An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
Good luck, buddy. AI output has already been ruled not copyrightable. As it should be.
Copyright and patent laws should die altogether.
its debatable who the artist is, however, because if you remove the ai from the picture he could never have made this, and if you remove the training data the results would also be different.
Realistically: everyone whose data this was trained on should be included as authors if its not just public domain
There were similar debates about photographs and copyright. It was decided photographs can be copyrighted even though the camera does most of the work.
Even when you have copyright on something you don’t have protection from fair use. Creativity and being transformative are the two biggest things that give a work greater copyright protection from fair use. They at are also what can give you the greatest protection when claiming fair use.
See the Obama hope poster vs the photograph it was based on. It’s to bad they came to an settlement on that one. I’d have loved to see the courts decision.
As far as training data that is clearly a question of fair use. There are a ton of lawsuits about this right now so we will start to see how the courts decide things in the coming years.
I think what is clear is some amount of training and the resulting models fall under fair use. There is also some level of training that probably exceeds fair use.
To determine fair use 4 things are considered. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
1 Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
This is going to vary a lot from training model to training model.
Nature of the copyrighted work.
Creative works have more protection. So training on a data set of a broad set of photographs is more likely to be fair use than training on a collection of paintings. Factual information is completly protected.
-> Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
I think ai training is safe here. Once trained the ai data set usually doesn’t contain the copyrighted works or reproduce them.
Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Here is where ai training presumably has the weakest fair use argument.
Courts have to look at all 4 factors and decide on the balance between them. It’s going to take years for this to be decided.
Even without ai there are still lots of questions about what is and isn’t fair use.
everyone whose data this was trained on should be included as authors if its not just public domain
Weird how we make this rule only apply to computers.
I doubt any human artist would make the exact same works as they have if they were not influenced by the art that they were.
So you’re saying the AI should own the things it makes?
Broken analogies aside, The twin major problems are
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most the data is still intact that AI often recreates it. I think court cases about this are ongoing.
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It breaks authorship chains. humans often have to wade through ads or buy products to ‘add data’ to themselves. So if you buy a magazine, you often contribute back to the source artists. or even cite them. AI does not do this. Which is why licensing datasets is a proposed solution to prevent AI from being a death spiral for creativity.
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Hmmm. This comment made me realize that these ai images have something in common with collages. If I make a collage, do I have to include all the magazine publishers I used as authors?
Not defending the AI art here. Imo, with image generating models the mechanisms of creation are so far removed from the “artist” prompter that I don’t see it any differently than somebody paying an actual artist to paint something with a particular description of what to paint. I guess that could still make them something like a director if they’re involved enough? Which is still an artist?
I dunno. I have my opinions on this in a “I know it when I see it” kind of way, but it frustrates me that there isn’t an airtight definition of art or artist. All of this is really subjective
if you make a magazine collage you’ve already paid all the magazine authors for their work by buying the magazine. I know its not perfect, but at least in a collage situation there is some form of monetary trail going back to the artists.
If the AI company were to license their training data this would be an almost perfect metaphor. But the problem is we’ve let them weasel in without monetary attribution.
It comes down to how transformative the work is. They look at things like how much of the existing work you used and how much creative changes were made.
So grabbing your 9 favorite paintings and putting them in 3x3 grid is not going to give you fair use.
Cutting out sections of faces from different works and stitching them together into a franken face could give you enough for fair use if you made it different enough.
I don’t know how collages work, but samplers do pay every single artist they are sampling for their use of the song.
No but you don’t get it, they wrote a couple words and also they know how to use the spot healing brush in photoshop, they’re a REAL artist!
To be somewhat fair this prompt probably took quite a bit of work. Still way less than even producing it digitally but not a couple words.
because if you remove the ai from the picture he could never have made this, and if you remove the training data the results would also be different.
How is this different from any other art? Humans are “trained” on a lifetime of art they’ve observed. Are they to attribute all of their art to those artists as well?
Human beings aren’t automatons.
Yes, and…
It’s a bit more nuanced than that, because a human can still develop artistic skills by observing non-artistic creations beforehand.
For instance, the world’s very first artist probably didn’t have any paintings or sculptures to build off.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree that the person isn’t an artist because they rely on external training data, but generative AI models most certainly need to observe other works to ‘learn’ how to make art, whereas humans don’t necessarily have to. (Although if someone were to make a reinforcement learning model based on user feedback as a way to entirely generate better and better images starting from random variation, that would make the original training data point moot)
are you suggesting the ai itself owns the copyright?
