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Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain
(doctorow.medium.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I too believe that AI work should be public domain by default.
If there were a machine on the street corner where pushed a button and a macguffin popped out, you don't deserve credit for the macguffin.
If you entered parameters into the machine on the street corner and pushed a button to pop out a custom macguffin, you may be able to argue that you deserve credit for the parameters, but not the macguffin itself AND FURTHERMORE if anyone else wrote custom parameters that happened to produce an identical macguffin without ever having read your parameters, they have exactly as much right to gatekeep it. which is to say basically none.
I'll go further. I believe all works should be public domain by default. And copyright law should go back to what it was- if you want to, you can register copyright for 19 years with an option to renew at the end of those 19 for another 19. 38 years is more than enough time to be the sole earner from intellectual property rights.
you know what HELL YEAH
I would support the fuck out of that
I'm too used to being surrounded by people who constantly push back on it.
As a creator of some digital content in the past (keep wanting to get back into it but, you know, life gets in the way) I was plagiarized and I felt flattered when it happened.
When people get pissy about it, well, that's a skill issue and they need to GIT GUD.
Ideally, some sort of universal asset tracking and attribution system would be nice so that the distribution of compensation could be automated. People who invent something oughtta be due SOME credit, but not full control.
I want everyone to have the inaliable RIGHT to create derivative content as long as if they generate any income from it a tiny portion of it gets sent 'up the line' toward whatever it was derived from.
I want people to be able to make original animations with "Disney characters" and get to keep at least 85% of what anyone is willing to pay them without Disney being allowed to take, or CAPABLE OF taking, even one goddamn penny more than that.
I want people to be able to create custom content for Warhammer 40K and Games Workshop to be utterly POWERLESS to stop them.
I want networks to never be allowed to nuke content libraries ever again.
I want media that's literally rotting away, disintegrating into nothing as the celluloid it's printed on oxidizes and crumbles into literal dust, to never be lost again.
Same with me. Someone took one of my monetized YouTube videos and put it in their laugh reaction video. Cool. More people get to see my video and hopefully laugh. If you're into an art form for the money, maybe you need to rethink why you're doing it.
It's going to raise some interesting issues when a studio decides to commision an AI programmer / artist to feed AI some exacting prompts to closely reproduce someobe else's copyrighted work.
There are still genies at large out of their bottles wreaking havoc.
The funny thing is hobbyists might be able to do the same thing given that we currently have access to very effective AI tools.
It will also raise questions if an editor goes over AI created material and makes changes. Does he get to copyright it?
Personally, I think no IP law is better than the system of IP laws we have (about which judges routinely make bad rulings out of ignorance). So I'll be glad to see it broken. I creative commons my own stuff anyway.
What is the difference if they hire someone to use photoshop to reproduce someone else's copyrighted work? Why would a case involving an AI be any different? Just because you create something and release it to the public domain does not mean you have the right to actually do that if what you created violates copyright.
Same question can be applied to any public domain works. AI generated or not.
But also the articles title is wrong, AI generated works are not uncopyrightable - only ones that don't involve any human input (much like any other work that does not involve any human input).
I agree with this though. But this case does not break the system at all. It just re-enforces precedents that have already been established for non ai works - in that a human needs to be part of the creative process for the work to be copyrightable. Articles reporting on this case are just going for the most clickbait title they can.
Consider the case of photography then - would you consider photos to not be copyrightable as all the photographer did was point a camera at something and push a button? The picture was not created by the photographer - just the output of light entering the machine and hitting some photosensitive paper (or a digital sensor these days). How is that any different from you macguffin maker? Or An AI generated work?
There have been many cases for photographs though - with mixed results. Namely the line is drawn when some level of human creativity is involved in the process of creating the works in question. Like in the case where a money took a selfie - that work was not copyrightable as there was no human input into the process. Just owning the camera is not enough to claim copyright. But there are other photographs are are considered copyrightable.
The case this article talks about is more akin to the money example - someone used an AI to create an image with no human input (and he admitted to this) and tried to claim copyright on the work as part of the work for hire clause to the copyright laws. The claim was shot down because no human input was part of the process. So this image was not copywritable.
But all the articles about this case are extending the judgment to mean any ai generated work falls under the same cause. But it does not as different AI work have different amounts of human involvement in the process. The case explicitly states that those works are still open for debate.
Things are not as clear cut that the titles these articles are using imply. And if a prompt is enough, or how detailed it would need to be to claim copyright is still an open question that as far as I know has not been tested in court yet.
The skill of a photographer is in the curation of the work.
They are credited with the framing, the positioning, the timing, the settings they used on configuring the camera.
If someone else went to the same location, attempted to frame it, position it, time it, and configure the camera themselves, even if the resultant picture somehow managed to come out identically to the first one - hell, even if they used the same actual physical camera - the photographer who took the first picture has no rights or claims over this new albeit hypothetically identical photograph.
Third example:
If a photographer set up a permanent camera at a location that already had the scene framed, all elements within the frame positioned, all settings calibrated and locked-in, and somehow even managed to make sure that the timing was always perfect every time someone came up and pressed the shutter button, ALL the work was still done by the photographer.
Fourth example:
If an AI algorithmically calculated all of these aspects and robotically configured a camera's settings, then used a drone to deliver and orient the camera precisely to achieve the framing and scene composition as determined by the algorithm, then were to schedule the exact optimal moment to trigger the shutters each time a human pressed a button, that human would have no claims or rights over the resultant picture and it ought fall directly into public domain.
That third example is a grey area. The photographer has no control over the subject of the photo, which is arguable a large part of the creative part of the photo. I am not convinced that they would automatically get copyright in that situation.
And the third and forth touch on a lot of points that modern smartphones already do - automatically set up the camera, can adjust the frame of the photo, take several pictures and blend the best ones together, stabilise the shot, auto adjust exposure etc etc. When does taking a photo with your smart phone end up being like those examples?
But regardless, this copyright claim has some good arguments for why a prompt for an AI generated image should not result in the image being copyrightable - far better then the case the article in this post points to.
The core of the argument seems to be that you cannot predict the output of the AI, so the prompts are more suggestions and not strong enough to be considered creative enough for a claim to copyright. And that generating lots of images until one matches your idea is also not enough - as that is like doing an image search until you find something that matches what you want.
Which feeds back into that third example, if the photographer cannot predict what the people will do in the frame then given the above I would argue they have a weak claim to copyright over the image. No matter how much work they did to set up the shot.
If you've spent some time with AI already you've probably realised that it takes some level of domain-specific information to get AI to produce a useful output. For example, people who are already artistic are better at getting artistically interesting images out of an AI. The idea and the guidance have value and are essential to the outcome. Prompt engineering is a very real skill.
Now this case is about an autonomous tool, which by definition doesn't include a human's guidance. I agree that the waters here are definitely murkier. If however, you put a blanket over all AI-assisted works and say that the author/engineer doesn't deserve credit, or protection, then I think you're off the mark.
Credit? Sure, whatevs! Copyright, royalties or ownership? Absolutely not.
Hard disagree, there is a near certainty that any work produced from a current generative "ai" model includes material scraped from the web in violation of the release license.
Whatever skill they apply, it's still by default an unlicensed derivative work.