AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge::United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell found that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, putting to rest a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office over its refusal to copyright an AI-generated image.
Just thinking out loud: how would this impact AI-generated videos, or stuff like AI-generated actors and AI-written scripts? Does this suggest that stuff made by AI would, by default, belong to the public domain? If true, that could do quite a bit in forcing the movie studios to get off their asses and bring them back to the negotiating table with the actors and writers.
Without human authorship you cannot have a copyright. If something has no copyright protection, it is public domain.
However, the public domain is not viral. A work made with public domain elements can itself be copyrighted. However the copyright will only protect the creative expression added to the public domain work. Everyone else is free to make their own works from the public domain elements.
But…
Holders of public domain works are NOT obligated to publish or make available public domain works in their possession.
So if you use AI generation as part of your process you still have a valid copyright. Unless the audience can extract the unprotectable elements from your final product, you have the same copyright protection as a fully human produced work.
This ruling only applies to fully AI produced works. Using AI to modify a human performance to look or sound like someone else, still copyrightable. Human filming from an AI script, still copyrightable except for the script itself.
If AI makes the final output is where there’s trouble. AI’s aren’t human, their expression isn’t copyrightable. The prompt you give the AI is most likely factual rather than creative, which would make that uncopyrightable as well.
Copyright protects humans’ creative expression, and nothing else.
This was a great summary, hope more people read this.
If AI makes the final output is where there’s trouble. AI’s aren’t human, their expression isn’t copyrightable. The prompt you give the AI is most likely factual rather than creative, which would make that uncopyrightable as well.
I am not convinced by that. I don’t think any lines have been drawn on how much creativity you put into a prompt for the resultant image to be considered copyrightable. This case is about someone trying to get the AI to claim copyright, and have that transferred to him as the owner of the AI. Which is like the cases where someone tried and failed to claim copyright over an image of a monkey that the monkey took because it was taken on his camera. He had no creative input into the shot so the image was not copyrightable.
You could condisider the AI like a camera - you have control over its input, what you point it at, the lighting levels, even creating the scene you point it at. All of which are creative elements. You did not actually create the image - light hitting a film did that. You just set it up to capture the picture you wanted.
So I could see the prompt being similar to setting up a shot for a camera and the AI being like a camera. With enough creative work being put into setting up a good prompt I can see a valid claim for copyright being made - though I am not aware of anyone testing this out i court yet.
Copyright laws have a standards for minimal creativity needed to create a copyrightable work. You don’t have to be very creative to qualify, but you need a minimal amount. There’s no good reason to think the US copyright office will not apply these same standards to AI art prompts.
The US copyright office specifically lists “listings of ingredients or contents” as not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection. This is why there is no legal recourse within copyright to prevent someone from copying the ingredients and quantities of your cooking recipe. If the prompt you give your AI is more than a list, you will not have a copyrightable work. For example, if you open up an AI image generator and type: “paved road on a cliff-face overlooking a pine forest,” the resultant output would likely be ineligible for copyright because the prompt was little more than a list of the image’s contents.
If your use of AI is creative enough to reach the level of “minimally creative” in the eyes of the US copyright office, the work is copyrightable.
When taking a photograph, you chose the settings, you chose the framing, you chose the equipment. That is enough to be eligible for copyright, unless the shot was taken by a macaque or a grizzly bear.
When taking a photograph, you chose the settings, you chose the framing, you chose the equipment. That is enough to be illegible for copyright
I assume you mean legible here.
But I can still see the argument going either way. You are right that the prompt might not be copyrightable. Just like a recipe or algorithm is not. But I don’t think many are trying to claim copyright on the prompts. It is the output that is of interest and there things become grey. Is choosing a prompt more like picking the settings of a camera, its framing, subject etc? Those are the important part of taking a photo, like a prompt is to creating an AI generated image. There are parallels here that can give a good argument in court I think. And IMO it is more similar to taking a photograph, than it is to a simple recipe.
The prompt is the part that has human input. If the human’s input is not minimally creative, than the AI generated whole cannot be minimally creative. If the human’s input is minimally creative, the AI output will likely be minimally creative.
If you use software to position objects in a the frame, and then you ask an AI to generate the objects and a background with the framing that you specified, you will almost certainly have a copyrightable work, because deciding where things are positioned in a picture is enough to rise to the level of minimum creativity.
What matters is the human’s input. You can create uncopyrightable works using any tool, and you can use any tool to create copyrightable works. What matters is how much human expression is involved.
If you use software to position objects in a the frame
And if you simply describe the position via a prompt (among other things) then is that not also minimally creative?
What matters is the human’s input. You can create uncopyrightable works using any tool, and you can use any tool to create copyrightable works. What matters is how much human expression is involved.
