Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted::Matthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.”
Allowing people to copyright A.I generated art could lead to huge issues where someone could just churn out generated images like no tomorrow and throw out copyright claims left and right. It could even lead to situation where you can’t really create any art because it’s probably something that’s already been generated by someone or close to it.
That’s what I have been saying. If the courts rule that AI generated art is copyright able. What stops some multi-billionaire from copywriters basically every logical arrangement of words or images or whatever. Heck they would probably even offer to fund employing the copyright office with contractors that they pay for to speed up the process and the government would say it’s a good thing because they are saving taxpayer money…
To file an infringement suit they’d need to have paid registration for each work which, even for the exorbitantly rich, wouldn’t be remotely feasible for all logical arrangements of words/images. There’s probably not even enough space in the Universe or time until its heat death to generate and store all such images.
Even if they did, copyright doesn’t protect against against independently created works that happen to be similar or even identical - so they wouldn’t be exhausting some limited set of possible works by doing so.
For my understanding artistic works get copyright from the moment of their creation. This would allow one to pick battles based on how lucrative they may potentially be.
You dont really need art museum of babel for this but you just tons of different works that may contain unique characters, structures or objects similar to what someone might be able to imagine or has already imagined.
You may draw fan art with disney characters but its actually illegal to sell said art work without Disneys aproval until copyright expires. Now if anyone can start churning out for example A.I generated web comics left and right the chances for almost identical designs increases by a lot.
For my understanding artistic works get copyright from the moment of their creation. This would allow one to pick battles based on how lucrative they may potentially be.
In the US, you need your copyright to be registered in order to file an infringement suit or be granted statutory damages. This must be done prior to the infringement, so they wouldn’t be able to pick and choose which to register after the fact. The fact that (unregistered) copyright arises from the moment of creation is true, but not particularly useful here.
You dont really need art museum of babel for this but you just tons of different works that may contain unique characters, structures or objects similar to what someone might be able to imagine or has already imagined.
Copyright is not the same as patents or trademarks; someone coincidentally creating something very similar or even an exact replica of your work is not infringement.
If whether you copied from their work or independently made similar choices is under question - then close similarity of the works could skew the balance of probabilities. However, the courts will be able to see that coincidental similarity is far more likely if a colossal number of images have been registered.
You may draw fan art with disney characters but its actually illegal to sell said art work without Disneys aproval until copyright expires.
It’s still copyright infringement even if you publish it non-commercially, but a Fair Use defense would likely hold up.
So your main argument against it is “anyone could do it”?
What? Lol
This is more of an issue with copyright law than of A.I. content generation. All you really need to do is create an algorithm that creates images based on every combination of pixels. There were a couple of lawyers who did this with melodies by creating an algorithm to generate every combination of 12-note, 8-beat melodies. One of the lawyers has a TED Talk where he goes into more detail with the issues of copyright laws: https://youtu.be/sJtm0MoOgiU
The museum of babel already exists.
However with generative A.I you dont need artwork for every combination of pixels. Machine learning seems to be really good at finding patterns in everything we may do or think.
With generative A.I we can use this information to create increasingly more human like output. In terms of art mimic and blend art styles, create new designs based on existing ones etc.
Much more elegant and way cheaper than using brute force algorithms.
This is one reason why copyright/patent law is stupid to begin with. Nothing but a state-enforced monopoly on a slice of all possible information in a category. Imagine if people started copyrighting basic trinomials.
What’s stopping billionaires from hiring artists now and just having them slave away at 1632961190 images of whatever they could think of for the same purpose? The art doesn’t even need to be good, it just needs to be something you can copyright
You mean, like stock photo websites? That are owned by Koch brothers?
Making AI art not copyrightable is probably the best reasonable alternative that we could hope for.
Companies are always looking to cut costs and getting some computer algorithm to churn out endless art without having to pay an artist would be a corporate holy grail. Except that if that artwork then can’t be copyrighted and thus monetized (or not as easily monetized), then it ruined or at least lessens their push to replace all their workers with AI.
They will just churn out pictures from midjourney and hire a cheap artist to touch them up and then copyright that.
That’s basically what they did for the intro to Secret Invasion on Disney+. They used AI to create it and then touched it up. It still looks like shit, much like the show itself.
That’s an interesting thought, that could potentially create corporate day jobs for artists.
Edit: I don’t believe in this idea, but thought it interesting. It’s better for artists to exercise creativity.
