this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain (doctorow.medium.com)
submitted 2 years ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
132 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The US Copyright Office offers creative workers a powerful labor protective.

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[–] FiskFisk33@lemmy.world 42 points 2 years ago (16 children)

Thats not really what that ruling was, in the case the AI created, and if i remember correctly also published, the work with no human intervention, making it hard to apply to pretty much any normal ai generated content.

[–] Jocker@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 years ago (12 children)

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

[–] nous@programming.dev 12 points 2 years ago (11 children)

From the case itself:

Undoubtedly, we are approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put AI in their toolbox to be used in the generation of new visual and other artistic works. The increased attenuation of human creativity from the actual generation of the final work will prompt challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an “author” of a generated work, the scope of the protection obtained over the resultant image, how to assess the originality of AI-generated works where the systems may have been trained on unknown pre-existing works, how copyright might best be used to incentivize creative works involving AI, and more.

So the question of how much human input is needed is still up for debate. I doubt any prompt will pass the creativity mark, but I suspect with a creative enough prompt you will likely be able to claim copyright and author ship over the works.

This case did not explore either of these ideas, only that you cannot claim the AI as the author and thus claim copyright via the work for hire clause in the copyright laws if there is no human input into the process.

This ruling IMO makes sense and is inline with other cases (such as photos being taken by an animal with no human input are not copyrightable). And IMO this is a good ruling - makes it harder for large numbers of images to be copyrighted on mass by companies or companies that own the AI claiming copyright over works their AI generated (even if the prompt was given by others).

[–] ram@feddit.nl 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

I suspect with a creative enough prompt you will likely be able to claim copyright and author ship over the works.

It seems that's not the case, no matter how much effort or time you expend on the prompts. This is from the Copyright Office:

The Office does not question Ms. Kashtanova’s contention that she expended significant time and effort working with Midjourney. But that effort does not make her the “author” of Midjourney images under copyright law. Courts have rejected the argument that “sweat of the brow” can be a basis for copyright protection in otherwise unprotectable material.18 The Office “will not consider the amount of time, effort, or expense required to create the work” because they “have no bearing on whether a work possesses the minimum creative spark required by the Copyright Act and the Constitution.”

Here's another key factor:

Because of the significant distance between what a user may direct Midjourney to create and the visual material Midjourney actually produces, Midjourney users lack sufficient control over generated images to be treated as the “master mind” behind them. The fact that Midjourney’s specific output cannot be predicted by users makes Midjourney different for copyright purposes than other tools used by artists.

This only applies to an image generated with AI prompts that isn't significantly altered by an artist.

[–] hedgehog@ttrpg.network 0 points 2 years ago

This is a lot more relevant to most people’s workflows, but even it reads like it wouldn’t apply to someone using processes that allow them more control, e.g., a Stable Diffusion workflow using multiple iterations; ControlNet with author-created posing; in-painting with directed img2img prompts for additional control; additional directives that restrict the creative output in a particular domain, e.g., the palette or lighting type, to an author-provided set; and most of all, AI-free post-processing.

[–] nous@programming.dev -1 points 2 years ago

That is a far more interesting read and more damning than what all these article are talking about - the Thaler v. Perlmutter case.

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