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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

> I've seen a lot of confidence on HN and other tech communities that a court would never rule that training an AI on copyrighted images is infringement, but I'm not so sure. To be clear, I hope that training AI on copyrighted images remains legal, because it would cripple the field of AI text and image generation if it wasn't!

Regardless of the copyright of the training data which really is unresolved, the copyright-ability of output of AI is questionable at best. There's no way to monetize the generated images for a stock art that isn't at risk of a court ruling pulling the rug from under it.

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AI-produced art is still human-made, as a person does the job of engineering a prompt and selecting from the generated images. The copyrightability of such work is unlikely to ever seriously be in question.

That's not so obviously clear cut. Can the model produce identical output from the same simple prompt?

But that's exactly what happens, AI isn't randomness, it's a set of predefined calculations. The randomness is in the seed/starting point. For e.g Stable Diffusion it is given/user input, resulting in perfect reproducibility.

I should have been clearer - that was rhetorical to point out that if you and I use the same prompt and pick the same resultant image, it's harder to claim either of us have copyright. This is a gray area. The tools themselves could introduce some stochastic aspect so that outputs are never identical, also.

None of this leads to an obviously clear cut legal position wrt copyright.

Your (and the other person's) set pf inputs drive a mathematical function that derives the same output.

If we were all honest, we'd give up the idea of copyright altogether where ML is concerned. You can't get much closer to "It's just math, man" than what it is currently.

I think we are saying the same thing, roughly.

Of course, "it's just math, man" isn't precisely a legal argument, either.

Vector art is just math, yet you can get copyright on it.

This is what I would like to believe… but needs to be proven before I stake my business on it.

It might be hard to argue that a prompt is original enough to be covered by copyright. Shorter, simpler prompts might be ruled unoriginal.

This is not as obvious as you may think. This is closely related to the "monkey selfies" copyright claim issues. The court didn't seem to agree with the photographer who said "I own the copyright of those pictures because I configured the camera by myself and put it there, the monkey only pushed the button."

The court didn't rule on the monkey selfies copyright claim. The copyright owner just ran out of money to pay for a lawyer and gave up fighting against Wikimedia.

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