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
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 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.
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.
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.
I have to say that when I focused on computer-aided graphic design, my instructors who had done that kind of work with material supplies totally felt my work was invalid.
And when I was writing essays in high-school English and getting downgraded for poor penmanship, my teacher refused to let me word-process my work, lest I write a whole essay with the touch of a button.
So yes, creators have had their efforts minimized from the dawn of time, especially as new technology makes output better or easier.
Still, this isn’t about the art, it’s about the capitalism. If we had a society where no-one had to toil for a meager existence, then artists could do their thing for the sake of creating beauty and not to earn a buck. I believe post-war social programs in the UK drove the Rock-&-Roll revolution in the 1960s (advancements in electric guitars also did some heavy lifting).
So… feed our artists?
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”.
🤓
He did some touch up in photoshop before submitting it.
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.
This seems to follow a similar line of thought ( On Art In Context )
Yea, we’re well into DADA-ist territory to find interesting reference points for the timeless question of “what is art” in this discussion.
I’m curious: how do you feel this relates? Does the banana feel like it should or should not be art and/or copyrighted? Is it an energy/effort quality being compared to the end result? Or just the concept vs physical manifestation of the concept?
Because the AI controversy isn’t about art, it’s about money, and the notion that artists have to art to stay alive. Specifically, they have to please rich patrons, often by providing a thing that fits into their own vanity project. That said, it doesn’t matter how much time someone spent on a thing, whether they poured their soul into a 100,000 word volume, or taped a banana to a wall. All that matters is if it entertained a Rockefeller enough that they are willing to pay a fee.
If artists weren’t on the brink of starvation and homelessness and getting shot by law enforcement, then AI would be a new keen tool. And it’s not even that it will replace artists, but that rich guys think it’ll replace artists and it will save them from tossing some coins at riff-raff.
We actually saw this during the 2020 epidemic and lockdown, that artists given a grocery budget, a warm home and nowhere to go will get arty on their own, and by this way we could have a very robust public domain. But that’s now how we do things.
Sorry, did you take this as me coming at you? I was genuinely interested in your take on the banana’s relevance because high conceptual contemporary art is very easy to dismiss as “not art” by the layperson which makes it an interesting touch point for the AI value debate. I very much understand and agree with what you’ve said here, and you’ve described me at two separate stages of my career.
I find it fun that you mention a 100,000 word novel because I keep going back to thinking about how “a picture is worth a thousand words” is probably seeing some major economic volatility nowadays. That adage is very much in question now. Some of these prompts are getting way up there and, personally, the results very rarely look like they’re worth the effort.
As it exists, AI isn’t even a keen new tool, yet. But I am biased as someone who routinely creates visuals from scratch and uses a lot of different tools. It’s clearly mind-blowing for the folks who don’t. It is a kinda fun gadget, but it’s really no more sophisticated than good old “content-aware” and just as fiddly and commercially not useful. The prompt engineers will have words for me, but really: this tech is laughably dumb at this stage.
But I don’t believe it ever really will be keen with this mode of operation as it’s basis - all this will ever do is force the homogenization of visual anything/everything. We’ve already seen similar thanks to Pinterest and ArtStation and any other community drawing for the same reference points. Fantastic if you don’t care about visuals but uh, hope you’re really into hyper-mainstream media because that’s all it will look like.
Because you’re right, it’s only the non-artists who think it can replace artists -because they don’t actually value art, just the benefit it grants them. Not that they value the artist either, obviously. These are people who agree with AI developers that not only can visual design be formulated, but even worse that it should be to make it easier/cheaper/whatever.
But the sad reality is that it’s here. And it’s impressive enough to convince those with resources that it is worth pursuing further down this path of development. It isn’t, but they’re definitely not going to go back to carve out protections for the creative community. So we are stuck with a few options.
-adapt - work it into your flow because you’ll have to at this rate. Sucks, but they fucked the game.
-abolish - yea, we’re not going get that far, but we might be able to maintain this copyright denial which will keep it from replacing jobs by way of being unusable content.
-compete - obviously it’s going to be impossible to do so directly as an artist versus an AI for output, but keep in mind this still just the first wave of this concept. Future iterations of the concept (I’m talking specifically not future versions of current tools) can still be about challenging the basis this technology operates on. Something ethically designed to respect and reward the human behind every element the AI interacts with. They’d love for us to think they’re too dominant to challenge, but look at how many copycats exist already. There’s tons of room for sending this wave to the obsolete pile.
Cool so ai art created from copyright input has no copyright cuz the input isn’t considered part of the copyright.
It goes from the same idea that if you saw someone else’s art and made your own art, the copyright of the new art would be yours, and not the one who inspired you.
We’ve seen edge cases in the music industry (Ray Parker Jr.‘s Ghostbusters vs. Huey Lewis and the News’
Hip To Be SquareI Want a New Drug ) though in most cases in music, artists routinely borrow each other’s elements.The problem is that AI generative art still requires effort from the programmer (the one who prompted the AI) and went through process of telling it what to do, curating the output, running it back through the AI again to add new elements. If that process is sufficiently long, then it warrants copyright. If that process is insufficiently long, then it challenges the copyrightable merits of artists who make quick art.
In my opinion (removed from the whole AI controversy) is that intellectual property law has been long abused, not by artists and creators but by publishers and studio owners who have used their landlord-esque positions to take control of most art, and then extend their IP rights while denying the public a robust public domain.
And they are the ones that are going to ultimately be hurt by the death of IP laws. Artists will still do art, but for the sake of expression, and then it’s a matter of the rest of society making sure they’re not exhausted by their day-job (which, according to the strikers in Hollywood, they totally are).
It was I Want a New Drug, not It’s Hip to Be Square
Checked and fixed.
In my opinion (removed from the whole AI controversy) is that intellectual property law has been long abused, not by artists and creators but by publishers and studio owners who have used their landlord-esque positions to take control of most art, and then extend their IP rights while denying the public a robust public domain.
The idea that a strong public domain is beneficial to all culture has been lost. Now we have huge court cases because two different songs use a similar progression of notes. The point of copyright should be to motivate people to create more art, not prevent people from doing it.
Take the whole Under Pressure/Vanilla Ice fiasco. Nobody listening to “Ice Ice Baby” is going to then say to themselves “great, now I never have to listen to Queen again”. They are both very different songs in different genres, that use the same guitar riff.
I understand why selling pirate DVD’s should be illegal, for recently made movies that are still under print, but transforming a work should not be infringement.
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
