Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfaster | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't there a decision in the US that said AI generated artwork has no copyright? Something along the lines of it has to be made by a human?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off...

View on HN

That doesn't say that AI generated artwork has no copyright.

It doesn't? What am I missing from the article then? I think it says pretty clearly that human artistry is a necessary component of a copyrightable work.

The much more narrow result is "AI art that didn't involve human contribution doesn't qualify for copyright". If there are people that did contribute, rulings about works that didn't involve people aren't really relevant.

But "AI art" generally has human involvement of some form, and the standard for that is very low. The specific case of submitting for copyright and claiming that no human input was involved means that the copyright office can take that claim for face value. That doesn't mean AI art generally doesn't qualify for copyright, you just need to "admit to" human involvement of some form. And it's unclear if AI art without human involvement even is a thing.

E.g. if as discussed in the subthread here we are talking about claims of copyright infringement, the first thing the claiment is going to assert is that humans had input into your "AI", and good luck disproving that (especially for the even more specific example here were the people making the claim were involved in building the core of your "AI", so even if you find an argument that your work wasn't human involvement you still need to disprove their claim that their work was!).

> The much more narrow result is "AI art that didn't involve human contribution doesn't qualify for copyright"

The linked decision doesn't even say that. It says an AI can't own its own work. It doesn't say anything about human ownership of works created by a machine.

But then a human comes and selects one from a hundred images. Not to mention the human had to write the prompt, sometimes a very long and explicit one. I'd say that's enough human involvement to be able to use the image as his own.

I'd say that the largest amount of human involvement was on the original works of art that these models ingurgitated. What came after is only statistical interpolation.

But then who does the copyright belong to? Does it belong to every artist who's input was used for training? Was it the user who set up the conditions and chose the image? Or was it OpenAI who developed the model?

Given the court ruling I linked earlier OpenAI almost definitely does not have ownership over the output of the AI, which is what they claim.

It doesn't matter, even choosing a picture is a creative act that imparts copyright. Maybe if you hook up GPT-3 to generate prompts for DALL-E and then filter the images with another automated method, then the work is completely AI generated and deserves no copyright.

As for the authors of the training data, they still enjoy the copyrights over the works they created. Images generated by DALL-E only copy the style, something humans are also allowed to do. Anyway, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, now we have to live with image and text models. Next year we'll be shocked at video models that can play games, accomplish meaningful office work and also generate long videos.

Why? I think it does very clearly and the source also says so clearly: https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...

It says the AI can't copyright its own work, not that a human can't copyright the product of an AI they create.

From the Verge article: "So if someone tried to copyright a similar work by arguing it was a product of their own creativity executed by a machine, the outcome might look different."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com