You have to be the creator of the work in order to copyright it. He didn’t create the work. If the wind organized the leaves into a beautiful pattern, he couldn’t copyright the leaves either.
Weirdly enough the monkey selfie probably establishes some precedence here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Problem is the AI isn’t a monkey with a camera, it is an algorothm licensed from a company. The guy basically outsourced the work and tried to copyright the finished product which might be fine depending on the legal agreements and if the AI Company has the rights to it.
You could copyright a photograph of that leaf pattern though, couldn’t you?
but its just a photocopy of the leaves, not the actual leaves. And to photograph something, you capture it according to your will. What will be the light situation, from which angle, at what focal length,… so many options.
You can copyright a combination of words, though, and it was his unique combination that created the art. The artist doesn’t copyright the palette, and the shop that sold the pigments holds no ownership over the painting. If the art is created with paint, pixels, or phrase, the final product belongs to the artist, and so should be protected by law for them.
It has to be fixed in a tangible medium.
In this case they’re not “fixing” their words and the final art is the created expression. Yet in this case their created expression wasn’t created by them but the program.
In this case their combination is the palette and paint but the program “interpreted” and so fixed it.
For example you can’t copyright a simple and common saying. Nor something factual like a phone book. Likewise you can’t copyright recipes. There has to be a “creative” component by a human. And courts have ruled that AI generated content doesn’t meet that threshold.
That’s not to say that creating the right prompt isn’t an “art” (as in skill and technique) and there is a lot of work in getting them to work right. Likewise there’s a lot of work in compiling recipes, organizing them, etc. but even then only the “design” part of the arrangement of the facts, and excluding the factual content, can be copyrighted.
In general these art pieces are not created simply with words. Users control the output using ControlNet which allows drawing on the image to force regeneration only to specific areas. It seems that if your only logic around it being non-copyrightable is due to them using words and that the program “does it all”, but that’s just not how it works.
I’m not in favor of copyrights for stuff like this, but you have a terrible misunderstanding of how these art pieces are created and it’s affecting your argument negatively.
It has to be fixed in a tangible medium.
Hard disks are pretty tangible.
But if they are not as you suggest, does this mean all digital photography is not copyright able?
So many arguments as to why this shouldn’t be subject to copyright seem to fail simple questions of logic.
If the output of ML isn’t copyright able, then the inputs should not be subject to copyright either. The whole system is broken and only serves to enrich the few at the expense of the many. It doesn’t protect the small time artists, only the exceptionally wealthy ones who earn more than the typical worker will make in many lifetimes.
Here’s more if you’d like to read about it.
https://www.copyright.gov/engage/visual-artists/
I remember when the DMCA was introduced and all the various issues arising from what and isn’t copyrightable when it comes to digital vs physical copies, etc.
Again I’d like to recommend Leonard French (Lawful Masse) on YouTube and Twitch for a copyright lawyers breakdown of these kinds of issues.
You cannot copyright a recipe, but you can copyright the product it produces, as evidenced by the wealth of food and drinks that are protected by law from being copied.
Can a person who works with wood and creates something unique from the wood then copyright their design crafted from the wood? What makes it art and not just glue, iron nails, and dead trees? This is what needs to be defined with AI. Right now everyone is so happy to jump on the anti-AI bandwagon that they blind themselves to issues regarding the law by claiming the art is lawless at best and stolen at worst, when in fact it is simply a new tool and a new medium.
Did authors who used typewriters rail against the new word processor? What about the editor that checked for grammar and spelling? Did they try to burn down spell and grammar checks in microsoft word? Is the art any less art if it has been created with a tool that allows for more ease than has been available in the past? Should we boycott the bakers that do not mill their own wheat? Or does the sourdough bread belong to the wild yeast cultures, and so owed recompense for all we have taken from it?
The argument can be made until the universe burns out, or we can accept that art is made by sentient life, and any tool used in the production of it cannot be considered an owner of that art, and if the only sentient lifeform involved in the creation of that art wishes to claim it as their own, then they should have the right to protections for their work.
you can copyright the product it produces, as evidenced by the wealth of food and drinks that are protected by law from being copied.
No, you can neither copyright a recipe nor the food or drink it produces.
Food and drink is only protected by trademark law. You are free to make a burger that tastes exactly like a Big Mac, you simply can’t call it a Big Mac.
