An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
You have to be the creator of the work in order to copyright it. He didn’t create the work. If the wind organized the leaves into a beautiful pattern, he couldn’t copyright the leaves either.
Weirdly enough the monkey selfie probably establishes some precedence here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Problem is the AI isn’t a monkey with a camera, it is an algorothm licensed from a company. The guy basically outsourced the work and tried to copyright the finished product which might be fine depending on the legal agreements and if the AI Company has the rights to it.
You could copyright a photograph of that leaf pattern though, couldn’t you?
but its just a photocopy of the leaves, not the actual leaves. And to photograph something, you capture it according to your will. What will be the light situation, from which angle, at what focal length,… so many options.
This is getting weird.
If I would generate an image with an AI and then take a photo of it, I could copyright the photo, even if the underlying art is not copyrightable, just like the leaves?
So, in an hypothetical way, I could hold a copyright on the photo of the image, but not on the image itself.
So if someone would find the model, seed, inference engine and prompt they could theoretically redo the image and use it, but until then they would be unable to use my photo for it?
So I would have a copyright to it through obscurity, trying to make it unfeasible to replicate?
This does sound bananas, which - to be fair - is pretty in line with my general impression of copyright laws.
Copyright covers your creative expression.
For example, you draw a superhero named “LemmyMan” and post it online. All of your creative choices are protected. If someone made another LemmyMan with a different caption, they would be violating your copyright because you created everything about LemmyMan, not just the caption in your drawing.
Now suppose you take a photo of Mount Everest. Mount Everest is not your creation, but the choices of lighting, foreground, and perspective are. Someone could not copy your exact photo, but they could take a different photo of Mount Everest making different creative choices.
The same is true of taking a photo of work in the public domain, like the Mona Lisa. If you make no creative addition to the Mona Lisa in your photo, then you have no copyright at all. If you put some creativity into your photo, like some interesting lighting, then those creative elements are protected. But anyone else could still take a photo of the Mona Lisa with different lighting, the subject itself is not under copyright.
Now suppose you tell an AI, “Draw me a superhero”, and it outputs ChatMan. If you make no further creative additions, then you have no copyright at all. But suppose you add a caption to it. Then the caption is your creative expression, so that is protected. But the rest of ChatMan is not, it’s in the public domain just like the Mona Lisa. Anyone else can make their own version of ChatMan that’s exactly the same minus your caption, because the underlying subject is not protected.
You just inadvertently explained why copyright doesn’t cover training. Thanks.
Copyright doesn’t cover the output of training. But AI companies are being sued over training input.
If you want to download a bunch of images from the Getty catalog, you need permission from Getty. If you don’t have their permission and download them anyway, you can be sued. It doesn’t even matter whether those images are used for training or some other commercial purpose unrelated to AI.
Depends on the training and the output.
Just like if you photographed the Mona Lisa in such a way as it recreated the piece as if it wasn’t a photograph, a model sufficiently trained that can reproduce the original training data, you have copyright issues.
Problem is that many models can do this, but it’s a mathematically improbable occurrence.
If I make a stamp that’s made of 1 billion exact copies of different copyrighted photos and cut it infinitesimally small, and mixed it up, the problem that it can produce the original work that it was made from still becomes a copyright issue.
You’d have to prove the opposite, in fact. That it’s mathematically impossible for your model to reproduce the copyrighted content for it not to be an issue
It’s human expression that is protected by copyright. Creative height is the bar.
If you’ve done nothing but press a button there’s often no copyright. Photography involves things like selection of motive, framing, etc. If you just photograph a motive which itself doesn’t have copyright, then what you added through your choices is what you may have copyright of. Using another’s scan of a public domain book might be considered fair use, for example (not much extra expression added by just scanning)
Independent creation is indeed a thing in copyright law. Multiple people photographing the same sunset won’t infringe each other’s copyright, at least not if you don’t intentionally try to copy another’s expression, like actively replicating their framing and edits and more.
Doesn’t modern art include works that are simply paint streaks left on canvas from someone quickly swinging a brush with paint on it at a distance?
Why is the phrase used by an AI prompt not considered more effort than that? The former requires no thought, only movement. The latter requires an understanding of language, critical thinking and the ability to envision an end result that isn’t just a paint splatter.
