Comment on U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material
tidderuuf@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Gonna be fun times in courts as anyone can claim something was generated by AI even if an artist claims they created it.
I wonder if this will end up limited to art or can be expanded to other copyrighted works.
I wonder what percentage has to be created by a human to be eligible for copyright. For example, if someone generates an AI image and then changes a few pixels, is that human-created? What if they over-paint 30% of the image? 50%? What if someone creates something in Photoshop from scratch, but they use Photoshop’s in-built AI driven tools to enhance it?
Either anything that uses AI in any capacity is uncopyrightable, or there has to be a line somewhere, so… Where is it?
If the final product isnt the raw output from my understanding. The current laws are there mostly to stop the whole thing from turning into copyright mills.
Instead of considering if the whole work is now copyrightable, consider parts of the work made by generative AI are not and the human parts are (if they reach the minimum line of creativity). Sure there’s other helpful tools that do some of the work but unless they’re substituting the creativity then they need not apply.
Easiest should be all digital art is not copyrightable as it was created with software that did most of the work and the “artist” could not have produced it without that software. But that would invalidate almost all Hollywood movies from the last 30 years lol.
I mean, you could make the same argument for paint brushes for traditional art. Or pencils. There’s a really big difference between someone using a tablet and an Undo hotkey to draw something digitally vs. someone making something with AI. One of those clearly requires a ton of skill; one does not require any.
I said easiest, I didn’t say that’s the way it should be.
all digital art is not copyrightable as it was created with software that did most of the work
This is a really weird idea of what making digital art actually involves. Drawing on a screen with a stylus isn’t somehow not art made by a person because it’s digital instead of on paper. Even if you use a mouse to make pixel art or modify 3D models, that’s still human artistic decision making involved. Non-AI digital artwork doesn’t involve just pressing a button and getting art.
A human can start off a process by their own design, but with the details implemented by phenomena not in their direct control, and still copyright the resulting work.
If I take a funnel full of paint and let it drip onto a canvas in a pattern caused by the movement of a pendulum, and incorporate random movement from wind on a windy day, how would you assign a “percentage” of human creation there? What about letting the hot desert sun melt some crayons into another canvas where I placed the crayons but didn’t control the drip pattern? What if I record some barking dogs but auto tune it into a melody? Or photograph the natural beauty of a wave crashing onto shore? These are all things that can be copyrighted, even if they’re inherently dependent on natural phenomena not in the artist’s control, because the process itself is initiated or captured or designed by a human author.
It goes both ways. If the artist has to do 30% of the work, what about collages? Do we have to count the square millimeters of each cut and paste item to ensure they are above the threshold?
What if it’s a collage of AI generated art pieces? Technically the artist did the same amount of work as someone making a collage of human-created things.
Iconoclast@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
It’s not generally difficult at all for an artist to prove that they are the original creator of a certain piece. My photography for example is available for anyone for free and in high resolution but I’m the only one with the full resolution pictures and RAW files.
tabular@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Seems impossible to me but I’m not an artist - I write code as a hobby and see no way to definitively prove I wrote any code that an AI could also produce. Is there any aspect of art creation that an AI cannot replicate?
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
You don’t have drafts or anything that can show the history of development? I write as a hobby and I have tons of drafts that show the development of my stories over time. If somebody tried to claim my works were AI, I could easily dispute that.
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks ago
What if the drafts were created using AI too?
Code is often in a source control system of some sort, which tracks changes to the code (who changed it and when it was changed). I don’t think that could prove that a human wrote it, though.
I think in cases like this, the author could prove they created the code/story/art/whatever by having a deep understanding of the material. That’s how Michael Jackson defended against lawsuits saying he copied someone else’s song - he described his songwriting process and could hum/beatbox every instrument in the track.
Iconoclast@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I don’t know how to write code myself, but intuitively it seems a little different in this case.
When it comes to photography, I can show the original unedited RAW file with full resolution and full metadata and everyone else just has a lower-resolution JPG. The same thing applies to most digital art.