And you can take a photo of some natural rock formations on black and white film stock, but you can’t take Ansel Adam’s photo of natural rock formations on black and white film stock. This is what the artist is suing for. He wants to claim ownership of his work, which I believe falls under copyright law, just like Ansel Adam’s photos.
Ansel Adams has a copyright because of the creative control he had over his photos, such as in lighting, perspective and framing.
Artists generally cannot copyright AI output because they do not have a comparable degree of creative control. Giving prompts to an AI is not sufficient.
Ok, I controlled the lighting, perspective and framing. Can I copyright now?
I’m not Anti AI. I have fun making stuff with it.
But the copyright laws as they are don’t apply. And if they did it would open a can of worms legally.
The recipe can’t be copyrighted. The cake produced can’t be copyrighted. But the packaging or style of a cake with your brand could be trademarked which is a different legal ball of wax entirely
What is the limit to the number of words that can be copyrighted?
For sale,
baby shoes,
never worn.
Can I claim that as my own? Is six words the lowest? Four? Where is the line? What makes it art vs. instruction? If Hemmingway had said those words to his publicist and asked that they be published instead of writing them himself, would he still own them?
And therein lies the rub. When it comes to copyright every infringement case has to be adjudicated by a judge (assuming they have filed a copyright)
I can definitely recommend Leonard French’s (a copyright lawyer) channel Lawful Masses on YouTube and Twitch for a more in-depth breakdown of copyright cases. How it works, the rights that copyright holders have, etc.
If I use a combination of words to commission an artist to paint a picture, I don’t own the copyright on that picture.
If it’s a commission, you might. Depends on the how the contract is worded.
Okay, let’s see the contract in this AI case that grants this man the copyright.
The contract is set by the company, let’s say Midjourney, which passes ownership to the person who generate the “art.” What needs to be defined is if ai generated art is art? So far, no one seems to have a definite answer. I come down on the side of yes, but there are a lot of others that say no.
Which company passes the ownership to the person in its contract? Midjourney does not, I just looked:
By using the Services, You grant to Midjourney, its affiliates, successors, and assigns a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicensable no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Content You input into the Services, as well as any Assets produced by You through the Service. This license survives termination of this Agreement by any party, for any reason.
https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service
They make it clear that you do not own the copyright on the images you create. Did the artist suing the copyright office use this company?
https://help.midjourney.com/en/articles/8150363-can-i-use-my-images-commercially
reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Content You input into the Services, as well as any Assets produced by You through the Service.
In no way does Midjourney own the image, they only have the ability to “reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute”.
The article makes that perfectly clear.
You can copyright a combination of words, though, and it was his unique combination that created the art
so its literature, then?
The artist doesn’t copyright the palette, and the shop that sold the pigments holds no ownership over the painting.
Sure, the artist doesn’t copyright a palette, or the shop does not hold ownership of pigments. But Companies do patent pigments.
If the art is created with paint, pixels, or phrase, the final product belongs to the artist, and so should be protected by law for them.
If you commission an Art piece, with a detailed description of what it should display. The artist comes back to you with a draft, you tell them to adjust here and there, and you finally after several rounds of drafting got the commissioned art piece. Did you draw it?
Thats what LLMs do and nothing else.
Is the diction of the buyer to the artist in the final paragraph of your argument make the painting a novel? You have you answer.
Yes, companies can copyright specific pigments, but that doesn’t give them ownership over the paintings created by them, only protect for their own IP vis-à-vis the pigments. In the same way, the company that created the LLM may protect their work but hold no ownership on the art it produces.
Who drew the art is of no import when the artist isn’t a sentient lifeform. By your definition, a photographer cannot own a picture because the camera captured it.
Yes, companies can copyright specific pigments
No, you cannot copyright a pigment. Companies can use colors as trademarks, but that just means that competitors can’t use the color in a way that would confuse customers. For example, you can’t start a courier service with vans that are the same color as UPS vans, because that might confuse customers.
You are still free to use that color in ways that are unrelated to UPS, for instance as an eye shadow.
Patents are another matter entirely. You don’t patent the color, but you might be able to patent the media (e.g. a new formula for quick drying paint).
In the same way, the company that created the LLM may protect their work
What does the company protect here? The system, or the model? Which the latter being ill-gotten by scraping already copyrighted content?
