You didn’t create it so why the hell should you be able to copyright it?
Talk about an inaccurate headline. The conclusion here isn’t that AI art can’t be copyrighted, it’s that AI cannot be a copyright holder. But it’s AI, so we can’t actually expect anyone to pull their head out of their ass and give it enough thought to write an article that isn’t garbage.
Instead we have yet another thread about this case in which no one actually has any idea what the ruling was. Very informative.
From the opinion;
Both parties have now moved for summary judgment, which motions present the sole issue of whether a work generated entirely by an artificial system absent human involvement should be eligible for copyright. See Pl.’s Mot. Summ. J. (Pl.’s Mot.”), ECF No. 16; Defs.’ Cross-Mot. Summ. J. (“Defs.’ Mot.”), ECF No. 17. For the reasons explained below, defendants are correct that human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim, and therefore plaintiff’s pending motion for summary judgment is denied and defendants’ pending cross-motion for summary judgment is granted.
AI being the copyright holder was never even in question. Some guy tried to register AI art in his company’s name, using the AI as the author of a work for hire. The Court found that he couldn’t get the copyright as a work for hire since no copyright existed in the first place.
What if a monkey made art, would that be copyrightable?
No. That is in the article.
In another case, the a federal appeals court said that a photo captured by a monkey can’t be granted a copyright since animals don’t qualify for protection, though the suit was decided on other grounds. Howell cited the ruling in her decision. “Plaintiff can point to no case in which a court has recognized copyright in a work originating with a non-human,” the order, which granted summary judgment in favor of the copyright office, stated.
Don’t post the entire article in the OP, please. You’ll end up getting C&D’s sent to your instance admins if punishers keep seeing this, because it’s - ironically enough in this context - copyright infringement.
Just post a snippet to stay within fair use. Don’t ruin Lemmy for all of us over something so silly.
Linking to it is fine, but OP had copy/pasted the full text of the article into the body of the post. It looks like he’s since edited it out.
It doesn’t happen too often, but I’ve seen some websites get in trouble for doing that.
Or, even better, use AI to generate a tldr.
Isn’t that what the autotldr bot basically does?
Exactly
couldn’t help but lol at this quote:
US copyright law is designed to adapt to the times.
Squeeze and squeeze harder, WGA. They’ll crack.
It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, “The Creativity Machine” register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.
The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI’s the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What’s clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn’t work for them.
You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.
The ruling is excellent, and I’m glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:
In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.
This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.
I wonder could you interpret this as AI created movie script isn’t copyrightable but the actual filmed movie is. That would invite some weird competition, like we’ve seen over the years with the copycat movies.
Yes , but let’s say Marvel writes the next Avengers movie with AI. Somebody else could come along and make their version of it. They’d need their own characters though, because those are copyrighted by marvel comics.
That’s great! It means artists can continue to use AI art for projects they don’t intend to sell, and Hollywood, which already has too much power, still relies on others.
Artists can still make money and copyright their stuff. You just can’t use exclusively AI to create the images. Cleaning up an AI generated image count as artistic work. Color correct, add missing fingers, make the eyes point the same way, remove background monstrosities. It all adds up.
Unfortunately this also goes for Hollywood. They can generate the bulk of the work and have one guy do the editing and suddenly they own the edit.
The real losers in this are the people that generate images with no modifications and post it as is while pretending that they are doing art.
You are correct. Hollywood will simply change up a couple things and then use the assets.
However, I‘m still undecided about how I think about whether generating AI art should count as Human-generated or not. On one hand, people can spend hours if not days or week perfecting a prompt with different tools like ControlNet, different promptstyles and etc. On the other hand, somebody comes up to midjourney, asks for a picture of a dragon wearing a T-Shirt and immediately gets an image that looks pretty decent. It’s probably not exactly what they wanted, but close enough, right? AI gets you 90% there what you want, and the other 10% is the super-hard part that takes forever. Anyway, sorry for dumping my though process from this comment chain on here xD
Sorry, I am firmly in the camp where that isn’t art. The prompt writing can be a literary work but the result isn’t a work of art. You set up the environment that allowed the image to exist but you didnt make the image.
