other algorithmic process, maybe deterministic, maybe (pseudo-)random. Under that ruling, it sounds like all of the outputs of my program would also fall under the copyright of the original program, unless the creator could prove that they did substantial work in addition to what the program did.
Which then leads to the next question of: what is the "lion's share"? Does it matter if I randomly punch in some parameters and get a nice result on the first try, or if I spend hours trying different parameter combinations to find some thing that looks the way I want it to? Even if the outcome is still considered owned by the software author, is my particular parameter choice copyrightable by me, being my own creative output?
If you think about it, the modern generative "AI" systems are more or less the same thing, but where the input parameter space is something like the entire space of written language, rather than a couple drop-down menus with algorithm settings and a seed for a PRNG. Does it matter if I slap in a simple prompt and get a nice result, or if I spent hours engineering a perfect prompt?
If anything, it should be unambiguous that the prompts are copyrightable just like any other written work, being actual free-form human-readable text. So at least AI artists have that going for them.
It will be really interesting to see what happens as more court rulings unfold.
I'm being facetious of course. I suspect this technology is going to rapidly push us into radically rethinking how copyright works, but it'll be delayed some 20-30 years by incumbents desperately clinging to their hordes of existing IP.
First, there's a bunch of (non-creative) people that just want free creative assets. They don't like it, when creatives insist on being paid for the [considerable] time, effort, education and experience that goes into the creative asset.
Those people are jumping for joy.
Then, we have the creatives, themselves, who may have attended the correct schools, and have the appropriate education, to produce quality assets. They don't want people to just take their work. This looks like a side-jacking. If someone sees a nice picture that was done by a creative, then they can prompt MidJourney to produce one that looks a lot like it, for the cost of the MJ subscription. They don't particularly care (yet)[0] about copyright.
Then, we have the portfolio holders, who are often not creatives, but still hold the copyrights on a lot of creative work. Think Disney, or Universal. Their portfolios are an investment. They don't want to lose that investment.
Then, we have the crooks, who want to make cheap, crappy copies of creative assets, regardless of who owns the copyright. At the moment, there is an element of risk, as they could get caught and punished.
They are also jumping for joy.
[0] I said "yet," because one of the problems with a "wild west" copyright and trademark atmosphere, is that it is extremely easy to make "almost-like" copies, and if you don't protect your IP (or can't), then it is "up for grabs."
This is done now, but it's illegal, and can be stopped; especially if trademark is involved. I was at a Chinese restaurant, once, and was listening to the music. I noticed that there were many strains of hugely popular (and copyrighted) songs, like Scarborough Fair, and Moondance, all mashed together into a continuous stream. The owner confirmed what I suspected. He subscribed to a service that sends legal "muzak" to his restaurant. He had been mugged by ASCAP, once, and never wanted to go through that again.
I've noticed that "free everything" people often insist that everything except their own work should be "freed."
Would you consider a 3D artist generating a texture for his model to be a non-creative? What about a concept artist who mashes together AI generated images? How would you classify Corridor Digital’s Anime Rock Paper And Scissors series?
To me it seems like there’s legions of creative people who are excited to use AI in their works.
I was talking about a coder that can’t draw, using assets for icons and backgrounds, or a CEO that can’t draw or program, using AI for their entire company. I already know of examples of both.
I’m an artist[0]. When I was younger, I even considered making a living at it. I haven’t done any real artwork in decades, though.
But I’m not a particularly skilled graphic designer. I know enough to be dangerous, but most practicing designers can run circles around me.
3D artists are pretty awesome[1]. I think they will benefit from AI.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654770
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35315404
And doesn’t reward them for their contributions, thus, removing the “feeder” creativity. Soon, schools stop teaching art, because no one wants to become one, and the algorithms end up using the output of other algorithms as their input, and original creation dies.
Original creative output can be ugly and disturbing, but it is original human creation.
Tools can help this (my example is 3D modeling. When the tools were still “raw,” then only engineers could produce 3D art, and it showed. Once the tools and standards progressed, real trained artists started to use them, to produce awesome creations).
