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Comment by blown_gasket | Hacker News Reader

Here is another perspective, if you're at all interested. Let's say you commission a paid artist for a piece of artwork with the want of "butterflies and rainbows". I'd say that you are giving that artist direction in the exact same way of the AI system. However, in the former you would probably not be granted copyright for the work as you didn't create it. So why is the AI system any different? You gave it direction, but you didn't create the final product. Also I'd argue that you aren't operating the AI system at all considering that along the way of creating the product you don't get to make adjustments; you are merely giving it direction.

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The difference is that if you ask an artist to take a cute selfie, and you ask an orangutan to take a cute selfie, the artist owns the copyright in the former and the orangutan owns the copyright in the latter. Presumably we can train orangutans to take good photos, but it seems that the person most involved with everything around making it possible for orangutans to take photos owns the copyright, and not the orangutan. See (not orangutan but macaque) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Looking at your comment that supposes that the legal system should treat AI as different as other tools, I suppose it should then also look at animals as legal persons capable of authorship and creativity (it already does see corporations as legal persons, but not capable of authorship I guess). Now, once animals can have creative output that is alienable, what about all the other, material, output that human society relies on?

Why does a legal system have to "treat AI as different than other tools" also have to "look at animals as legal persons" to be consistent?

The concern with the 'AI' is that it's copyrighted content being recombined in ways that don't create a new copyright, so the output can't have a new copyright.

That concern isn't shared with animals since they aren't inputting copyrighted materials to produce the selfies. Midjourney is.

> The concern with the 'AI' is that it's copyrighted content being recombined in ways that don't create a new copyright, so the output can't have a new copyright.

I believe the conversation was with respect to copyright ownership of the transformation applied to the training materials, and not the training inputs itself, (to the extent that the AI has been so poorly trained that its outputs aren't sufficiently transformative of its originals; A transformative work with a human author is copyrightable and does not infringe on the copyright of the original work).

On a liminal case, are song performances by songbirds who have heard it on the radio copyrightable?

Edit:

> but it seems that the person most involved with everything around making it possible for orangutans to take photos owns the copyright, and not the orangutan.

These photos are not copyrightable.

That would conceivably be a work for hire, and yes, you would more than likely own the copyright.

The AI we have now doesn’t actually disrupt anything that 300 years of precedent hasn’t worked through. Commissioned work, generative tools, etc — it’s all been done and sorted and debated and ruled on.

Some AI might shake things up, but nothing we’ve seen yet.

Because the legal system treats software as a tool and not a legal entity. AI can't hold copyright in the same way your paint brush or copy of photoshop can't hold copyright.

Sure AI is much more effective, but what would it even mean for AI to hold copyright and why would it even be useful to do this?

My comment was going in the direction of I think that, in an ideal system, legally an AI system would be looked at differently than many other tools.

I have no answer to your questions because I haven't thought about them.

The legal system serves to provide useful rules for the benefit of society. Even though logically AI tools are more powerful and more self directed than simple programs, there is no reason we would actually want them to own AI because there is no use for a non legal entity to own something.

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