For now. Wait until AI becomes the judges.

AI will just learn to remove watermarks

Lawyers and Judges are afraid of the ever-decreasing distance of thier job being useless against AI.

That's GOOD for AI art. Less chilling effect from the first person to simply ask the AI to do certain things.

No reason why someone wouldn't be able to figure that out, but I wonder what would be the retaliation to that.

This is justified. A computer absolutely can not create original work. This is also the basis for my assertion that ChatGPT college essays are not "plagiarism."

So onwards to Futurama with the Judgebots?

[removed]

Shhhh, don't anger them

I would very much prefer the floating heads

It will eventually reach a tipping point

> A computer absolutely can not create original work.

Why not?

Or rather, if a computer can't, what is the reason that a human could instead?

This isn't crippling. All it says is images you curate from the ai without very much user input into the creation can't be copyrighted.

There are now controlnets where you can create your own poses or take your own drawings and run them through the ai to supercharge the guiding process for the ai. Even then you can always do editing post generation to make it personal. Hell you can even train the ai on your own art and style. Just because one guy used midjourney doesn't mean that someone doing something with a more open and configurable ai can't get their works copyright. It's on a case by case basis.

Because a human must take action for it to occur. A human must direct the AI to do a task so the human behind the instructions is the true creator.

Humans don't need to be told what to do to be creative, we can choose to do it of our own free will.

That's narrow minded

Are you a digital being ?

We don't even understand what "free will" is. So how can you say that it can't happen "artificially"? These conclusions are just wild guesses wrapped in a false certainty.

This seems like a real flimsy axiom to put the basis on.

Well I couldn't do anything without my parents having taken some action for me to exist, and they couldn't have done that without their parents, so is all original work actually belonging to the first semblance of life?

Or how about, my wife and I decided to buy a deck of cards for date night ideas, and one of the cards said that we should paint portraits of each other. Are the paintings original work of ours, or does that belong to the card creators who inspired us to do it?

If instructions are all that is required consider art not original work; then I really don't think we should give Michelangelo any credit for the Sistine Chapel. He was told to paint it by the Pope.

"A computer absolutely can not create original work."

This year.

All art is derivative.

>Humans don't need to be told what to do to be creative

The evidence is increasingly to the contrary.

How did it start then?

This should be pretty easy to legislate against and they absolutely should do so. A computer program should not decide sentencing nor argue against the accused. I suppose if the defendant wants an AI lawyer the should have that right the same way they have the right to defend themselves.

Stick figures on cave walls.

>Crucial And Devasting Legal Blow

Terrible headline

The real answer is, Duh, it's just common sense

We need less artificial restriction of creativity, not more. Copyright law has expanded far beyond anything reasonable

[deleted]

So if someone goes to a artschool, views art, or interacts with a creative property in any form, thier art is tainted by those preconceived works and therefore is not truly a creative work? All art is plagiarism but reconstructed and applied in small enough parts that you cannot tell it is.

Imitating nature.

Cave wall - history’s primal gallery.

>Crucial And Devasting Legal Blow

Earth shattering legal news! On giantfreakingrobotDOTcom. Uh-huh.

Possibly. However the presumption will be that AI 'assisted' art is not entitled to copyright either. I expect the presumption to be rebuttable to some extent, but the author is going to have a difficult time trying to delineate what is and is not original to the author and not something that was added by the AI. In other words, copyright will be dragged into the morass of litigation over validity that patents go through.

It's how copyright is defined

Just imagine if the same logic had been used on photography.

"Pushing a camera button is insufficient artistic input for photographs to be copyrightable"

Or look at some of the more wild paint splatter methods.

Napster got into legal trouble it still changed the landscape of the music industry forever

*/r/technology hatesturbates even harder*

Professional photoshoppers devastated

A paintbrush or camera cannot create original work

Except in your example the photos would be of existing photos.

A lot of people arguing for AI images don't understand art or are only using metaphors to the depth that suits them.

But first they saw stick figures in clouds because pareidolia

So... what the ai does?