I hear, all the time, non creative people drooling over not having to pay or deal with creative folks.
This is nothing new. Just a new venue for typical human greed and laziness.
We’ll figure it out, and, I guarantee, some creative folks will figure out how to use these tools to become quite successful.
And those non creative folks are still gonna have to pay them.
This implies that without a support structure, people are not interested in creativity. Which is absurd. People are still interested in creating even if they're not compensated for it. Many people are proactively creative at great personal expense.
People painted long before it was taught in a formal setting, and people will continue to paint even if they can't use it to pay the bills (as - quite frankly - most painters do)
I know of what I speak. BTDT, got the T-shirt. One of the issues with noncreatives, is they have this illusion that creatives don't work hard, or don't "earn" their money (which can sometimes, be a great deal).
I run into that attitude on a regular. I'm routinely asked to do $20,000 worth of work for free, "because it's fun for me."
I suspect that a lot of us have dealt with that. Development of software and hardware is a creative (and valuable) effort, but people sometimes think we don't work hard at it, because our fingernails aren't cracked.
In my career, I've worked with some of the top people in the design field (and my company paid them a lot of money). They were worth every nickel.
One of the problems with being good at something, is that we make it look easy, so people think it will be easy.
I posted this a while back:
There's the old story I've heard about the retired engineer (apocryphal, I'm sure):
This engineer worked for a corporation for 40 years, and retired.
A few months into his retirement, his old company frantically calls him, begging him to come in, and help fix an issue with the system he worked on. Apparently, the new team had managed to hose it, and couldn't figure out how to fix it.
He comes in, sits down at a terminal, looks at it for five minutes, and says "Here's the issue. If you do this, it should be fixed..." He then presents an invoice for $10,000.
The beancounters go "There's no way we can pay $10,000 for five minutes work! Itemize it!"
He sits down, scribbles a bit, and presents an invoice that says:
Lots of people, on this very forum, would love creatives to do their work for free, so they can grab that work, and use it for stuff they will sell.There's an unfortunate culture of "Everyone [but me] should do work for free, and publish it on the Internet, so I can use it, and make money [because my own work will never be free]."
perhaps that ruling could be justification.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=WE9ibS_6WdY
https://www.openculture.com/2020/03/every-melody-has-been-co...
Hell no. I can't tell if you're serious about this. You know prompt is sometimes literally a single English word right? Like literally just "pig"? If that's copyritable then it's officially the end of copyright.
Traditionally code would be written as a tool to achieve a specific output. If you automate the task of generating a particular piece of code, you still did all the work, or at least defined it pprecisely. While I don't see AI as an independent mind (yet) it seems independent enough from the person who prompts it to say the prompter doesn't own the output. I'm so 100 percent on what I just wrote, but it seems reasonable enough to say the precedent you mention may not apply.
I don't see any inconsistency in this ruling.
Actually that would be interesting hack for older people. As it could give longer period of protection than their natural lifespan.
This ephemeral fake world of contemporary society is not some sacrosanct construct, or divine mandate. There is no immutable obligation to preserve it.
This case is fundamentally not about whether art in which AI is used as a tool by a human (even if the human role is entirely in programming the AI) is copyrightable as a work of the human, it is solely about whether a piece of software can be an author under copyright law, a very different question.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...
This is of course up for interpretation by a judge (though I think the US copyright office refusing registration may make it de-facto impossible to get it in front of a judge, as I think it's a requirement to actually bring a suit against someone for infringement), but I suspect this is the kind of distinction that they will consider regarding this particular precedent.
The copyright office refusing registration counts as copyright registration for the purposes of register-before-suing-for-infringement.
Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
In the case of a camera, you know how the pohotgraph will turn out. You set and positioned the camera in a specific, creative way to ensure that composition.
In the case of an AI, it's not the paintbrush, it's the painter. The prompts serve less as arms to a brush and more as instructions to a commissioned artist.