Companies can always just lie about it as well
This is a very delicate and complicated matter, part of me thinks that making AI works non copyrightable would incentivize human art
Given the presence of stolen artwork in the training data I don’t see why it should be copyright able.
Also award winning? It honestly looks like the kind of liminal mindfuckery most models could output. There’s nothing particularly impressive with the piece.
iirc it was submitted to a small art contest without disclosing it’s AI generated and it won a prize… which made a lot of people very mad
If this is the one in thinking of, they disclosed it was made using midjourney, but the judges didn’t know what that meant and didn’t ask.
Eh. I’ve seen abstract art that people are in awe with throughout my life. And like the uneducated swine I am, I’ve never thought they were impressive either.
Art appraisers are weird.
Edit: I saw the piece in question. This one is a tricky one, because if a human painted it, it would be impressive. Very nice details. But since it was generated by a machine in minutes… eh.
But according to the article, it wasn’t generated in minutes. The artist went through over 600 iterations of tweaking the prompt to get what he wanted. Sounds like days or even weeks of work probably. And then made additional tweaks via Photoshop.
Not too say that makes it any more impressive, but it wasn’t something that was without effort.
Point taken. In that case, I guess one can recognize the effort. Still, the impressive part of the piece is the style, which, if one were to assume was made with actual oil paint, it would be impressive.
With AI, I would explore styles that are inherently difficult to produce digitally. And yes, “oil paint” would be difficult to produce with digital tools alone outside of AI (maybe there are good plug-ins for it?) But you know what I mean. I don’t even know which styles those would be.
Read the article. He added details and the description fed into the prompt was 624 words long. He basically wrote a page describing the scene he wanted created.
Which I can also do. “Imagine a cave full of cats. The first cat is pink with yellow dots. The second cat glows in the dark. The third cat…”
I guess art involves expressing what you want to express it, sure. But also how you express it is part of it as well. If you make the strokes yourself, it’s more impressive. A machine? You gotta do better than making it look like someone painted it.
It’s like 3D printing. A 3D-printed statue? Neat. But not terribly impressive. A 3D figure that defies all optical illusion explanations? Now we’re talking.
I agree completely. I think this is the best solution to the AI replacing human artists problem. Big companies can’t use AI to replace humans because if they do, whatever they make will be ineligible for copyright and everyone will be free to rip them off.
This will change the first time a big pharma pill designed by AI hits the market.
Drugs are patented, not copyrighted, and handled by the US Patent Office. This is a decision by the US Copyright Office.
Not the same thing, and I would not be surprised if the Patent Office decides drugs designed in part with AI tools can still be patented, while the Copyright Office decides art cannot be copyrighted.
I look forward to trusting my medical well-being to algorithms which can be completely fucked by the idea that Kenya starts with the letter K.
AI are already generating antibody treatments. Companies provide AI with the disease/issue and antibodies that kinda work, then have the AI generate antibodies to fix the disease/issue. The best antibodies are then made in a lab and tested in vitro. However, as somone else noted, antibodies/medications are patented, which is different than copyright. Patents can be done on the process of making the antibody so you patrent the final process of making the antibody, not the AI work to come up with which antibody to make. Source: I attended a Patent Law seminar on this a few months ago.
They’ll just say this random scientist over here that signed away to the rights of anything he thinks of came up with it.
I just want to point out that the description beneath the image in the article is hilarious.
This is Allen’s AI-generated artwork, which we can publish without asking him because, as the article notes, it’s not eligible for copyright protections.
Off topic but anyone know if you can download this art in high-res from somewhere?
This is an amazing piece, regardless what I think about the AI art shitshow in general.
It’s a lovely piece, created by nobody.
It’s like how you can look at and appreciate a beautiful cloud or leaf or rock formation which exists in the world without meaningful human expression, but you can’t copyright it or otherwise claim to be its creator or exclusive owner.
Created by the artist. An artist using AI is no different than an artist using AfterEffects or other processing medium. Using your example, it’s essentially saying “Earth” made a beautiful picture and not the cameraman.
Without the human element manipulating the AI, the AI is presently worthless. If we ever create AGI that can create art on its own, then we have a real discussion on our hands.
Luddites who are mad that AI is beginning to show promise can hate all they want, but this is the reality.
Yes, US copyright law requires human involvement to grant authorship. AI generated works are not eligible for copyright and it’s unlikely to change unless copyright legislation goes through to yet further restrict copyright.
