Submitted 1 year ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world
Controversial AI art piece from 2022 lacks human authorship required for registration.
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.
All those artists did the same thing, they’re also only able to pursue art because the work of so many people before has made a world in which we’re so surrounded by luxury that they don’t need to work the fields just to survive.
As the famous meme so rightly states, we live in a society. I get that a lot of modern artists don’t want to help build a better society for all because they want to protect their privileged position in capitalism but that’s not really an option, you live by the sword of capitalism you die by the sword of capitalism.
It is funny how that “one mediocre painting” won the award while the human art did not.
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.
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.
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
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.
Does my camera own my art, and not me?
Thats honestly a fair point. I think I often feel lot of hostility towards ai, because a lot of aspects of how its being used or the arguments made by its proponents don’t sit right with me, but its clear our systems need to evolve to handle ai and ai created content more appropriately
Why do photographers get copyright over their pictures then?
They're just pointing a camera at something at 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 🤔
Did you know that it is illegal to take a photograph of the Eiffel tower at night? France lacks the right of panorama, and the lighting system was designed by someone still living. So photographs do require violating copyright law sometimes.
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.
In this scenario, it is like asking why I can't claim copyright over the things I photograph
This scenario is closer to me asking why I can't claim the copyright of the things I took a photograph of, rather than just the photo itself.
It's honestly pretty much the same with ai, there's lots of settings, tweaking, prompt writing and so on..
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 scene isn’t copyrighted, anyone could go to the scene (theoretically) and take their own photo from a different angle. What’s copyrighted is the expression that went into staging the shot.
An AI tool is the one doing the creative expression when generating its images is the argument. The prompt is where the creative expression of the user ends, and copyrighting just a phrase seems ridiculous. I tend to agree with these sort of arguments, especially when models like this are often trained on other people’s copyright work.
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
He’s allowed to copyright it as a collage, just not claim ownership to the source images.
When you say a painting from a sketch, what do you mean? Is it a sketch from another artist? If so, you can still copyright the painting, you just can’t claim ownership of the sketch, because you didn’t make it.
The article says that he could have copyrighted the work if he disclaimed the AI generated source images in his application. The collage he created is copyrightable but he can’t claim copyright on the source images because they were not created by a human. If someone were to take his collage, he’d still be protected.
What’s significant about this is that this means that you can’t simply copyright an image you had ai generate from a prompt, there needs to be some kind of transformation, and if someone else got ahold of the original AI image before transformation they could use it freely as public domain.
What happens if I use AI to generate images and then paint them? This is so confusing
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!
Cool. Ugly ass Ai trash
Am I the only one that think the longue they reject it, the more it will participate to it’s story behind, and make it worth more and more, and make it more and more “outrageous” and continue etc to make it have more worth?
xkforce@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Good. Maybe this could put a stop to the attempts by companies to gut their payroll and replace artists with software.
hardware26@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
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.
xkforce@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
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)
Chariotwheel@kbin.social 1 year ago
Ha.
A lot of money will fly and laws and views will change like butter in the sun.
xkforce@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just for once Id like to be optimistic