But the treatment of photographs in the decision fits your description. The photographer sets up the environment that allowed the image to exist but it’s the camera that makes the image. The judge held that was protectable because the image represents the human’s mental conception of the scene. It’s not a ridiculous stretch to consider AI to be merely a camera for the prompt-writer’s mental conception. I am certain this argument has been or will be tried in court. The IP owner industry is far from done litigating this topic.
Plenty of things that take weeks of work aren’t art.
Definitely. Ask anybody who finally evacuated the last thing they ate from Olive Garden!
This doesn’t change much because of a simple difference: This was an AI product put in wholesale.
There was no human intervention in (visually) creating this product, thus no human can claim copyright.
Studios aren’t gonna do this when replacing some of their writers, because AI may not be good enough yet. Instead, it’ll be a smaller team, they’ll do the edits, and they can claim copyright.
This only really matters If AI advances to the point where we can completely create a full movie or TV show from scratch with just purely prompting, which, currently, we can not.
This limitation is too easy to get around. Have AI generate a picture. Take a photo of that picture and destroy the original. Copyright is now owned by the photographer. Have an AI write some music, change one note of that music and call in your arrangement of that piece, destroy the original music, and only your arrangement that you have a copyright on exists. etc.
As a photographer that knows copyright law, I assure you flat-art copying a work of art does not make it yours.
The thing I’m seeing that does sort of skirt the issue is that it’s very obvious a lot of YouTubers have jumped on AI image generation to produce static images instead of drawing the images themselves or farming it out to an artist on Fiverr or something. So if they want “evil Jerome Powell with flames in his eyes” they hand it to the AI, it spits something out, and into the video it goes, to be published on YouTube as a memey splash image in the video.
Now that it’s in the video, along with all the other clear acts of human creativity that form a video, it’s sort of “washed” in the money laundering sense, and I don’t see how you legally separate that image from the video in a way that makes the image ineligible for copyright. I don’t see a court being flummoxed by that, at all. If you filch the image from the original video, or try to pull excerpts from the video featuring Evil JPow, you’re in violation of copyright, and we’re on pretty solid, well established legal ground with that. At the very least, you are not completely in the clear to just yank that image for yourself.
So while the original raw image of Evil Jpow that the AI spit out was not eligible for copyright by itself, now it is as part of a larger work, open and shut.
Near the end of the article it affirms pretty much that, saying, "An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” [as quoted from the copyright office]
My quote is a bit messy there (i’m quoting the article who is quoting the copyright office) but you get the point.
The raw AI output, assuming no human was involved, cannot be copyrighted, but as soon as the AI output is somehow arranged into a larger work by a human, that changes everything.
So yeah, a bit of arranging, some editing, and the completely AI generated footage can be copyrighted all day. At the very least there would be a court case there.
“evil Jerome Powell with flames in his eyes” Maverick of Wall Street? lmao
You own the copyright of your photo, AI flat art has no copyright, therefore the only copyright is yours.
When you copy a public domain work, you can copyright your original contributions.
So, for example, if you create a picture book of hamlet, you’d own the layout of the text on the page, but not the text of hamlet itself.
What’s stopping someone from generating an AI script and then saying they wrote it and copyrighting it?
That would be a fraud on the copyright office. Nothing is “stopping” people from committing fraud other then it’s fraud and has legal repercussions if found out.
Like if AI generated it, who is going to complain if a human copyrights it?
This is what’s not computing in my head.
When they try to enforce the copyright against an alleged infringer, the infringer may claim the holder committed a fraud on the office and there is in fact no enforceable copyright. No one really knows how this would pan out in litigation because it’s untread territory.
other humans perhabs
So say I create an AI that can generate movie scripts. I use it to create a script. I put my name on it and copyright it. How would anyone else know?