Did you read the article? In this case he put in quite a bit of work to generate and alter the image:
He sent a written explanation to the Copyright Office detailing how much he’d done to manipulate what Midjourney conjured, as well as how much he fiddled with the raw image, using Adobe Photoshop to fix flaws and Gigapixel AI to increase the size and resolution. He specified that creating the painting had required at least 624 text prompts and input revisions.
And he is essentially claiming that the work should be transformative enough to be copyrightable. Even if the original image is not.
That all makes this case more interesting then a lot of others in the past as it is about AI generation with some human input. Not just someone generating vast amounts of work to find something they like (which likely will never be copyrightable). When this goes to the courts will will help to define the line of how much and what type of alterations are required to claim copyright over the works.
Not all AI work is the same, but I am glad that the copyright office is pushing back on these claims. Putting the burden of proof onto the author that they did have enough input into the work. The big open question ATM is how much input is needed and what that input can look like.
He’s lying though. He’s pretending the original (wierdly blurry) output was the only AI output, but the details and basically everything else is also AI generated. Nothing is his own skill, brushstroke or even artistic effort/craft, other than prompting the machine-image-generator that he sources the work from.
I only have this article to go on, and it does not suggest that at all. What sources do you have that show he is lying about his input to the artwork?
I follow artists on twitter. And they pointed out that he was trying to imply that the details were his own work.
Who is they? Do you have links?
I’m not trying to be critical or skeptical, just want to be as informed as possible.
The artwork, Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, was created by Matthew Allen and came first in last year’s Colorado State Fair.
No. No he didn’t create it. He put words into a black box.
“He didn’t create it. He moved a mouse.”
“He didn’t create it. He put commands into a keyboard.”
“He didn’t create it. He pressed the camera trigger.”
“He didn’t create it. He threw store-bought paint at a canvas.”
“He didn’t create it. He cleaned some dirt off the wall.”
“He didn’t create it. He was inspired by gods.”
Where you see a categorical difference, I see a qualitative one. AI-generated art can be nothing more than putting words into a blackbox, but it can also be a day-long process of tweaking dozens of parameters to get what you want from the words you put into the box. A child can slather paint onto a canvas without much thought - but that doesn’t mean great artists drawing complex, intricate paintings isn’t art, does it?
Generative AI is a tool. It can do more than most tools, but still, it is something wielded by an artist.
As I’d just written in another reply here, there is a world of difference in describing an illustration and creating an illustration.
Same goes for lightning a fire without and with a lighter.
But you are creating the image as it’s often never what you intended on the first try. If anything they are editors, and last I checked we aren’t taking any rights away from editors. Someone else made the material and “you” manipulated it into a better product or into what your vision actually was.
Editors also don’t have copyright protections on what they edit
Even if I were to grant you that generative AI is just “describing an illustration”: other people say there is a world of difference between painting something with your hands and using a mouse, yet I think digital illustration is as real as physical illustration. Yet other people say there is a world of difference between creating something from the ground up and using store-bought materials and tools, yet I don’t discount artists who do just that.
But I don’t grant you that, because if I simply describe an illustration, the generative AI will not give me anything close to what I want. I have to learn the prompting language of the model (what words and phrases result in what?), I have to learn the influence the many different parameters have on the output, and I have to learn how to use things like prompt weighting, negative prompts and the like to get what I want. It’s something completely different from describing an illustration.
And that’s ignoring things like variant generation, inpainting, outpainting and the many different things that are completely removed from just “describing an illustration”.
🤓
He did some touch up in photoshop before submitting it.
So…he did something and then by a process something beautiful was created. How is that different from pour painting?
He put words into a box == he just tipped over a can of paintNow I’m just hoping some idiot out there is trying to copyright melting crayons down a blank canvas.
So he did make it. The tool can’t generate anything without something feeding it prompts. I mean technically it can but it will just be random totally incoherent stuff.
Cool so ai art created from copyright input has no copyright cuz the input isn’t considered part of the copyright.
Nothing that judicial, legislative, and regulatory capture can’t turn around. Just need enough money and time.
I give it 5 years at most
Funny situation indeed. Thoughts:
- Copyright is particularly artificial and openly amenable to change to suit the needs of the economy and creators it applies to. So treating this as open ended is probably necessary.