Because it learns what a concept looks like and that's how it will generate an image from pure static. It doesn't have images saved inside the model it has knowledge of what something looks like and how to make that from static. Essentially it knows how to draw a thing but doesn't have images of the thing saved in its data.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90649913/the-unusual-creative-process-of-the-artist-behind-the-little-mermaid-and-beauty-and-the-beast

Aphantasia prevents the generation of mental images based on knowledge of what things look like, but it does not prevent that knowledge serving as the basis for an image made with pencil and paper. Keane can draw a picture of Ariel because he knows what humans (and fish) look like, and that information—plus the skills acquired through study and practice—steers his hand accordingly.

This is the best explanation i can think of for this.

And originally monkeys can’t copyright. How can AI

You can already highlight the part of the image that generated a signature or whatever and ask it to put something else there on SD. Midjourney I think you have to redo the whole piece.

Any one confused on the issue, here’s the written ruling.

https://copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf

> A person who provides text prompts to Midjourney does not “actually form” the generated images and is not the “master mind” behind them.

> Nor does the Office agree that Ms. Kashtanova’s use of textual prompts permits copyright protection of resulting images because the images are the visual representation of “creative, human-authored prompts.” Because Midjourney starts with randomly generated noise that evolves into a final image, there is no guarantee that a particular prompt will generate any particular visual output.

So this case does address this in some fashion and the office ruled that significant edits can be proof of authorship. Mrs. K does provide examples of ai-generated work that is edited and they do review it.

Skynet figured out that the military industry is so 80's. The real way to screw humanity is through the legal system.

From the court ruling cited on this specific case:

> In cases where non-human authorship is claimed, appellate courts have found that copyright does not protect the alleged creations. For example, the Ninth Circuit held that a book containing words “‘authored’ by non-human spiritual beings” can only gain copyright protection if there is “human selection and arrangement of the revelations.” Urantia Found. v. Kristen Maaherra, 114 F.3d 955, 957–59 (9th Cir. 1997). The Urantia court held that “some element of human creativity must have occurred in order for the Book to be copyrightable” because “it is not creations of divine beings that the copyright laws were intended to protect.”

Photos are a great example.

Somebody takes a photograph of a skyline, why should they be able to copyright that? All they did was press a button, the skyline itself was created by others.

If the answer is because of the compositional choices involved, then that's no different from a user giving specific prompts to an AI. Which is exactly what the comic book author was doing when creating their work.

Photography should not be copyrightable under the same standards held to AI in this case.

> don't understand art

Understanding art isn't a prerequisite for creating art.

But in the case of AI, it's not skylines, it's art that people have made themselves that is being stolen. I say people who don't understand this don't understand art because they don't know what it is to create something and have it stolen as if it were nothing.

> However the presumption will be that AI 'assisted' art is not entitled to copyright either.

I would draw the exact opposite conclusion from the USCO correspondence. Note this:

> We conclude that Ms. Kashtanova is the author of the Work’s text as well as the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work’s written and visual elements. That authorship is protected by copyright.

They’ve specifically said that everything about but the generated images themselves is copyrighted. Assuming that this decision holds up to further scrutiny (which, who knows), an assistive tool is one that combines non-copyrightable generated content with copyrightable human generated elements. With those kinds of tools, the fact that individual elements of the final work are not copyrightable would generally be academic.

Edit: phonetic typo

This sounds like you’re confused about how these models work. It’s not just a big database of art that the model is clipping pieces out of.

To clarify, this is not a court ruling. They’re citing court rulings, but the US Copyright Office is part of the legislative branch, not the judicial branch.

Good clarification. I’ll edit to reflect this fact

but if all art is derivative where'd that come from? Can we say that only the cave drawings are truly unique?

Personally, I'm staying right away from AI.

You and these AI promoters aren't creating art.

I've had it explained to me quite well. The AI isn't drawing or painting anything. It's extrapolating. If you didn't feed all of those drawings of a horse into it to spit back out, you wouldn't be able to ask it for a horse and it would draw a horse.

There are a lot of you who are wistfully telling yourselves bullshit to side step the fact that you're nothing but thieves asking a computer to do your work for you like a monkey.