Because in a Jackson Pollock painting, the artist was in complete control of his paintbrush as it swung through the air. Not to mention the choice of brush, the amount of paint, the color, etc. If there is a blue streak in the upper left, it’s because Pollock wanted a blue streak in the upper left.
An AI prompt is more like handing your camera to a passerby in Paris and saying, “Please take a photo of me with the Eiffel Tower in the background”. If your belt is visible in the photo, it’s because the passerby wanted it there. That’s why the passerby, not you, has a copyright over the result.
No they weren’t. Their brush was being influenced by every piece they had seen before. None of those arguments are any different than the resin was in control of the prompt when they requested the image. This is nothing more than human/biological exceptionalism.
Copyright law is absolutely based on human exceptionalism, because it is meant to incentivize humans.
Your first paragraph is just nonsense. Please go try to swing a paintbrush and get every drop exactly where you want. It’s not possible. It’s literally why pollock painted that way.
Being in control does not mean achieving what you “want” or intend.
You are in control of your car, even if you unintentionally hit a tree. Likewise, Pollock controls his paintbrush, it is held by his hand which only he can move. If he flicks paint on his friend’s new jacket that might not be his intent, yet he is still 100% responsible for that outcome.
Hmm… what about pendulum painting? Where you put paint in a bucket, put a hole in it, and let it swing back and forth over the canvas?
On one side he chooses paint and size of hole and initial path and so on, but on the other hand he let nature and physics do the actual painting for him.
In this case, it sounds like all the key creative choices (eg form, color, background) were made by the artist.
Indeed. ‘Fountain’ is widely recognised as a major landmark and it’s just a urinal in a museum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
Couldn’t you take a picture of the leaves and copyright that?
Yes, you could. BTW I just took a screenshot of your comment so it’s mine to copyright.
I mean, literally yes, though?
Like, it’s not meaningful at all, but yes, it’s copyrightable.
Exactly my point, copyright law is ridiculous.
If I made an image in photoshop, the computer made it, I just directed it.
How is AI different?
And that’s why I make art completely without instruction or man made tools. I actually independently developed cellphones and English purely to dunk on people on the internet.
Funny but that is kind of my point, where is the line and why?
What are you talking about? The computer didn’t make it. That’s like saying a paintbrush made a painting.
That is not even close to AI image generation.
We could explain it to you, but you’re not interested in understanding.
I’m being honest, I get that they are not the same, I just don’t understand why the line is drawn with AI, Why wasn’t it drawn with photoshop?
They tried to draw the lines with Photoshop, and with cameras, and with pre-mixed pigments, and probably more.
It’s been used many times before, but I like the analogy of ordering food. If I go to a restaurant and order risotto, I haven’t made the dish, I’ve only consumed it. I want you to focus on that word “consume”, it’s important here.
Another idea I’ve seen recently that I like was a summed post something like this:
I know I’m using a lot of analogies here; from food to writing and now the visual medium - but stick with me. Completely sidestepping any lofty notions of soul or humanity, let’s look strictly at what’s being communicated in a visual piece of art generated by AI. It’s an idea, one containing neither your specific style (the creative process) or vision (the final product), though you may feel you get a close approximation after several iterations and a detailed/complex enough prompt. If you wanted to convey the idea of “eagle perched in a tree”, you’ve already done so with that phrase (or prompt in this respect). By providing an AI-generated image, you’ve narrowed my own ability to interpret down into the AI-generated noise now taking up space between us.
The reason you’d use AI-generated art is because you need to fill space, like the thumbnail to go with an article. An empty space to dump things into. While I can’t ever claim enough authority to define what exactly art is and is not (nobody can), I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how far the tech evolves, to me PERSONALLY, AI will only ever generate content, not art. There is already more art in the world than I could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes, I neither want nor need this garbage.
If I buy a bread at the bakery, ham and cheese in the grocery store, and make me a sandwich, who’s the creator?
I understand your point, but I disagree.
As someone who has a very vivid imagination and absolutely no artistic skills, and who doesn’t enjoy drawing, i find that being able to produce my ideas through words is amazing.
For me, AI art is a tool that enables me to express ideas that would otherwise never be expressed.
I don’t consider a few lines of prompt of the top of your head art, but if someone sat down, revised, tweaked and put effort and imagination into it, isn’t that art? Would it be more of an art piece if they just published the text instead of the generated image?