So if I stick out the camera from a corner then I don't own the copyright because I don't know how the photograph will turn out, if that's not case then I should own the copyright of an AI generated image because in both cases I have an approximate understanding of what the image would be.
This is very much like the "is electronic music real music?" debates when people can quickly throw together some presets and hit play.
TLDR it's untested in United States court, but yes, the same principles apply. You very well might not own the copyright on that street-corner photo.
There is no way of getting around the human authorship and creativity requirement. There's no loophole that AI can sneak though. If AI output does become copyrightable, it will only be because of arguments that the controlling of that AI is sufficiently creative and deliberate to pass the minimum threshold required by law and the outcome isn't a random or uncontrolled result. Saying that it's "just like pressing buttons on a camera" does you no favors, if photography was just pressing a button then it wouldn't be copyrightable.
And in fact, there was an 1884 Supreme Court challenge over photography copyright that was predicated exactly on the argument that photography was a purely mechanical reconstruction of an existing scene (https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2020/09/historic-court-cases...). The argument was rejected not because purely mechanical reconstructions are copyrightable, but because the court disagreed and said that photography was both an act of human creativity and that it had a controlled outcome, similar to "writing" or "engraving".
And note that a critical component of "writing" or "engraving" is intent and control. When you write down something on a page, you get the result that you intended to put on the page; you control the "words" that appear. An important question when discussing AI copyright is what the threshold is where we can say that use is actually controlling the AI. A vague prompt might not qualify, an extremely specific prompt that is itself a creative expression might? A more guided process might? (although it's not certain if this would cover the resulting image or just the prompt itself). This is all untested in current law.
Right now there's thing like ControlNet which allows you to draw a skeleton for the AI to follow. There are plugins that provide masking. You can draw stuff on top of an existing image. You can draw a sketch for the AI to follow. You can fix details in post.
So there's a multitude of possibilities available.
The interesting thing is that unless you are involved in the scene it's very hard to tell what took the user a lot of work, guidance and retouching to generate, and what popped out just like that.
Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtoBSDUdEk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiG_v61cLxI
Take any good digital came, switch it on, and press the button. Do you get a great photograph? No, because you haven't even removed the lens cap. Photography is not about pressing the button, it's about where you point the camera and how you configure it before you push the button.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/14ye2eg/co...
https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI
I could see an argument that a heavily augmented normal photo is not much different from a photo generated from a prompt. Digital zoom is virtually AI inpainting where it guesses the detail.
This case was analogous to claiming the camera as the author, and the photographer as a copyright owner only because the camera did the work as a work for hire.
Which would also fail.
Step two: Very slightly modify it. (Visual art: Apply a color filter, draw in a single element, have a different AI change some details, etc. Music: Subtly change the tempo or add one minor audio effect.)
Step three: Copyright the work as something "made by a human with AI assistance."
If challenged, step four: Claim that humans have been making works of art with all available technical means from the dawn of civilization, and that to draw an arbitrary line in the sand at assisted generation is unprincipled.
And, basically, lmao at the courts, as usual.
A classic essay:
What colour are your bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
[0] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
> lmao at the courts
I see this a lot on HN: the idea that courts rule based on principles. It’s a strange viewpoint. There are courts of law. They rule based on law. To the extent law is messy (it is), court rulings will be messy.
There isn’t a court in the world that would make a ruling based on your, my, or anyone else’s principles.
It goes right along with the belief that capitalism is a naturalistic ideal, as opposed to a temporary state of societal organization maintained for the benefit of a few people.
Also, for the reasons you give, copyright itself is devoid of principled logic.
We can pay labourers for their time producing works. We don't need pay-per-copy.
If the AI generated portion exists nowhere else, and if it's not _obviously_ an AI-generated work, how would a court know what's generated and what's been modified?
I mean really. Do you think you’re proposing an original idea here?