Who drew the art is of no import when the artist isn’t a sentient lifeform
It was an allegory. The supposed artist is the commissioner and the LLM being the artist. And since you can’t copyright something you didn’t made, well tough luck getting copyright on AI slop.
By your definition, a photographer cannot own a picture because the camera captured it.
No, because as a photographer you hold the tool in your hand. You can adjust everything, even the subject. And its all in your own control and it takes your skill in managing it to shoot the perfect photo.
If we would take your interpretation of my definition, then nobody can own anything since they always have to use a tool to create something.
It’s a good analogy but one thing to consider is that the artist is the copyright holder.
The company that directed it only has the copyright either by explicit contract transferring rights or because it’s a work for hire where the employee’s copyright work is “automatically” transferred to their employer.
Some interesting case law on that from Disney artists, comic book authors, etc
What does the company protect here? The system, or the model? Which the latter being ill-gotten by scraping already copyrighted content?
That depends on what is proprietary to the company. If they have created the system and the model, then both.
The supposed artist is the commissioner and the LLM being the artist.
That is a highly subjective point of view. Let’s look at music. If a musician loses their arms and can no longer play an instrument, but instead dictates the chords to someone else to play, who is the artist? Who can claim ownership of the piece?
No, because as a photographer you hold the tool in your hand. You can adjust everything, even the subject. And its all in your own control and it takes your skill in managing it to shoot the perfect photo.
Spoken like someone who has never used an LLM before and thinks it magically produces exactly what you want on the first time, every time.
If we would take your interpretation of my definition, then nobody can own anything since they always have to use a tool to create something.
No, that’s everyone else’s argument. Mine is that the tool is the LLM, and that when art is created with it, it should be open to copyright.
Let’s look at music. If a musician loses their arms and can no longer play an instrument, but instead dictates the chords to someone else to play, who is the artist? Who can claim ownership of the piece?
Then that musician becomes the composer who can copyright the sheet music. The one who plays the chords becomes the performing artist and can copyright the performance.
Spoken like someone who has never used an LLM before and thinks it magically produces exactly what you want on the first time, every time.
I have used LLMs extensively, several versions and types. I know how that shit works. And no I do not think that its results are deterministic and accurate.
Mine is that the tool is the LLM, and that when art is created with it, it should be open to copyright.
The LLM is the “artist” as it produces the image. And you can’t claim copyright for someone else.
Then that musician becomes the composer who can copyright the sheet music. The one who plays the chords becomes the performing artist and can copyright the performance.
That is if they actually composed the music. In the case of someone saying I want a song that is ABAG, and they ask that it be written down because they cannot write it down themselves, the person who writes down ABAG isn’t the composer, they are an extension of the pen that writes the note–they have become a tool.
The LLM is the “artist” as it produces the image. And you can’t claim copyright for someone else.
The LLM gives you what you ask for based on a random seed and keywords in your prompt. It has no will of it’s own. It cannot exert its will over the image. It simply outputs. As I’ve said in another part of this thread, if I tie a bucket of paint with hole to a rope and sling the bucket of paint over a canvas, does the bucket of paint get credit for being the artist? Does the rope? No. They had no will. Even though my input was minimal, and the results most assuredly random, I am still the artist by all accounts, and as such may copyright my random sprays of paint should I deem them worthy. My intent has created the art–my desire. The machine cannot create because it cannot exert its will. It simply does what it is asked and outputs.
the final product belongs to the artist, and so should be protected by law for them.
Then the real artist, the AI, should request the copyright. And sue the charlatan that tried to take its work and claim all credit.
And the camera owns the photograph, and Photoshop owns the digital image, and Final Cut Pro owns the film? The tool owns nothing. The tool is incapable of ownership
Thus the value of the art is reduced to an idea and the human labor invested. The labor is practically zero and an idea is worth nothing. That means there is nothing worthwhile to copyright
Wow.
And how do you define a tool?
Couldn’t you take a picture of the leaves and copyright that?
Yes, you could. BTW I just took a screenshot of your comment so it’s mine to copyright.
If I made an image in photoshop, the computer made it, I just directed it.
How is AI different?
What are you talking about? The computer didn’t make it. That’s like saying a paintbrush made a painting.
That is not even close to AI image generation.
And that’s why I make art completely without instruction or man made tools. I actually independently developed cellphones and English purely to dunk on people on the internet.
Funny but that is kind of my point, where is the line and why?
