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Comment by mkotowski | Hacker News Reader

Lately, there seems to be an avalanche of tools like DALL-E, was there some breakthrough that helped make these thinks more viable to run publicly?

And concerning creating a logo with such tools: Is there any consensus on an eventual copyright of such works?

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> Is there any consensus on an eventual copyright of such works?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic...

This is kind of a weird take to me given that photoshop exists. (Tons of proto-computer vision algorithms in there, like basic convolutional filters.) I suspect you'd still get copyright if you modify it a bit somehow.

So, if a nascent company chooses to go down this same path of generating (or maybe _seeding_) their logo design with AI, have they essentially given up any ability to protect that logo going forward?

Logo's are generally protected by trademark rather than copyright. I don't think anything prevents you from using a generated logo with trademark. For example you could have a trademark on an orange square, even though you could never copyright it. In the same way a trademark could protect your product name even if it is a single English common noun, as long as it is distinctive in use within your trademark scope.

From a technical perspective, there has been a much larger adoption of diffusion models which make these types of generative art much more viable. There has also been breakthroughs in connecting images and text with models like CLIP. DALLE-2, Imagen, and a lot of other generative work are using these ideas to get even better results.

Big pretrained models are a huge contributing factor. Being able to take a model that already mostly knows language and a model that already mostly knows images and hook them up means you don’t need to do the entire end to end learning together.

And are the images it's trained on copyrighted? What are their source images from which these are derived?

to answer your other question, diffusion generative models recently became big. you can read up on them if you want.

dall e 2 says you can use their images for commercial uses.

that's not all there is to this though obviously

You can use it according to their license, but is it copyrightable is the question, and precedent so far seems to say no since a human didnt author it.

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