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.”
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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.
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
The real solution is to abolish copyright
That would be great in the fully automated space gay commune, until then though we don’t want artists to starve.
gay?
For some reason a lot of the Internet relates communism with homosexuality. I think maybe because heterosexual people established capitalism? Idfk
I guess just homophobic slander? To be fair I read it as a “space joyful commune”, which seemed to make most sense. Giving it the benefit of the doubt…
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.
Are you the artist when you comission an artist to draw something the way you want?
When I commission an artist, I’m probably not looking over their shoulder the entire time telling them exactly what to do. But that does bring up an interesting point. Assume I have no use of my limbs and an artist agrees to help me make a painting. I tell them exactly what to do, which colors to use, where to make paint strokes, etc. I am guiding the image, but they are actually painting it, and their own skill and technique and style will obviously play into the final image. I don’t know who would have more of a claim to the image in that case.
You don’t tell the AI where to make each stroke, exactly what colours to pick and mix, every detail of the composition. The AI preselects everything for you by considering what the majority of people like in pictures.
No one would say the person “guiding the image” is the one who created the image. This is why ideas aren’t copyrightable. Everyone has a ton of ideas. It’s the execution that matters, which takes skill, patience and dedication.
Most clients have a very defined idea what they want to have drawn or designed. Especially in a higher price segment. This often takes weeks or months and multiple lengthy discussions between the artist and the client. Never have I seen a client later say “Well that took a lot of talking from my side. I guess it’s basically me who created this picture!”
I think a lot of people underestimate how much work it takes and since you don’t really see anyone creating the image, you get the impression you somehow magiced it into existence by yourself.
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.
You can make digital illustrations with a graphic tablet and the right digital brushes that look remarkably similar to oil paint. Because with a graphic tablet and pen you can utilise tilting, pressure, speed, etc. The colours will often simulate how actual oil paints work (well, at least they try). It’s kinda like a very easy casual mode of actual oil painting.
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.
Is it your art and are you the artist when you describe a painter or illustrator what they should draw? I can tell you, many clients use more than 624 words.
If you wrote 624 words into a machine like a typewriter and published it it would be copyrighted. But those same 624 words fed into another machine can’t be. Funny.
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.
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.
Cool so ai art created from copyright input has no copyright cuz the input isn’t considered part of the copyright.
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.
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”.
Learn how to make a digital illustration, learn to make an oil painting and learn to make an AI image. Then we can talk.
I can do all three (worked on comission basis as a digital illustrator and did make Sci-Fi illustrations with acrylics and ink in the past). Generating AI images is not even in the same universe as the ballpark where digital illustration and traditional painting are playing.
It’s like saying watching someone’s Let’s Play of playing GTA is “kinda similar” to driving a Formel1 sports car yourself. Because you still have to turn on your computer and find a good streamer.
Learn how to make a digital illustration, learn to make an oil painting and learn to make an AI image. Then we can talk.
Done. What do you want to talk about?
Generating AI images is not even in the same universe as the ballpark where digital illustration and traditional painting are playing.
And what ballparks are there? How many ballparks exist in the realm of illustration, and where are the borders?
I just spent literally 31 seconds making this image:
According to what you write, this has a much higher artistic value than the header image of the linked article. Now please, explain to me: what value does this view bring to any discussion?
It brings value to the discussion if the discussion revolves around whether artists should be paid and how much. Whether AI images should be committed to art contests. Whether someone using AI to create an image should have copyright on that image. How much value we put on the time and effort it takes to learn artistic skills. Whether we want people to continue to take on that endeavour. Etc.
Actually I think discussing the differences and similarities between AI image generation and other forms of creating art is quite central to the issue.
🤓
He did some touch up in photoshop before submitting it.
Touching up your photograph or painting does not make it mine.
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.
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.
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.
The solution would be to cancel copyright and make everything free for everyone
It’s almost impossible to have a living wage as an artist even know. Than it would definitely be impossible.
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?
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Looks like shit
