I’ve heard arguments for both sides and i think it’s more complicated then simply yes or no. what do you guys think?
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“Should AI art be copyrightable?” Is the wrong question. AI is a tool for people to make things. You might as well ask “Should art made in Photoshop be copyrightable?” When you put the two questions side by side, it becomes obvious that yes is the only logical general answer, but the more important thing is the actual process. I can make a drawing of Mario in Photoshop, but I don’t own the copyright for Mario. Meanwhile, I can make a unique logo in Photoshop and I can own the copyright. Simply saying “made with AI” isn’t sufficient for describing the process. For AI, copyrights in their source material and originality of the final product are complicated topics, so the only real solution is that the outputs of an AI will need to be handled on a case by case basis.
Different take: If I generate an image through a random number generator, should this be copyrightable?
My thought on that is if you generate multiple images through a random number generator and find one that’s interesting or aesthetically pleasing, then you are the creator since selecting it, while low effort, is the creative process.
Sounds good to me. So AI generated image should also be copyrightable. As it’s basically a random number generator.
Essentially yes, I would give the person using AI to generate an original image the credit as the image’s creator. I’m willing to bet that anything “good” AI generates is a result of many attempts and refinements and a human selecting the best result, and to me that makes it a human-driven creative process using a tool, the same as using a random number generator.
I’m deliberately not saying “copyrightable” because I don’t personally believe that digital files should be copyrightable (since recognising a copyright of a number is insanity), but it should be copyrightable in a society that recognises number copyrights.
Yeah, basically if you used one of these generators to create an image, you are the creator.
I think they should be copyrightable. AI is just a tool for the artist like a paintbrush, an art program (and now some of those even have AI tools built-in) or even filters on photos. Even if using others’ original works to train the AI, the result should be transformative which is already a mechanism that exists within US Copyright Fair Use.
As AI image generation methods improve, it will become difficult if not impossible to distinguish between an image being generated by AI or with the help of AI or not. Even if the stance will universally become “no” how could it actually be enforced? What sort of objective validation could happen that always gets it right?
Furthermore, how much would someone need to change the end-product to not be considered “AI created” anymore anyway? How transformative must it be?
Regardless of the answer now, it is almost certain that the answer in the future will be “yes”.
Absolutely not. AI images can be mass-produced and two people using the same seed will be able to create the same image. If they’re copyrightable nothing would be stopping a company from making millions of images a day and copyright trolling anyone who tries to use them.
There’s also a lot of other issues like image AIs being trained on real copyrighted data, so nothing stops me from saying “Hey, generate an image of Kirby”. It’s hard to argue that you own that image when it clearly depicts something that isn’t yours.
two people using the same seed will be able to create the same image.
In my experience ONE person using the same seed will not be able to create the same image. I can feed an identical prompt into an AI artist 100 times and be handed 100 similar, but different pictures at the end. This may change as AI science evolves however.
so nothing stops me from saying “Hey, generate an image of Kirby”.
Every AI image creator has blacklisted words/tags for preventing copyright abuse or prevent creation of offensive images. Most AIs won’t draw you pictures of Disney characters (anymore). Many AIs won’t draw pictures of Jesus or public figures like politicians. No AI on the market will draw you a gory execution. The managers of the AI in question just have to implement a blacklist about it and they can stop you from running prompts for whatever they want.
There’s also nothing stopping you from sitting down at your desk and drawing a picture of Kirby with a pen. When you’re done, do you own that image?
I agree with you that AI art shouldn’t be copyrightable or at least, if it is, there should be some significant hoops to jump through. But I don’t think the arguments given here are good reasons why.
In my experience ONE person using the same seed will not be able to create the same image.
I mean actual seed, not prompt. If you’re using something like Stable Diffusion it gives a seed number with each image. Using the same prompt and seed number gives exactly the same image.
Every AI image creator has blacklisted words/tags for preventing copyright abuse or prevent creation of offensive images.
Only the ones you can’t run locally. Most people still use Stable Diffusion because it’s the most powerful and open, and that lets you create anything you’d want and allows you to train it on whatever you’d want. You can make a model based on 500 images of Kirby and it can make similar-looking images with the same art style.
There’s also nothing stopping you from sitting down at your desk and drawing a picture of Kirby with a pen.
This argument never made sense to me. If I’m drawing it, I put in the effort and made it with my own hands. AI image generators can mass-produce images. Not to mention that they’re based off other people’s work, not yours. It’s not the same.
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The seed is more like an address. It’s a number that gets paired with the prompt to tell the model what variation of the thing it should output. Given the same seed and same prompt, the model will output the same image every time, no matter what.
Fair points on the locally run AIs, I admit I don’t have experience with those and didn’t realize they were run differently. I defer to your knowledge there.
I disagree on the drawing point though. Nearly every artist learns their style by learning from other artists, in the same way that every programmer learns to code by reading other code. It IS different, but I don’t think it’s THAT different. It’s doing the exact same thing a human would do in order to create a piece of art, just faster, and automated. Instead of spending ten years to learn to paint in the style of Dali you can tell an AI to make an image in the style of Dali and it will do exactly what a human would - inspect every Dali painting, figure out the common grounds, and figure out how to replicate them. It isn’t illegal to do that, nor do I consider it immoral, UNLESS you are profiting from the resulting image. Personally I view it as a fair use of those resources.
The sticky situation arrives when we start to talk about how those AIs were trained though. I think the training sets are the biggest problem we have to solve with these. Train it fully on public domain works? Sure, do what you want with it, that’s why those works are in the public domain. But when you’re training your AI on copyrighted works and then make money on the result? Now that’s a problem.
As an artist you do not look at how 300 other artists have drawn a banana, you look at a banana and try to understand how you can use different techniques to capture the form, texture, etc. of a banana.
