Good. Maybe this could put a stop to the attempts by companies to gut their payroll and replace artists with software.
Using automation tools isn't something new in engineering. One can claim that as long as a person is involved and guiding/manipulating the tool, it can be copyrighted. I am sure laws will catch up as usage of AI becomes mainstream in the industry.
I dont think AI is equivalent. It can create content without you being involved and in massive quantities. It is very much capable of decimating the workforce.
You have to remember that you exist in a capitalist system that would love very much to replace you with cheaper labor if it could and there is no human that can possibly work for cheaper than an appropriately trained AI.
The only way that an artist would have a chance to survive is either through maintaining the craft via the novelty of it. I.e hand drawn/painted etc. (Which would be progresssively easier to fake) Or to become one of the people that make prompts and dont actually generate the content themselves. And the latter group of people is going to shrink over time as AI gets better at making content with little input. So any precedent set now is going to cause issues down the line when the tide shifts in AI's favor.
I agree that AI can decimate workforce. My point is, other tools did that already and this is not unique to AI. Imagine electronic chip design. Transistor was invented in 40s and it was a giant tube. Today we have chips with billions of transistors. Initially people were designing circuits on transistor level, then register transfer level languages got invented and added a layer of abstraction. Today we even have high level synthesis languages which converts C to a gatelist. And consider the backend, this gate list is routed into physical transistors in a way that timing is met, clocks are distributed in balance, signal and power integrity are preserved, heat is removed etc. Considering there are billions of transistors and no single unique way of connecting them, tool gets creative and comes with a solution among virtually infinite possibilities which satisfy your specification. You have to tell the tool what you need, and give some guidance occasionally, but what it does is incredible, creative, and wouldn't be possible if you gathered all engineers in the world and make them focus on a single complex chip without tools' help. So they have been taking engineers' jobs for decades, but what happened so far is that industry grew together with automation. If we reach the limits of demand, or physical limitations of technology, or people cannot adapt to the development of the tools fast enough by updating their job description and skillset, then decimation of the workforce happens. But this isn't unique to AI.
I am not against regulating AI, I am just saying what I think will happen. Offloading all work to AI and getting UBI would be nice, but I don't see that happening in near future.
That's already the case, but also it has to be substantially guided by a human because copyright only protects human expression and elements beyond what the human intentionally expressed are not protected. (Of course studios won't generally admit how much human involvement there really were)
Ha.
A lot of money will fly and laws and views will change like butter in the sun.
Just for once Id like to be optimistic
Pretty sure this case is dead. The copyright office did the same thing with the monkey selfies and the ai art piece from stephen thaler. That "void of ownership" is just public domain. Gonna be interesting what other kind of ai cases come up later though.
If those people have ever tried actually using image generation software they will know that there is significant human authorship required to make something that isn't remotely dogshit. The most important skill in visual art is not how to draw something but knowing what to draw.
Then why does all AI need to harvest the work of millions of artists in order to create one mediocre painting? Millions upon millions of hours of blood sweat and tears is hidden behind that algorithm. Thousands of people starting to draw when they are 5 and never stopping in order to get as good as they are.
All big AI services refuse to disclose the training set they use and those that we know anything about absolutely uses copyrighted material from artist that didn't consent to be part of the training set.
This is what fuels my contempt for AI. People that uses literal billions of dollars of stolen time and talent and then pretend that actually having ideas is the important bit.
I mean, I agree that the developers of these AI tools need to be made to be more ethical in how they use stuff for training, but it is worth noting that that's kind of also how humans learn. Every human artist learns, in part, by absorbing the wealth of prior art that they experience. Copying existing pieces is even a common way to practice.
Yeah, that shrug you did about how it would be nice if AI didn't steal art is part of the problem. Shrugging and saying joink doesn't work when you want to copyright stuff.
Human learns by assimilating other people work and working it into their own style, yes. That means that the AI is the human in this and the AI owns the artistic works. Since AI does not yet have the right to own copyrights, any works produced by that AI is not copyrightable.
That is if you accept that AI and humans learn art in the same way. I don't personally think that is analogous but it doesn't matter for this discussion.
There's a reason I said "they should be made to be more ethical" and not just "they should be more ethical". I know that they aren't going to do it themselves and I'll support well-written regulations on them.
but it doesn’t matter for this discussion.
Isn't it what almost your entire comment was about?
The argument was basically "that is how humans learn too". I accepted that analogy because it doesn't change my conclusion that AI can't be copyrighted. Had the discussion been about something else I wouldn't have accepted that argument.