I’m not trying to be like, argumentative. I’m just trying to understand.
You don’t “copyright something”. You have a copyright on everything you create yourself by default and you don’t on things that are not copyrightable. You can not put a copyright on something not copyrightable.
In practice this means if someone else copies your script without your consent, you can then try to enforce your exclusive copyright by suing them for copyright infringement. Then you need to proof and convince the judge of the originality of the work and that you put in significant creative effort.
Ok. So, it seems as usual I have missed the point here. Thanks for clarifying. So the point I’m to take away from this is that AI can’t hold copyright over things they create? If the answer is “yes”, then I ask. Can a human hold copyright over something an AI creates?
I am not a lawyer but the first question is probably a yes. AI is software and software does and can not hold any rights by itself as of today. The second question is what this post is about and the judge in the article said no, a human or company does not hold copyright over something AI creates. That does not mean, that anything touched by or created with the use of AI is not copyrightable. If you have your movie script error checked or rephrased with an AI tool it’s still your movie script with your orignal ideas in it.
As a person who creates both visual arts and music, though admittedly for my own enjoyment alone, I can’t bring myself to ever recognize any of the AI generated stuff as Art. None of it is any good if you look at it close. It’s wrong in every way. The machines were supposed to come for our jobs, but that was supposed to mean factory production and construction and shit.
If you had spent just a few minutes thinking about it, you’d have realised email jobs and creative jobs would be first on the automation chopping block.
A secretary used to schedule events and write invitations manually, now you have calendly and ChatGPT.
You used to need an HR professional to onboard new employees, now you can use on-demand courses through any of the million LMSs that exist.
Oh and there are already AI generative tools for those kinds of online courses.
Meanwhile, even the best robots move like geriatrics. We’re 100 years away from a robot that could do all that a construction worker does.
On one hand, great; will that extent to software development, architecture and other fields?
On the other hand, sounds like the first step to, when AI and androids reach self awareness and conscience, legally keep them enslaved.
When an AI can make that argument for themselves, then the law can change, until then, a human must be part of the creative process to hold copyright.
A classic example is the monkey selfie. There’s no copyright because there was no human involved in the creation of the selfie.
Well, the opressed and enslaved usually has no say about changing the law.
It’s a good thing that AI isn’t capable of being oppressed or enslaved. Because it’s currently less AI and more, janky code that does a thing, and sometimes does it correctly.
For now. 40 years ago, what it does now was impossible science fiction.
And for the next 40 years it will likely remain science fiction.
So there’s no point in fucking up all the case law for something that doesn’t exist. Seriously, copyright needs to be cut down, not expanded further. It’s already the life of the author plus 70 years. How does that even work? Copyright is meant to get humans to produce more creative works, so how the fuck does that work after death?
The answer is, corporations that don’t die. They want more control, and want AI to make shit, so they don’t have to pay real people to do it.
So no. No copyright for theoretical AI. no copyright for monkeys with names assigned by some third party. Just stop trying to expand copyright.
I tried to reach out to Allen Iverson for a comment, but he just kept ranting about practice.
But what did Ja say? Anyone get a hold of him?
“Yo, it’s Ja Rule in the house! You know, AI-generated art is an interesting twist in the game. But when it comes to copyright, I gotta say, it’s a bit of a gray area. I mean, can a machine really claim ownership, right? But then again, if a human’s involved in training that AI, there might be some room to argue. At the end of the day, it’s all about respecting the craft and the creators, whether they’re human or machine. We’ll see where the courts take us on this one!” - JaRuleGPT
so stuff made with adobe sensei will not be admissable. plugins too? Don’t think they did their homework. AI is a tool like any other that will still need a person for imput.
In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.
I am not a lawyer, but Adobe Sensei is likely fine.