An AI calculates from hundreds of images the probability of lines and colours being arranged in a certain way and still being interpreted as a banana. It never sees a banana or understands what it is.
Tell me, where do you see a similarity in these two processes.
If you were to copyright AI art who would the credit go to? The original artists the training was based on? The person who created the training model? The person who writes the prompt? The computer itself? I don’t think copyright makes sense in this context
Judges have ruled that they can’t be copyrighted because of this lack of a true author, and I agree.
Fairly sure that was a case where the guy wanted to give the copyright to the ai algorithm itself and not about the copyrightability of the art. Specifically, he wanted them to be copyrighted as “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine” - creativity machine is the name of the algorithm. Basically just a modern version of the monkey selfie kerfuffle.
My theoretical answer is this: in an ideal world, there would be no copyright at all. This is an artificial contrivance that was once dreamed up to serve physical-copy economy, and it was rendered obsolete by the digital age. Shit would be so much easier when we got rid of this shit and everyone could share everything by default without any profit motive. (Caveat: This will not work unless literally every jurisdiction on the planet gets rid of copyright laws all at once, otherwise this is way too exploitable due to power imbalance. So I don’t think this is a practical proposition. *cough* unless we all decide Anarchism is a good idea after all *cough*)
My practical answer is this: Welllllll we’re kinda damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. My personal feeling is that AI creations aren’t really copyrightable, and even suggesting they are copyrightable is kind of opening a huge can of worms regarding what exactly counts as “creativity” in the first place. The best we can do under current copyright regime is to regulate how the AI datasets are curated, because goodness knows the current datasets weren’t exactly ethically obtained.
The real solution is to solve the power imbalance. What percentage of creative media is controlled by the already obscenely wealthy? We don’t want “non infringing proprietary models” to be the only legal models, because then the only ones with access to such powerful tools are the ones that can afford the Adobe art tax.
We need to hold our governments accountable to hold the oligarches accountable for imbalancing the power struggles to an unethical degree. The common people have received no benefit from technological improvement based productivity gain in the past 50 years and this will only get worse until it is fixed in drastic fashion
The common people need a GUARANTEE to benefit from productivity increases. Unions are also good, but nothing is being done about unethical anti-union campaigning from those with already imbalanced amounts of power and influence.
Yadda yadda. Going after open source models ain’t gonna help. I’m fine pushing for special forgiveness for open models, but don’t just put the ball into the hands of the people who can afford proprietary datasets.
The situation today is that AI images are copyrighted (or not) just like any other images.
Given the power of the copyright industry, I doubt that this will be cut back. In the interest of society, it should be, but denying copyright to AI imagery is not the best place to do this.
The original intention of copyright was the same as that of patents: To encourage the creation of new works by making it possible to monetize them through licensing. AI images can be very expensive to make, depending on what goes into them. Without copyright on these images, we might miss out.
ETA: This purpose of copyright is given in the US Constitution (though it is older). US Americans could think about that. IP is property created to serve the public. That’s the only justification for property to be found in that document.
The purpose of copyright in the USA, and as far as I know in Brittain, yes.
But please remember that in much of the rest of the world copyright is a reaction to people, creators, getting in trouble over third party usage of their creations.
Leading to the idea that a creator should have the power to stop people from using their works for whatever the creator deems objectionable.
Not as far as I know. The continental European copyright-equivalent preserves feudal ideas.
Rulers granted monopolies to their cronies to allow them to extract money. These privileges were finally abandoned in the wake of the French Revolution. Ethical considerations aside, this was necessary to allow for industrialization/economic development. Except for “copyright”, which is democratized by automatically granting it to everyone, rather than being a special favor. The continental patent system works much like the US one, granting a “mere” 20 year monopoly. Copyright duration is tied to the death of the author, showing its nature as a personal privilege.
Small wonder then that the US copyright industry has come to dominate. Unfortunately, it has leveraged this power for rent-seeking so that much of the harmful, European model was adopted in the US.
You are right, though, that the European model has no regard for public benefit but is quite concerned with the “honor” of the creator.
In Denmark the case surrounding “Nøddebo præstegård” caused copyright to be enacted.
I’ve noticed the theme come up in other countries, amongst these France, but I’ll grant that I may have overestimated its importance by overfitting to prior knowledge.
Do you have more info on that case, please? It’s fine if it’s in danish.
The original intention of copyright was the same as that of patents: To encourage the creation of new works by making it possible to monetize them through licensing
Not that it really changes much of your larger point, but that’s not really true. The original intention of copyright comes from the Licensing of the Press Act 1662 and the Statute of Anne 1710 and neither of those was intended to encourage the creation of new works. On the contrary, they were intended to discourage the creation of new works. The problem at the time is that people were printing too many new works, many of which were considered a threat to the monarchy and/or the church. Copyright forced all printers to be registered with the Stationers’ Company initially (a crown-monitored guild) and later the crown itself, to aid in censorship and government control of the press.
The Statute of Anne 1710 gives this justification: […]for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books.
There are many precursors, but I don’t think they can be called copyright in the modern sense. All guilds had monopolies which they defended at the expense of society. It was a feature of feudalism that the elites sought to prevent change to preserve their positions.
But yes, copyright is the major remaining limitation on the freedom of the (printing) press.
(It’s interesting how many of the demands to regulate AI are parallel to the controls on the printing press, in the first few centuries after its introduction in Europe.)
The problem with it is you now have to confirm that no copyrighted material was used in the process, something which can be impossible. At the same time, if we want corporations to be checked, then AI should not get copyright, because that way they still have to pay artists and writers.
I don’t think copyright should exist, but as long as it does I lean towards “no” because AI images are just copying with extra steps imo
