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Comment by wgjordan | Hacker News Reader

> Not a lawyer, but given that it takes the original picture as an input, there's a very strong claim that it's a tool to create a derivative work.

I don't think it's that simple- as I understood the proposed conversion, there would be two phases. The first phase extracts an 'idea prompt' from a source expression (resulting in "an asian man lying in a grass field surrounded by a semicircle of driftwood and crows"). The second phase generates a new expression from this prompt alone.

As long as this intermediate 'idea prompt' is sufficiently devoid of 'expression' elements to withstand scrutiny (and the tool could even embed its idea prompt in metadata for auditing purposes), I would imagine the final output to be likewise considered a sufficiently transformative work compared to the original.

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That’s not really how it works. Copyright is less about process than result. For example, a human can—-completely from memory—-draw an entirely new image and it can be found to be infringing on an original. Similarly if I took someone else’s book and made a silent film adaptation of it. That is a derivative work, it won’t contain any of the literal words from the book or any words at all but if it contains a representation of the unique, identifiable characteristics of the underlying work it’s going to be considered a derivative (infringing) work. So many of these gotchas people talk about with AI are not nearly so simple.

No that's the opposite, patents are about the result and copyright is about the process. If that would work like that, all those image boards like Getty themselves would never be able to exist since there's so many near identical images produced independently.

That's not true. If you patent the Microwave, I am free to heat my food in the oven. The result is the food is cooked, the method is different. The process is a key part of the patent.

Edit: After gasp researching (which maybe we should all consider before commenting) you can patent one of 4 things, process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_(patent) so process is definitely something you can patent, but is not necessarily required.

Yeah sure, to be more precise, to be a copyright derivative, the creation process must be examined, there's no way around it. You can totally create very similar artworks which don't share a copyright.

As long as you're saying an AI-transformed image wouldn't be considered an inherently derivative work because of its process, I believe we're in violent agreement.

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