The difference is a human artist can then make new unique art and contribute to the craft so it can advance and they can make a living off it. AI made art isn’t unique, it’s a collage of other art. To get art from AI you have to feed it prompts of things it’s seen before. So when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
My point is that this description literally applies just as much to humans. Humans are also trained on vast quantities of things they've seen before and meanings associated with them.
it’s a collage of other art
This is genuinely a misunderstanding of how these programs work.
when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
Because the only art anyone has ever done is when someone else paid them for it? There are a lot of art forms that generally aren't commercially viable, and it's very odd to insist that commercial viability is what advances an art form.
I do actually get regularly paid for a kind of work that is threatened by these things (although in my case it's LLMs, not images). For the time being I can out-perform ChatGPT and the like, but I don't expect that that will last forever. Either I'll end up incorporating it or I'll need to find something else to do. But I'm not going to stop doing my hobby versions of it.
Technology kills jobs all the time. We don't have many human calculators these days. If the work has value beyond the financial, people will keep doing it.
Human brains don’t have perfect recollection. Every time we retell a story or remember a memory or picture an image in our head it is distorted with our own imperfections.
When I prompt an AI to create an image it samples the images it learned from with perfect recollection.
AI does not learn the same way humans do.
If I took a few hours to make an impressive AI generated price of art, that's still %0.0001 the amount of time an actual a real artist would've spent developing the skill and then taking the time to make the peice. I get to skip all that because AI stole the real artists' works.
What about photographers?
I don't think "amount of work" is a good measurement for copyright, if you scribble something in 2 seconds on a piece of paper you still own the copyright, even if it's not a great piece of art.
I'm pretty specifically trying to bring to mind the time it takes to hone the skill. Photography is similar in that it takes many many hours to get to the point where you can produce a good work of art.
If an artist (or photographer) spends a couple hours on a peice, that's not the actual amount of time needed. It takes years to reach the point where they can make art in a few hours. That's what people are upset about, that's why nobody cares about "it took me hours to generate a good peice!", because it takes an artist 10,000 hours.
What AI art is doing is distilling that 10,000 hours (per artist) into a training set of 99% stolen works to allow someone with zero skill to produce a work of art in a few hours.
What's most problematic isn't who the copyright of the AI generated age belongs to, it's that artists who own their own works are having it stolen to be used in a commercial product. Go to any AI image generator, and you'll see "premium" options you can pay for. That product, that option to pay, only exists on the backs of artists who did not give licensing for their works, and did not get paid to provide the training data.
People have made millions off of photographs despite having zero training and only casually snapping the photo. You can get lucky, or the subject of your photo might be especially interesting or rare (such as from a newsworthy event).
I think we need something more nuanced than 'effort input'
So if I tell someone else to draw something, who gets the copyright?
Depends on your agreement.
I think by default if there's no contract saying otherwise, the copyright stays with the original artist.
If someone is doing work for you, you get the copyright. That's how it always worked
This isnt always the case. Tattoos for example, are commissioned and paid for but the actual copyright often resides with the artist not the person that paid for the work.
Yes, the artist must agree that copyright transfer is part of the agreement. By default ownership is with the artist.
That's only with the artist's agreement though isn't it? Usually because you're paying them. In this case the artist isn't a person so can't grant you the copyright (I think)
It's actually gotten significantly easier, which makes this artist's work even more impressive. There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month, and sure, I can just take the first thing midjouney throws at me and be satisfied with 80% accuracy, or I can work and rework, each generation with diminishing returns, until I get to 98% accuracy and just accept that it's not capable of 100% yet.
There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month
.... you've never actually made art, have you? The sort of stuff that you enter into contests takes months to make, from the actual painting to rough sketches to reference gathering, and that's just the basics
Clicking a button a thousand times isn't really comparable
I'm not at all disagreeing with the overall sentiment here, but having given it a go, I will say AI image generation is a very tedious endeavor many times.
It's not just clicking a button. It's closer to trying to Google some very specific, but hard to find medical problem. You constantly tweak and retweak your search terms, both learning from what has been output so far and as you think of new ways to stop it from giving you crap you don't want. And each time you hit search the process takes forever, anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours.
I don't really feel like this constitutes skill, but it does represent a certain amount of brute force stubbornness to try to get AI image generation to do what you want.
Maybe if you spent some of that time you spend tweaking settings on midjourney practicing art, you'd make something worthwhile and not just generated content slop. :)
Look, if I train a monkey to draw art, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting art is, I don't own that art, the monkey does.