Yes, that has basically been my argument - the human input has to be creative in some way and IMO and prompt can be. But not all prompts used will meet that bar. Where the line lies on what meets that bar is still up for debate and AFAIK no court has laid any groupd work for this yet. But a prompt alone can IMO contain enough creativity to allow the AI generated work to be copyrightable.
Copyright laws are written vaguely so they can be applied to all human expression even those that haven’t been invented yet.
Obviously there are boarder cases where things are not clear cut. That’s true for anything. But when courts make those decisions, they are going to do so using legal frameworks that already exist. The courts are not going to invent new standards to determine whether AI usage is copyrightable or not.
I pray it means that Disney is screwed on their plans to make their productions fully autonomous and fire their writers, animators, other artists, line producers, … I could go on, but you get the idea.
I don’t need confirmation that they are working towards that goal, it is the inevitability of their existence and greed. All profit, no overhead.
I hope all AI generated everything can’t be protected.
Nah, fuck that. Writing aides and stuff work wonders to break me out of bad habits and writer’s block. I’m 200 pages into a thing because the LLM I use is like a buddy who takes your writing and goes, “yeah, and–!” And keeps you going. It’s my content in my style based on my writing, idiosyncrasies, and colloquialisms. It’s augmented by an LLM.
This is how it should be. A tool to help people be more productive and effective at their jobs.
So, no change then. This is as it has always been. You can take AI elements chop them up, recombine them, and have copyright over the result, but you can’t say “Show me a picture of waffles” in your prompt and expect the resulting waffles to be copyrightable.
That is not even what this case was about - it was about some guy that created an AI that used that AI to generate an image with no real inputs - then claiming that the AI was the author and the copyright should transfer to him as the owner of the AI.
No precedence was set on how much human creative input was needed for an AI created image to be considered copyrightable. Only that you need to be a human to copyright something. Which was already set by previous cases where animals took a picture of things/themselves. No you don’t get copyright if you own the camera, just like you don’t get copyright for owning the AI.
I am not aware of any cases yet which start to set the bar for what is considered enough human creative work for the content to be considered copyrightable.
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This title is massively misleading. There is no ruling that says AI-Generated Art cannot be copyrighted at all. This case is about someone who filed for copyright listing the AI as the author and that the copyright should be transferred to him as the owner of the AI.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler owns a computer system he calls the “Creativity Machine,” which he claims generated a piece of visual art of its own accord. He sought to register the work for a copyright, listing the computer system as the author and explaining that the copyright should transfer to him as the owner of the machine.
The claim was rejected on account of you can only claim copyright if you are human and an AI does not count as a human - so no AI can claim copyright over a works.
The Copyright Office denied the application on the grounds that the work lacked human authorship,
And he explicitly stated he gave no real input into the work.
Plaintiff requested reconsideration of his application, confirming that the work “was autonomously generated by an AI” and “lack[ed] traditional human authorship,”
But that does not mean AI generated work is uncopyrightable like the title claims - only that enough human input needs to be present to be able to claim copyright over any works. We have yet to decide on how much input is required for someone to claim copyright over an AI generated image, which the case clearly states:
Undoubtedly, we are approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put AI in their toolbox to be used in the generation of new visual and other artistic works. The increased attenuation of human creativity from the actual generation of the final work will prompt challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an “author” of a generated work
So AI generated work is not uncopyrightable by the own conclusion of this case. Making the title of this article a complete lie. More cases will likely be done to draw the line as to what really counts as enough human input - this case was not one that does that. Only confirms that non-humans cannot claim copyright over an image. And that you need enough human input for a work to be copyrightable.
How does this work for using ai generated art as part of larger projects e.g. games development? Is the game still copy rightable? Are parts of it protected but others not?
The ai generated portion does not have copy right protection. This also applies within an image. So for instance in an ai generated building image with a human created character in front. People couldn’t copy the character but could use the background.
How will the copyright office know what’s ai generated and what’s not
They’ll have to find the tools that will help them detect AI works. However, the current standard they’ve set is that once they learn its AI generated the work is no longer protected under copyright law.
AI generated portions of things would have copyright per the article. Only wholly-AI-created content is non-copyrightable per this ruling.
The title is a lie if you actually read the case. AI work can be copyrighted if there is enough human input into the work. This case was just about trying to get the AI to claim copyright (which it cannot do as it is not human) and transferring that right to the owner of the AI.
As for cases where the AI work is not under copyright then I believe it would be consider public domain? And thus we already have rules for how that works can be used as part of a greater works.
Well this is going to the Supreme Court I guess.
Beryl Howell was #2 behind Chutkan in the “take no shit about J6” sweepstakes, so I have a soft spot for her.
I largely agree with her decision, but I feel like it’s kind of screwing over all the actual human artists whose work was stolen and incorporated into their models without permission or payment.
I hope somebody whose art was released under the GPL can prove it was used in Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT and sues the fuck out of them.
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ai and copyright can both suck my balls
A ball sucking AI would truly change the world