The model does not need to see drawings of a horse to produce a picture of a horse. It needs to see pictures of horses, sure, but those could be photographs, drawings, whatever. As a human, you also would not be able to draw a picture of a horse without ever seeing a horse, so I’m not sure what your point is.

Also, how do you know that you’ve had it explained to you well? Unless you’ve attempted to apply the knowledge, you can only tell if you’ve had it explained convincingly

Most images generated with AI do not look interesting. People generate a fantasy girl, mario as a dwarf, some space car, funny sometimes, but it gets boring easily.

It is actually not so easy to generate something interesting with it. The most imaginary images are created by people who were already artistic, and they use their knowledge with this new tool. Mostly changing elements afterwards or combining images.

For photography it is the same, 99,999% of images are nothing more than snapshots. And it is so easy, just one click. But it takes an artistic eye to make something more of it.

It doesn't matter if it creates it from something or from "nothing" the reason a computer can't be creative is that it lacks initiative, a person must direct it to create for it to happen.

No free will = no creativity

A person will always be the one responsible for the works existence because they will have to initiate it somehow.

They do however need to be compensated

[deleted]

Exactly, they are just tools, so is AI.

Laws are written by man, they’re not sacrosanct or perfect. Sounds to me like copyright is the problem.

Sky daddy says rocks weren’t created in his image

Nah fuck AI

Why would AI art care? We are witnessing the death of copyright, not AI art.

Ok but see why my example of photography in particular applies here.

A photographer can use a specific camera with a specific lens, specific camera settings, shutter speed, film stock etc. They can photograph a specific city skyline from a specific angle and distance and elevation at a certain time of day/night with specific weather and visibility etc. They could then take a unique picture.

The photographer has made all of those creative choices and hardware selection to compose the shot, which is a primary argument as to why a photograph is copyrightable and art.

The exact same photographer could also use a popular imaging-creation AI, and almost perfectly re-create the real photograph they took via AI by carefully using all of those same exact creative choices down to the lens type, in the software prompt.

So the same person would have created a nearly identical image from two different methods. Yet one is currently copyrightable and one is not - despite the same creator putting the same effort and knowledge into composing both versions of the final image.

This is tru photography is stupidly easy, let’s be honest (professional with over 10 years of experience under my belt.) yes the first 1-2 years was difficult, but once I learned all the fundamentals it’s like second nature. It’s very easy.

Art depends on the intent, does it not?

I think the concept of craftsmanship is what is the issue here. As in, somebody can spend years mastering a specific creative technique with a lot of study and practice, and now somebody else can just come along now and press a few buttons to generate a very similar result. It's a lot to think about.

Craftsmanship is not required for creating art, though it is arguably a preferred ingredient by many who appreciate art.

This is a fact which nobody can argue. Everything is a remix. There is never truly original art and never will be.

>... AI art.

Oxymoron? :D

I thought we already heard this last week? Anyways, it is good for people who are making the type of art that is meant to be copyrighted (as opposed to stock images)

Yes, but this week it's back with an even more outrageous click-baity title, so we get to argue about it all over again.

A cave painting of a horse will have been made by someone who has seen a horse. Fundamentally information has to come from somewhere, yet often the expectation set on AI seems to be "it's derivative because it can only draw a horse due to having a horse in its training set".

Whenever someone says "this is a fact which nobody can argue", it almost always turns out to be arguable.

The idea that "there is nothing new under the sun" is itself a tired, old idea from the Bible. It represents an ancient view that everything in life and the world is just a cycle that repeats. It leaves no room for progress or innovation.

Original creativity is an essential ingredient in art. Maybe nothing is one hundred percent original, but it's still important to talk about whether, and to what extent, an artist's work brings something original to life. If something is one hundred percent a remix of old ideas, then it's not good art.

>> A computer absolutely can not create original work.

> Why not?

> Or rather, if a computer can't, what is the reason that a human could instead?