- Copyright has for a long time happily provided varying degrees of protection by recognising that one may hold copyright over a work but only over a “thin” or relatively minor aspect of the work.
- While there seems to be broader factors involved here regarding the power and market dynamics afforded artists and corporations should AI copyright be protected, there also seems to be plenty of scope to recognise that actual original work can be behind an AI work, however “thin” and distinct from the ordinary categories (eg Music, Literature etc) it may be. Indeed I would question how much the judges involved actually understand this enough.
- Does anyone know how this policy is tracking with or affected by policies in whether the AI engines themselves are infringing copyright?
While my thinking is in line with what @TheLobotomist@lemmy.world and @NateNate60@lemmy.ml have already said, why can’t “AI artists” just do what everybody in a profit-seeking situation does and just lie about it? “No your honor, our studies have shown cigarette smoking is not hazardous to your health,” “yes, your honor, OxyContin is completely safe,” or in this case “yes, your honor, I created this illustration.” If your conscience is really bothering you, you could claim it was AI-assisted. I wouldn’t think there’d be a “Big Eyes” prove-you-painted-that courtroom case. Am I wrong?
It detectable by actual artists, trained eyes, and probably other ai algos. Prompters have no true artistic skill 80 percent of the time, so they rely on AI to even do the finer details.
There are a few actual artists who use AI in the way scammers do (rather than as a tool to enhance their workflow), but they are rare.
Our thinking is not that different. There is a world of difference of describing an image and creating it.
But I have to strongly disagree with the rest of your assessment. Beyond the flood of six-fingered waifu, I’ve seen some beautiful, legitimate works created by this new tool. If you have to use an “ai algo” you’ve already defeated the purpose. It’s illustrations we’re discussing here, not banknotes.
BTW, do you consider Photoshop/Krita/GIMP artists “scammers”? Blender/Maya/Cinema4D artists? Who are these “actual artists” of which you speak?
In any case, we’re still in uncharted territory. And personally I’m not crazy about the work in question. It LOOKS (by my “actual artist trained eyes”) AI generated, regardless of the human Photoshop retouching involved.
BTW, do you consider Photoshop/Krita/GIMP artists “scammers”? Blender/Maya/Cinema4D artists? Who are these “actual artists” of which you speak?
This comparison automatically invalidates any point you may have made.
You say our thinking is not so different, and then defend machine-generated art as legitimate creation?
To be clear, when I say AI tools, I mean for collecting references, making poses and future enhanced basic transform/select/etc tools. I don’t mean generating entire complete peices of art.
Selling AI art on platforms that actual artists sell their work on, is a scam. Since illegitimate work is flooding human creations. NFTs are often scams too.
I still think we are more or less on the same page. I also agree with your position on NFTs. Nevertheless, “machine-generated art” as you’ve called it IS legitimate creation, just like canned baked beans is legitimate creation, just like the act of making scrambled eggs is creation. Notice that I never mentioned anything QUALITATIVE about the process. I’ve never referred to these works as “art” (however you’d like to define that) but “illustrations” which is all they are and again, for the most part, they are visibly AI…but there are exceptions, rarely without human intervention (retouching). If someone wants to sell their AI-generated illustrations, what’s the problem? Same with NFTs. What do I or you care? It’s your moral obligation to part a fool from their money.
That said, since we’ve veered way off course of the original question, MY PERSONAL OPINION is there is next to no expression of the human condition (define that as you will) in StableDiffusion/Midjourney/whatever-engine “art” and is merely (“merely,” he says!) putting the “infinite monkeys theorem” into practice. While chance and chaos is good (and not only in art), a foundation is always necessary. If “you”, untrained in composition, art history and materials, you think describing images using a certain language/method is “art”, become a writer. We’re all waiting for your bestseller.
Have a wonderfull day and thanks for the chat!
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Looks like shit
It’s an interesting spectacle, but pretty meaningless right?
No, it looks like shit, like all ML art
Then auto-tuned, sample-ridden, garbage “music” should follow the same rules. The “artist” that “made” those songs shouldn’t have any rights to the material as they didn’t make anything. They had a computer rework their voice, who’s words are often someone else’s, with music that was also made by someone else.
Someone made the reference images generative AI used to make the end result image just like someone made the music that Lil’ NoTalent69420
copiedused for their song. Lil’ NoTalent69420 manipulated it as much or even less than the individuals making AI art. It’s pretty frustrating.
