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Comment by hourago | Hacker News Reader

> When asked about these issues, a spokesperson for Shutterstock told The Verge that there were “lot of questions and uncertainty around this new technology, specifically when it comes to the concept of ownership,” but that the company’s stance is that “because AI content generation models leverage the IP of many artists and their content, AI-generated content ownership cannot be assigned to an individual and must instead compensate the many artists who were involved in the creation of each new piece of content.”

As far as I know, this is Shutterstock opinion and there is no judge rules or new laws addressing the situation.

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The human mind has been doing this forever. Taking inspiration from others and creating new art.

As far as I know it’s even legal to study the style of one specific artist and create imitation art as long as it’s clear that this is a new artwork from a new artist and about ~50% different from any existing works.

So a prompt like “a photo of Times Square in the style of Ansel Adams” should be ~50%+ unique.

The trickiest area for these models might be prompts that recreate existing work.

Given a prompt like “a black and white photo of Yosemite Valley in the style of Ansel Adams”, if the model is too good, then it seems like copyright infringement.

But as far as training data goes, as long as it’s acquired legally, I don’t think it can (or should) be regulated.

The work of art was 'created' by an anonymous author, the AI. Title 17 explicitly handles works by anonymous authors. I can't just claim them if I didn't create them. If I can claim I own works created by my code, and the code is the artist, then Adobe owns every work created with it's tools that does not have a seperate copyright claim. Which Adobe obviously doesn't. This is not new or novel, it's just like with Napster, the current law in inconvenient to what people WANT to do, so they claim the reality they want. If the work is unique enough to claim copyright, then the algorithm added the uniqueness/copyrightable characteristics, not your writing the algorithm, and therefore the AI is an anonymous Author. If it is your algorithm that is doing the creating, then Adobe owns the copyrights to the work generated using it's algorithm, which it obviously doesn't. I am missing the gray (grey) area here.

Interesting point.

I guess the main difference for me is the extent of human involvement.

For example, with Adobe there is a huge amount of human interaction required to get from idea to end result.

With DALL-E, you basically go from idea to end result instantly.

>The human mind has been doing this forever. Taking inspiration from others and creating new art.

Difference being that the AI doesn't take inspiration, it takes raw data.

You claim "difference", but how can you say such things when we have no idea how human brains mix and match different sources of inspirations? I've definitely composed a succession of melodies only to turn around and realize I'd just copied an entire chunk of a commercial jingle I'd heard in the background a while back. What is the precise definition of inspiration?

If one thing is known and the other is unknown then they are different. If they were the same, both would be known, or unknown.

Known and unknown are relative. I know my first name. I don't know yours. Your theory suggests that the two names will certainly be different. Is that always the case?

The mechanisms of human brain is indeed unknown to us. So how can we say with confidence that its underlying workings are this way or that way with certainty? We can only observe the inputs and outputs and do our best to compare the two. Which is the whole point of AI - to simulate the human brain (or what we can observe about it) to the best of our ability.

Kinda shitty to acknowledge that ownership is in question and the proceed to sell it anyway

Shutterstock don't mind stealing others work and selling it as their own. These AI ownership questions are trivially resolved with their way of doing things.

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