In the review being appealed here (https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...). It makes it clear that the computer scientist doing the filing was trying to argue this was a work made for hire with the author being the computer. They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn’t how the law works. The summary makes it clear early that it’s just taking their word that the work had no human input and was thus purely the creation of the computer. This seems to be a a better article https://www.millernash.com/industry-news/paradise-denied-cop....
Just a nitpick that this isn't really about copyright assignment, it's about rights that arise as a result of a eligible work by a eligible author being fixed into a tangible medium. These rights aren't assigned to the author, they come into being automatically.
In this case, the ruling seems to be that there was no eligible author, and as such, no rights came into being. Or at least, the claimed author is not an eligible author: had the claim been that the human was the author, using the AI as a paintbrush, that would be a different question.
It would be another matter if a natural person authored a work and wished to assign its rights to a non-person. Which yeah, you pretty much can't do. Under most legal frameworks, ownership is for people, natural or corporate; anything that's not a people is property and property can't own property.
For the sake of argument, if a camera had 5 years of storage and battery life and was left running from the factory, should canon own everything it produced? Is pushing the shutter button really the most important question?
Wasn't the point that all those things were absent in that case? If the monkey indeed snatch the camera completely unexpectedly, and then proceeded to take a selfie of itself, then the photographer didn't choose the subject matter, location, angles, exposure, or anything else.
Lel.
Its wholly a semantic game. If you say "this machine created this artwork wink wink" the court will deny you because "machines can't have copyright". If you say "I created this artwork, using aid from a computer program" they'll likely let you do just about anything.
So semantics matter. Strategic disclosure of methods will matter.
And your copyrights will be even more secure if you have an army of lawyers to say you “created this artwork”.
These are all highly subjective dials.
I think these early cases are going to get buried in cases with increasing complexity.
We don’t really know how this will fall out.
As in, let's say I got AI to generate a cartoon character preparatory sketch in black penline.
If I printed that out and used it as a reference to do a "clean room implementation" of the character — do I now own the copyright, since I'm the first person to produce a copyright-eligible rendition of that likeness?
Or since it's a copy of an uncopyrightable work is the character immediately in the public domain, as if it was generated by a human & then given a really permissive license?
I type "a racoon wearing a hat" as a prompt and get back an image. It sounds like that's not copyrightable.
How about if I type that into Photoshop generative art, and then apply some filters?
Or how about I run that, and then "a walrus with a bowtie", and then "a platypus on a skateboard", and then arrange those three images together on a page?
What about if I spend literally hours prompting, and re-prompting, and combining, and layering, and cropping until I get the result I'm looking for?
These feel like important questions to me. Has anyone tested these in a court of law yet?
Corridor Digital are getting closer to perfecting AI anime. After the first video, Rock Paper Scissors, they said they got some flak for training the AI on stills from an existing anime movie, so for the second one they hired an artist and trained it from their drawings. Well, what happens if you hire an artist that essentially draws some art work heavily inspired by an existing IP and then you train your AI model on that? Is that infringement, even though the art work you've trained the AI on is now one step removed from official source material, even if it is practically identical? What if you commission another artist to make artwork based on that artwork? And another after that? When does the signal get distorted enough to pass as not being based on pre-existing IP?
The whole thing feels like the "grain of sand" philosophy problem. What constitutes enough change to warrant something as not belonging to an IP anymore? Are we going to have to come up with some sort of image comparison algorithm that spits out a comparison percentage and set some arbitrary number as the cut off point? Or are we going to continue with time consuming and costly case by case, human judged comparisons?
The whole thing feels ridiculous.
That will absolutely always be required, because no matter how much we pretend, copyright is not a natural right, any more than capitalism is the natural economic system. You can extrapolate this to the concept of property, and by extension, ownership. The cans of Campbell's Soup don't care that Warhol copied their likeness any more than the trees we felled to build your house care if a squatter takes it over.
https://ia601401.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.24...
This has been a problem for 75+ years. Courts just making de facto law. It’s not their role.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206
I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim.
Because it shows how stupid they really are, but also how eager they are to scam you.