At the end of the day, the so-called AI generated art is a result of millions of artworks which were consumed by the AI model while training. I always like to draw parallels between AI copyrights and NFTs in the Web3 world. While minting NFT == having a digital copyright on the art piece, you pay a gas fees for doing so which gets distributed to the community as a reward to enabling it. I would love to see similar mechanisms in the AI world where the community get rewards for someone using Stable Diffusion (and not just Stability AI).
The intersection of AI & copywrite is a philosophical pretzel! All I know is that if I had kids today, the only careers I'd let them pursue would be AI/ML engineer or copyright attorney.
Art created by a generative AI platform (like Stability or Midjourney) is potentially copyrightable. The fact that an AI platoform was used does not, by itself, prevent the resulting art from receiving copyright protection. However, the art is only copyrightable if the human artist’s prompt contained sufficient expressive input.
I imagine you'll get into issues: If I take the original prompt and seed, but very mildly tweak the prompt, would I be violating copyright?
It depends on how mild the tweak is, and perhaps how different the result will be. I expect copyright protection for AI art will be very narrow, and likely only protect against direct copy/paste, or near-identical copies.
I think it should be copyrightable to incentive the AI's to create more content. In conjunction, we should also let the AI's buy themselves. That would incentivize people to create the AI's.