He did not make it. He essentially commissioned a machine to create an image for him using millions of pieces of art that were stolen from artists. It’s no different from commissioning an artist to draw something for you, except the artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people’s art, or copy and pastes it, and then you attempt to take credit for it instead by claiming that you made it. I predict that this lawsuit is not going anywhere as he does not have a proverbial leg to stand on.
The copyright office’s policy isn’t perfect, but denying copyright to AI slop is probably the best we can expect from the system as it currently exists.
Besides I’m pretty sure you can still use AI in the production of an image and still claim copyright on the final image, just not any of the raw generations.
This is correct. If a painter uses AI to generate a concept and composition, then does a classical oil painting of it on canvass they can claim right to the image of the oil painting.
It’s no different than an artist painting a public park or forest. They can’t copyright that location, but they can copyright the painting of that location.
So why can’t he copy right the prompt which created it? Obviously not being 100% cereal about this specific scenario but in the early days of GPT4 I fed it fucking dissertation length prompt threads writing ridiculously niche and in depth scripted functions. I don’t know how to code but used a tool to create something extremely useful for my job. Some of the project took weeks to fully put together.
So what Im really asking is, why would it matter if I used cnc lathes to make something id want copywrited/patented or if I use a LLM to make it? Should it be any less protected because it’s taking the “muscle” or “legwork” out of it? Should engineers only design prototypes destine for copywrite/TM/R/patent office if the prototype can be made on manual machines? Again, I kinda understand I went over the top with this but I am fascinated with how the fuck people are guna come up with regulatory frameworks to define the modern age of intellectual property and all the TM/C/R/P drama to follow.
Edit: To expand, the shit I have made using GPT having limited but interested experience with IT work also didnt stike me as anything marketable until I got feedback from vendors and customers I gave it to but from reps that didn’t know I made it. It’s not the point of me asking I just thought itd help anyone who is guna respond to see that my questions are coming from more of a manufacturing a tool type of understanding rather than the AI toookurjerbs from the suffering artist or musician type of understanding.
I never meant to imply that things, or parts of things created with an AI shouldn’t be able to be copyrighted, but as the law is now that’s how it works. Things might change in the future to more directly address this, which is what this current case is doing.
As for copyrighting the prompt that could get tricky. For example you can’t copyright a title, but you can copyright a literary work.
So if your prompts are that long you should be able to copyright the prompts as literary work, but someone who just types in “brown cat” isn’t going to be able to and shouldn’t be able to, because copyrighting the concept of a brown cat in general is silly. What about "fat, brown cat.?’ Well, someone is going to have think very hard about how long the prompts have to be before they are eligible. That’s not even considering the prompt part, just the right to your written concept before it becomes a prompt.
I’m hoping it’ll work out fairly eventually. I work in professionally in traditional media so it’s not something that effects me, but I do have a basic understanding of copyright laws(as they are) to share.
But I do see your point about it being a tool. Like if my paint brand tried to say I don’t have a right to the work I created with their paint I’d be pissed, but that’s a lot less complicated(legally speaking) to parse out than AI generated stuff because we don’t yet have precedents for that.
Plus all the unethical and exploitive AI scraping that’s been going on that no one agreed to has left a lot of artists kinda bitter towards AI… so there’s not a lot of sympathy in creative communities towards it’s use right now. If they could use it more ethically I think you’d see a shift in attitudes fairly quickly.
I think the logical conclusion of copyrighted prompts would include not just the input prompt but the version number of the program, any settings, the seed, etc. Basically everything you would need to copy that exact image, because all of that together would produce an exact copy.
AI Prompt User is complaining people stealing their artwork? Well that’s new.
Super interesting. The guy claims is wasn’t just ai, that he performed alterations as well. If that’s true but he still gets shot down it might pave the way for AI being much more shunned in the world out of IP concerns on the output side rather than the training data.
You can’t copyright that music, game, book, screenplay or video because AI made some contribution.
Nah, that won’t work. As soon as corporations get involved they’ll carve out exemptions for themselves.
I’m claiming copyright over Back To The Future because I edited out Power of Love and replaced it with Party All The Time.
I can’t see how any judge or arbitrator could see “alterations to something someone else made” as a viable defense.
“”“Artist”“”
Oh gee so scammers aren’t getting protection for lying? Dang what a cruel world poor him…
/s
That douche punched a sentence into a computer and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become.
Dude just pointed a camera, pressed click and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become. We could take that train of thought all the way to “if you’re not grinding up your own pigments and painting on cave walls you’re not really an artist”.