It's a question of the word "original". Water makes beautiful patterns in the sand below it, wind creates intricate patterns on the water. But we don't usually use the phrase "original work" to talk about things like that. Its meaning is related to the concept of invention, something that takes a will, a desire, imagination, intentional work, skill, and a process that involves being conscious of the aesthetics of what's being produced. I think that some animals are capable of it too, to some extent. But things produced by inanimate forces just don't fit into the category by that name. It doesn't mean they're not beautiful, and they have been the inspiration for countless artworks. But they're not called original artworks in themselves. There are different words for that.

On the other hand, people use tools and media to make art, and an artist using a computer can certainly create original work, if it involves the elements mentioned above. Also, processes of chance have been extremely important in the art of the past century. Much of the "output" of John Cage's work for example, is based on randomness. And I don't think the US Copyright Office is a particularly good judge of that. They might refuse to register a copyright on the music created, when musicians played notes that were produced by fish in a tank with a musical staff painted on it. Nevertheless, that piece is considered a very important and original work in the history of avant-garde art and music.

One of the best examples is artist Harold Cohen's AARON, a software project started in 1972, that produces physical paintings, spanning over four decades. The artist himself doesn't claim that the sofware is "creative", though the paintings have been displayed in many important galleries, and the overall work is considered very significant and influential in the history of art and AI. In 1994, Cohen asked: "If what AARON is making is not art, what is it exactly, and in what ways, other than its origin, does it differ from the 'real thing?' If it is not thinking, what exactly is it doing?"[1]

It comes down to the nature of the work. Someone who writes "an astronaut riding a horse"... it's so low-effort that it's difficult to call it original art, even though it's become somewhat iconic. But I don't think at all that its impossible to use AI image generators in a process that does produce original, creative art works, or at least, in a way that the deep and thoughtful investigation of the questions, as in Cohen's work, is clearly the original work of an artist.

i disagree with photos as a good example. the skyline in your example never changes is. and you and i can stand at the same spot and take the same photo with the same camera and it will turn out the same.

on the other hand this is not true for ai art. you and i can use the sample computer and provide the same prompts and we will get something different for the same prompt.

[deleted]

No, because plagiarism is when you copy something verbatim, without creating your own authentic interpretation and expression. All art has elements of borrowing, but it's inventiveness, imagination, and some originality, that makes it art and not plagiarism.

The question is whether a machine is capable of inventiveness, imagination, originality, thinking, feeling, etc., or not, since those things have generally been acknowledged throughout history as being necessary elements of art. Wind and rain may carve patterns that are as beautiful as the most beautiful painting, but we don't call it art. Some people believe, or want to believe, that computers are capable of those things, and so we should call the patterns they produce, original, creative art. Others think that those things are not actually necessary, and we should call it art anyway. Personally, I think it's neither art nor plagiarism, but something else, that we don't have words for yet, and we're not sure how to deal with. It's a necessary discussion to work it out, but trying to fit dramatically new things into old categories is usually less successful than creating new categories.

It's not gonna stay away from you though...

I expect that the CO will leave all issues regarding the boundaries of what is copyrighted and what is not to the litigants in much the same way that patent 'quality' issues are left to litigants. So really, not much is changing other than the strengthening of the idea that non-persons cannot be the author of copyrightable works.

Generations of law students will write on to their law reviews by rehashing this issue. Yecch.

I mean, most human-generated images are generic and uninteresting too.

Anything that takes two years to grasp and apply the fundamentals can't be called easy...

There was an article not long ago about a major stock photo company already using AI to create it's images. How are they acquiring copyrights then?

If this is about money then you might as well just say "poor people" aren't allowed to use AI and copyright it's work.

would you prefer CartoonBrew? https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/midjourney-ai-images-us-copyright-office-226437.html

according to the copyright office, it's different because photographers have a direct creative input into the image produced.

'The office argued that, unlike a photographer, Midjourney users have
very limited control of the final images. Photographers manipulate
framing, lighting, subject, exposure time, depth of field, composition,
and more when creating a photograph. According to USCO, “The process by
which a Midjourney user obtains an ultimate satisfactory image through
the tool is not the same as that of a human artist, writer, or
photographer… the initial prompt by a user generates four different
images based on Midjourney’s training data. While additional prompts
applied to one of these initial images can influence the subsequent
images, the process is not controlled by the user because it is not
possible to predict what Midjourney will create ahead of time.'

