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...

This is more of an issue with copyright law than of A.I. content generation. All you really need to do is create an algorithm that creates images based on every combination of pixels. There were a couple of lawyers who did this with melodies by creating an algorithm to generate every combination of 12-note, 8-beat melodies. One of the lawyers has a TED Talk where he goes into more detail with the issues of copyright laws: https://youtu.be/sJtm0MoOgiU

They will just churn out pictures from midjourney and hire a cheap artist to touch them up and then copyright that.

Absolutely based af :)

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.

I agree completely. I think this is the best solution to the AI replacing human artists problem. Big companies can't use AI to replace humans because if they do, whatever they make will be ineligible for copyright and everyone will be free to rip them off.

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.

Or really anything that's more practical than art.

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.

Tweaks adjustments and corrections need a reference material. The raw AI image needs to be published first for his tweaks to be copyrightable. Anyone wanting to claim copyright on edits should produce the initial uncopyrightable image too.

but then that makes it not his original work and he shouldn't be putting it in competitions.

We give copyright for much less.

I find this an interesting point. My understanding is that AI art just isn't considered enough work on the part of the human creator, presumably because of the idea that you only need to come up with a prompt.

But at the same time, most photographs and videos are copyrightable even if you literally just pointed your phone at whatever without any talent at all. IIRC, the idea of photographs being copyrighted was originally a controversial one, but these days is generally accepted. As long as a human took the photo (and not, say, a monkey, as a famous case found).

Is pointing a phone and clicking a button more of a human contribution than coming up with a prompt? What about if they had to iteratively tune the prompt and mask out parts of the image? In my book, I'd say that's more human contribution than many photographs.

"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.

He did some touch up in photoshop before submitting it.

Did you read the article? In this case he put in quite a bit of work to generate and alter the image:

He sent a written explanation to the Copyright Office detailing how much he’d done to manipulate what Midjourney conjured, as well as how much he fiddled with the raw image, using Adobe Photoshop to fix flaws and Gigapixel AI to increase the size and resolution. He specified that creating the painting had required at least 624 text prompts and input revisions.

And he is essentially claiming that the work should be transformative enough to be copyrightable. Even if the original image is not.

That all makes this case more interesting then a lot of others in the past as it is about AI generation with some human input. Not just someone generating vast amounts of work to find something they like (which likely will never be copyrightable). When this goes to the courts will will help to define the line of how much and what type of alterations are required to claim copyright over the works.

Not all AI work is the same, but I am glad that the copyright office is pushing back on these claims. Putting the burden of proof onto the author that they did have enough input into the work. The big open question ATM is how much input is needed and what that input can look like.

https://media.wired.com/photos/64f8c8a43e1a7b4810e35753/master//AI-Copyright-The%CC%81a%CC%82tre_d'Ope%CC%81ra_Spatial-Culture.jpg

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 Square~~ I 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 detectable by actual artists, trained eyes, and probably other ai algos. Prompters have no true artistic skill 80 percent of the time, so they rely on AI to even do the finer details.

There are a few actual artists who use AI in the way scammers do (rather than as a tool to enhance their workflow), but they are rare.