351
US rejects AI copyright for famous state fair-winning Midjourney art
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I agree. Well, that is assuming there's no human editing of the results of the AI tool afterwards. There was heaps of it in the piece referenced in the article, and there usually is if you want to get something actually good. The piece referenced was entered in to a photomanipulation and editing category too, which seems like it's very much in keeping with the spirit of the competition. But the reason I said that was because the comment I was replying to wasn't about who has the copyright of the tool's output, it was about the value of the output and tools in general
The tools are valuable for sure.
Where the law is on copyright it looks like we're figuring out. For now I'm glad to see rulings like this as it will, hopefully, take some of the wind out of Hollywood studios and aide union negotiations.
If there was, then the artist should have discussed those heaps of human editing that went into the creation of this piece of art, and he would have been granted a copyright.
The fact that he refused to disclose what - if anything - was done after the AI spit out the result is what resulted in him not being granted copyright.
He did? This article mentions it only briefly, but he talked about it more when it was first getting attention for winning the competition. Is this something he did in the court case that you've read elsewhere?
But also, if you used Midjourney at the time that the image was made, you'll know that you did not get an image like that straight out of it
This wasn't a court case.
This was a copyright application.
The Copyright Office asked him to provide them with an unedited version of the image generated by Midjourney in order to determine how much (human) work went into the final version.
Allen refused to provide them with an unedited version, so the Copyright Office had no way to verify how much or how little work was actually done by the artist compared to work that was done by the AI, so they had to assume that the vast majority of the work was done without any human artistic contribution.
They were essentially forced to reject his copyright application because he refused to provide evidence that he actually did any kind of creative artistic work.