As non-human animals cannot copyright their works, it then thusly defaults to the public domain.
The same applies to AI. You train it to make the art you want, but you're not the one making the art, the AI is. There's no human element in the creation itself, just like with the monkey.
You can edit or make changes as you like to the art, and you own those, but you don't own the art because the monkey/AI drew it.
Why do photographers get copyright over their pictures then?
They're just pointing a camera at something and pressing a button.
AI is a tool like any other.
Because photographs don't require other people photographs to work. It just requires the labour of the engineers at Nikon and you payed them by buying the camera.
Use an AI algorithm with no training set and see how good your tool is.
What if I used an open source algo with my own photographs as a dataset 🤔
Then absolutely go ahead. That isn't what the guy in the post did tough.
I don't see why you wouldn't be able to keep copyright then. Everything involved would have been owned by you.
That is a big difference to how other generative models work though, which do use other people's work.
Because the human element is in everything they had to do to set up the photograph, from physically going to the location, to setting up the camera properly, to ensuring the right lighting, etc.
In an AI generated image, the only human element is in putting in a prompt(s) and selecting which picture you want. The AI made the art, not you, so only the enhancements on it are copywritable because those are the human element you added.
This scenario is closer to me asking why can't I claim copyright over the objects in my photograph, be
This scenario is closer to me asking why I can't claim the copyright of the things I took a photograph of, and only the photograph itself. The answer usually being because I didn't make those things, somebody/something else did, I only made the photo.
Edit: Posted this without realising I hadn't finished my last paragraph. Oops
It's honestly pretty much the same with ai, there's lots of settings, tweaking, prompt writing, masking and so on.. that you need to set up in order to get the result you desire.
A photographer can take shitty pictures and you can make shitty stuff with AI but you can also use both tools to make what you want and put lots of work into it.
The difference is it's not you making the art.
The photographer is the one making the photo, it is their skill in doing ehat I described above that directly makes the photo. Whereas your prompts, tweaking, etc. are instructions for an AI to make the scenery for you based on other people's artwork.
I actually have a better analogy for you...
If I trained a monkey to take photos, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting photo are, I don't own those photos, the monkey does. Though in actuality, the work goes to the public domain in lieu as non-human animals cannot claim copyright.
If you edit that monkey's photo, you own the edit, but you still don't own the photo because the monkey took it.
The same should, does currently seem to, apply to AI. It is especially true when that AI is trained on information you don't hold copyright or licensing for.
Actually... If an animal you own/trained makes art... you did get to have the copyright to the art, until recently with these same legal developments. Now it's less clear.
I also agree more with the other posters interpretation in general. We copyright art made by random chance emergent effects (Polluck et al.), process based art (Morris Louis et al.), performance art (so many examples.. Adrian Piper comes to mind), ephemeral art, math art, and photography, as the poster says. None of those artists are fully in control of every aspect of the final project- the art makes itself, in part, in each example.
If a human uses a math equation for the geometric output of a printer, and they tweak the variables to get the best looking output, we consider that art by law. Ai is exactly the same.
It's funny, I find that illustrators hate ai art, but "studio" artists (for lack of a better term) usually adore it
If you compare the AI image that was used with the image that one the price after the artist enhanced it to that level you could argue that paintings from sketches are not copyright-able
Well if the sketch was made by the artist then no you can't, and if the sketch wasn't then the copyright board has a right to know, and he didn't disclose the original image.
Idk if he has shown the ai image (which isn't copyright-able) but it was discloed that AI was used in the process
We're gonna have some juicy legal battles when Hollywood start leveraging generative AI more and more
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Because Mr. Allen is unwilling to disclaim the AI-generated material, the Work cannot be registered as submitted," the office wrote in its decision.
In this case, "disclaim" refers to the act of formally renouncing or giving up any claim to the ownership or authorship of the AI-generated content in the work.
In August 2022, Artist Jason M. Allen created the piece in question, titled Theatre D'opera Spatial, using the Midjourney image synthesis service, which was relatively new at the time.
The image depicting a futuristic royal scene won top prize in the fair's "Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography" category.
In his appeal, Allen claimed that "the Office is placing a value judgment on the utility of various tools" and that denying copyright protection for AI-generated artwork would result in a "void of ownership."
More recently, it also denied copyright registration for an image that computer scientist Stephen Thaler claimed was autonomously generated by his AI system.
The original article contains 536 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