AI is a tool. I don’t have an issue with someone using AI and calling themselves an artist, as long as they’ve generated the AI model based on their own previous art. You teach a machine to mimic your brush strokes and color palette and then the machine spits out images as you taught it. I don’t see an issue there because you might as well have painted them yourself, it just saves time to have AI do most (if not all) of the work.
Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?
People absolutely did rag on people like Turner for using pre-mixed paints. People absolutely did rag on photography.
Ahh yes, the camera bullshit. Here we go…
Yes a photographer is an artist. They need to know light diffusion, locational effects, distance and magnification, aperture, shutter speed, and have a subject prepped and able to take direction. They also have to have an insane understanding of post process editing.
They don’t simply type a sentence into a computer and get beautiful photographs.
A child can produce the exact same image by simply typing the exact same sentence into a computer.
A child cannot be given a camera and be tasked to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer- and succeed.
So stop with this bullshit comparison. It’s apples and oranges.
A child cannot be given a camera and be tasked to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer- and succeed.
Um. A macaque did. And every photo a child takes with a smartphone is considered to be sufficiently creative as to be a copyrightable work. It doesn’t need to be “good” to be art.
“What is art” can be a difficult question. But “how difficult was it to create it” is not the answer.
If a skillless child can reproduce it with no training but a command of their language of origin, it’s not art. You can give a child a camera but they’re not gong to be Ansel Adams. Yet you can give a child a computer and voilà! You have Stable Diffusion.
I’m not arguing this with you any further.
If a skillless child can reproduce it with no training but a command of their language of origin, it’s not art.
The art is in the eye, not the device. People made the same or similar claims about photography. “It’s just reproduction not creation!” “It’s just operating a machine that does all the work!”
AI is a tool - the person is the creative.
You may not like the art - but that’s not to say it’s not art. Either way I think it’s a creative work and worthy of at least the option to be considered art.
In my eye, AI isn’t art and using AI doesn’t make one an artist. In fact I think it’s an insult to at and artists that talentless hacks are now claiming the title when it takes a lifetime to develop a craft to become an artist.
It’s shameful.
In my eye Jackson Pollock is a no-talent hack who created meaningless crap that looks like somebody left a 2yr old unsupervised in the arts and crafts room at school. And I think it’s an insult to other artists that his work is so heavily prized.
But we’re talking about the quality of the work here aren’t we? Not whether it is a work at all. You’re effectively saying that you don’t value the work because it was easy. Which is fine - that’s your value call. But to deny that it’s a creative work at all is an entirely different thing.
Did you read the rest of the comment or did you stop after the first sentence?
I didn’t need to. The moment photography was brought up as a comparison, that’s all I needed to know.
AI is not art. Period.
Let’s say I’ve been an artist for 10 years. I take all my work and stick it into an AI model. That model starts generating images based on the art I’ve created in the past 10 years. Have I stopped being an artist because I put down the brush and picked up a keyboard?
How would a child produce the exact same image if they don’t have my AI model?
You did not stop to be an artist, you just stopped to make art and every kid is able to recreate what you did, because all it have to do is type your name in prompts.
More than that, every kid drawing with a crayons on papers or on tablet is more creative than you this time.
How would a child produce the exact same image if they don’t have my AI model?
That assumes you have a big enough data set to even make anything useful with just your art. And we know that that was not the case here
That’s not the case here and I think the artist in the article has no claim to that image. I’m against the general idea that using AI instantly disqualifies someone as an artist, which is what the other person believes.
The moment your art was run through AI, it was no longer yours, and no longer art.
I’m done talking about this. I stated my point, my opinion, and I have no intention to change it. AI is garbage.
If you want to be the old man yelling how the world is changing for the worse, go ahead. You are entitled to your conservative opinion.
Firstly, I agree with most of what you’ve said. However…
Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?
Is there anything in the world that isn’t a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn’t influenced by something you’ve heard, read, seen? Feeding art to AI is no different than a student walking a gallery and learning the styles of the masters. Is the AI better at it? Sure. But it’s still doing the same thing. If someone with eidetic memory paints like Picasso, are they not an artist?
To really drive home the point, if I have a friend that is an artist, like, a really good artist, and I ask them to paint something for me, say, a field with wildflowers in the snow, and they come back with something that looks just like Landscape With Snow by Van Gogh, does that mean my friend isn’t an artist? If I ask AI for that, and they come back with something like what my friend painted, how is it any different? We call them “learning” models, but we refuse to believe that they “learn”. Instead we call it “theft”.
