It took me a couple of clicks to discover that, as I suspected, this article is about the Stephen Thaler case. Thaler was trying to argue that the AI itself should hold the copyright for the images it generates.

This is both a ludicrous argument and irrelevant to the overall issue of whether AI-generated art is copyrightable. AIs are not legal persons, and only legal persons can hold copyright over someting. The result of this lawsuit is straightforward and expected.

I think excluding all AI creations from copyright might be one part of a good solution to all this. But you’re right that something has to be done at the point of scraping and training. Perhaps training should be considered outside of fair use and a copyright violation (without permission).

totally. and if scraped, they must be able to provide the source. I don't care if it costs them money/compute time. They are allowed to grow with fake money after all

Scraped the internet for data? Public domain.

Of course, just because material is on the internet does not mean that material is public domain.

So AI is likely the worst of both worlds: It can infringe copyright and the publisher be held liable for the infringement, but offers no protection in and of itself down the line.

I think the next big thing is going to be proving the provenience of training data. Kinda like being able to track a burger back to the farm(s) to prevent the spread of disease.

There was an onlyfans creator on a chat group for one of the less restricted machine learning image generators a while ago.
They provided a load of their content, and there was a cash prize for generating content that was indistinguishable from them.
Provided they were sure that the dataset was only their content, they might be able to claim copyright under this.

That's not the take (although in a sense I agree training data should influence it especially if it materially reproduce training samples)

Instead the argument is that the individual outputs from ML can only be copyrighted if they carry a human expression (because that's what the law is specifically meant to cover), if there's creative height in the inputs to it resulting in an output carrying that expression.

Compare to photography - photographs aren't protected automatically just because a button is pressed and an image is captured, rather you gain copyright protection as a result of your choice of motive which carries your expression.

Too simple prompts to ML models would under this ruling be considered to be comparable to uncopyrightable lists of facts (like a recipe) and thus the corresponding output is also not protected.

So, if prompting is considered as human intervention, the whole ruling is absurd?

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.

Ii-V-I is already not eligible for copyright. That's why a million contrafacts exist.

Lyrics, maybe. Lyrics are really the most copyrightable part of a song. Then melody after that.

Chord progressions are barely protectable, usually only in combination with a melody and lyrics.

The title of this article is a lie. The case it talks about is only judging the case where someone used an AI they created to generate an image, without human input then tried to claim the AI as the author and himself as the copyright holder on the work for hire clause/being the owner of the AI.

The conclusion was basically that a work need some human creative input to be able to copyrightable. It does not answer the question of how much work is required when AI is involved (and explicitly calls this out).

So using AI as part of creating a work does not mean it is uncopyrightable. Only the case where you have put in no input into that work.

What if an AI is doing my mastering in my DAW?

Then it's probably an improvement over today's mastering engineers.

@foggy There's another article that clarifies the decision. Works created by a human with AI assistance are copyrightable. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/

Works created solely by AI, like if all the human did was enter a prompt into ChatGPT or Midjourney, are not copyrightable.

Copyright laws and parents IMO do have a purpose and in the current state of the world IMO something like them is needed. But their current implementations last vastly too long and give far too many protections to the owners of them.

Personally I would rather see a world with a UBI and thus no need for artists and inventors to need to profit of their works (without others being able to just steal and profit for them selves). If we had a UBI then IMO we could likely do away with the copyright laws for the most part.

But we don't have that and artists/inventors do need to make a living. So some protections to allow them to do this are currently required. But they have been flipped to give large corporations far too much control and need a big revamp in how they work to rebalance them.

Also, this case does not make AI works uncopyrightable - only those that have no human input. So is not as big a deal as these articles are making it out to be.

You do own your own likeness, though. So I think you probably have some right to prevent someone from making deep fakes of you.

You don't own a photo someone else made of you IRL either. Personality rights are closer to trademark.

No, it just means that a bunch of lawyers are going to get rich. They will force judges to legislate exactly what amount of human input is necessary for a work to be copyrightable, and there will be endless lawsuits arguing whether particular pieces of work have enough human creativity in them. Big companies aren't going to let something like this stop them.