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/midjourney-ai-images-us-copyright-office-226437.html

using AI to generate art seems closer to Art Direction, rather than the creation of art itself

Here's what was said about the difference between photography and AI art generation :

'The office argued that, unlike a photographer, Midjourney users have
very limited control of the final images. Photographers manipulate
framing, lighting, subject, exposure time, depth of field, composition,
and more when creating a photograph. According to USCO, “The process by
which a Midjourney user obtains an ultimate satisfactory image through
the tool is not the same as that of a human artist, writer, or
photographer… the initial prompt by a user generates four different
images based on Midjourney’s training data. While additional prompts
applied to one of these initial images can influence the subsequent
images, the process is not controlled by the user because it is not
possible to predict what Midjourney will create ahead of time.'

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/midjourney-ai-images-us-copyright-office-226437.html

It may have, the article I posted was from last week. I did a quick google search of the article title and reddit, but didn't see anything other than the one about watermarking. There's a new one posted today from cartoonbrew, in case that counts https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/midjourney-ai-images-us-copyright-office-226437.html

here's a different one with a less click-baity title

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/midjourney-ai-images-us-copyright-office-226437.html

Terminator vs Judge Dredd, anyone?

It's still click-baity though. The US Copyright Office did not say "AI-Generated Images Do Not Qualify For Copyright Protection". It said that in this particular case, there wasn't enough evidence of creative authorship on the part of Kris Kashtanova in producing the images, so they could not register the copyright. That doesn't necessarily apply to all images generated by or with an AI model.

It does mean that people can't copyright something they made with a simple prompt that in itself wouldn't qualify for copyright, so I guess that's "news". It seems obvious to me, but perhaps not to some of the people calling themselves "AI artists". Now they know. But it's not a general decision, not even a court decision.

That may sound convincing to somebody unfamiliar with the software, but how the process is characterized is misleading.

Certainly, the less information given to the AI, the more random the output. However if you sculpt your prompt to include all of the photographic and desired image factors, you can produce a very specific result. The AI model can simulate all of the photography factors, listed, if you instruct it to do so. Lens type, exposure time, lighting, film stock etc.

A person could take an actual photo. Then recreate that image from scratch through the AI by providing enough information to sculpt the output with all the factors involved in the photo's composition.

That would leave you with two nearly identical images created by the same person, but only one of those images able to be protected by copyright law. But both images required the same compositional choices on behalf of the image creator.

I recommend every play with software like midjourney or stable diffusion themselves and learn the basics about how AI prompting is done, and learn how specificity on the part of the artist/software user is always going to be necessary to produce the desired result.

Certainly with the comic book artist in the article, it should become obvious that the images in question aren't completely at random, but all done in a similar style that served to illustrate the story and in a specific order that matches and illustrates the written text. That can't occur at random, it required very specific decisions made by the artist for each image.

Has there been any examples of what you've described? The two nearly-identical images, one produced by human and one produced by AI with explicit direction, as opposed to 4 generated close-enough ones?

Also, I think the argument is that the actions of one using AI to create art is closer to what an Art Director does, rather then what an artist does. You can direct a person or a computer with directions, but that doesn't mean you are the one putting pen to paper, so to speak.

> and you and i can stand at the same spot and take the same photo with the same camera and it will turn out the same.

But both of our photos would still be protected by copyright despite being near identical to each other. Yet the AI image, created by giving it the exact same factors as input, down to film stock and exposure time, lens selection, time of day and weather conditions etc, would not be.

And there would be some differences in our photos, mostly random factors like the exact pattern of clouds, or visible lights on/off at the moment, passing birds in the sky etc.

And that random factor is something to consider, random imagery generated by nature is copyrightable in an image - like a cloud pattern, vegetation or natural landscape - but not if that random imagery is generated by AI.

> you and i can use the sample computer and provide the same prompts and we will get something different for the same prompt.

The more specific information we give the prompt, the more similar the results would be. I bet we could get pretty close by being providing enough information in the prompt, with the minor differences in detail being reasonably considered inconsequential.