Is there anything in the world that isn’t a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn’t influenced by something you’ve heard, read, seen?
Yes, i have made something that wasnt influenced by anything else
I didn’t say I’m completely against imitation. I more or less implied that’s where lines start to blur. If someone spends their entire life learning Picasso and can perfectly imitate Picasso then I don’t consider that to be not art. Similarly if someone did that and fed it into an AI model that then imitates them imitating Picasso I think that’s still fine.
But if you throw in all the famous artists and have the AI generate an image could you really imitate it? Not only would you have to imitate how all of them paint and what colors they use, you should also be able to tell the difference which part of the painting was influence by which artist so you could imitate it correctly. And if we factor in that AI can blend brush strokes it becomes even more harder to actually imitate. That’s so muddy water it’s easy to make arguments for and against.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that because AI can blend together the works of hundreds and create something unique, that it is bad?
I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m saying claiming it as your own original work becomes very questionable. If you want to claim AI art as your own work you have to use only your own artistic expressions in the AI model.
That douche punched a sentence into a computer
The jokes write themselves, folks.
Yeah, the joke is that someone thinks they can call themselves an artist by typing a sentence into a prompt on a computer. I get that you’re trying to call me out, but the failure in your joke is that I’m not claiming to be an artist. That douche is.
You’ve got nothing.
You’ve got nothing.
That’s a matter of perspective.
Imagine thinking this is a salient point, lmfao. “oh, you criticise people writing text prompts on large learning model tools to generate art based on an amalgamation of everyone else’s stolen art, for claiming to be artists, AND YET, here you are writing text.”
it’s so fucking stupid. a work has to be actually creative and novel to be protected by copyright, most AI prompts would not meet the threshold of creativity and originality to benefit from protection.
because it was an expression of his creativity.
yeaaaah no chief, that ain’t it.
The problem is “intellectual property” and capitalism more generally. As technology makes art harder to define and control, the absurdity of violently controlling art will hopefully collapse along with capitalism in general.
Intellectual property as a concept is incompatible with the continued advancement of human knowledge. Before copyright and patenting, we still had trade secrets and sensitive information, and those things cost us insights into metalworking we are still slowly recovering to this day. We still can’t figure out how Roman’s stumbled upon some of their glass blowing breakthroughs, and we just recently figured out Roman concrete.
Capitalism didn’t invent greet, but it’s certainly allowed greed to flourish as a core precept of its design.
Womp womp
boo fucking hoo. If you want to copyright your painting, learn to fucking paint.
It also sucks and is just another shitty AI generated image full of weird nonsense.
Just because he duped a bunch of idiot judges doesn’t mean his art or his arguments have any merit.
Can’t be that shirty if it won an art competition.
Art competitions can be insanely pretentious, throwing some vaguely pretty shit can win over the judges sometimes. My town hosted a art show competition thing where they had a judged award and a voted award. The judges granted it to some dude who made a purposefully pretentious painting to see if he could get the award, the general vote award went to a hand forged bronze axe based off of Minoan double headed axes.
This hasn’t been reported on much, but I actually checked what that “competition” really was, back when the image won the prize. It was some local festival in Bumfucknowhere, USA, which among various other events (sport events, food tasting, that sort of stuff) included an art competition. I doubt the jury was made up of highly experienced art critics.
And besides, people should trust their own eyes. If you like the picture, you like it, and if you don’t, you don’t. Appealing to the critics as a source of objective artistic judgment is naive, and I say that as someone who has published some art criticism myself.
Ah, I remember this image. It received some kind of award or something and created a stir when it was revealed to be AI gen. I can see why that would be incentive to want copyright.
I play with AI image generation all the time. No way do I see that as my work, there’s no skill other than positive and negative prompts, maybe feeding it a a starter image set or something.
Where it might be more concerning is if you use AI gen to create an 2D example of something, then an artist creates a 3D physical representation of the thing. Who owns it? AI famously is not good at creating “whole” things, but one can certainly interpret that image to make a whole of it.
I guess no one owns it, it’s like in the common societies mind or something, especially if it’s an ai model trained on free stuff found in said society.
Like a chair; paint it, draw it, build it, cannot copyright it but you can’t make an exact copy of someones fresh creation either.
