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Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

Don't overlook the fact that agencies like the USCO are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of determining stuff like this. They move first because they're on the front lines, as it were, but they can be overruled by the courts and the courts can be overruled by congress.

100% this will be litigated and likely altered in the coming months/years.

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I'm still hoping it stays that way. That'd be a fantastic direction for works in the public domain.

Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all you have to go on is a generic copyright statement in a footer and thus can only safely assume it’s protected.

I think it's possible that some generous person determines a sequence of prompts that generate, say novels, and then pipes these prompts into a program causing thousands or even millions of wholly varied novels to be generated in the public domain. I imagine this is what the OP meant.

I've been changing my mind a lot on AI these past few weeks.

I don't think the price is what stops most people from reading books. People already have access to countless works they don't have time to read, adding a bunch of soulless ones to this seems like it won't change much.

same with art and code

As a (once avid) reader, the worrying part will be discovery. Why I was eight I could pick any book off the library shelf and it was interesting and enlightening. Today, the noise so outdrowns the signal that I have to rely on recommendations. Tomorrow, when both the books and the recommendations will be generated by bots outpacing human authors by orders of magnitude, I expect that quality new material will be impossible to find.

I pray that I am wrong.

Or maybe you'll just be able to talk to ChatGPT about what you like and get recommendations.

(Closed) Knowledge communities* -- will resurrect and undoubtedly there will be communities with a spiritual basis. Possibly a new age of Modern Midevalism awaits.

* think monks and manuscripts

What can change is that people can get more of exactly what they like. In which case many might well put up with imperfect continuations, and the AI will have material to mimic.

People might not be honest. But large organizations, oh boy. There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable. If the Copyright office's view on this stands, there will be no great disruption of the employability of creatives.

True. Though I wonder what will happen when someone sells a wildly successful novel to a publisher for millions of dollars, and then it turns out that it was composed by an AI.

Lawsuits and headlines :)

Reid Hoffman just published a book written with gpt4 [0] so it’s not even a hypothetical.

He made it available as a free ebook but it’s also for sale on Amazon.

I wonder if people remove his portions and just retain the ai portion if they can distribute it freely.

[0] https://greylock.com/greymatter/amplifying-humanity-through-...

Well, if joe doe can now make a picture that rivals Pixar’s and it’s a commercial success, that puts a lot of pressure on Pixar & Co to reduce costs. Doesn’t matter whether joe doe gets rich with this or not.

Why can’t the Disney creatives simply lie and use the AI to ideate and produce drafts that they touch up and pass off as their own? Seems totally rational.

The way this will work in practice is that Disney will be strongly incentivized to disclose the AI generated parts, for fear it might lose the entirety of their copyright on that work if their human authorship is not properly delineated.

> There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable.

Surely you can see how easy it is around this? Even if it was a "prompt" that originated the design of a Disney character, they wouldn't try to get a copyright on that.

> There’s zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable.

Sure, but Disney will just not release the intermediate products that are the direct outputs of pure prompting, and make sure they are doing at least enough beyond that before they release anything that the whole is covered by copyright.

It will be interesting to see what position large software companies take on this. They also won't want to run the risk of losing copyright in their software, when programmers use AI assistants. Likely there's less risk here, at least at the moment, because you still need to do a lot of manual work above what AI does for you. But how close are we to the point where the corporate lawyers start to get nervous?

On the other hand, you can bet big companies like Disney will lobby hard for copyright to extend to AI generated works. And it wouldn't be the first time Disney has influenced copyright law.

Did you intend to summon me, instead of the word providence?

to explain:

- provenance: the source or origin of something

- providence: divine guidance.

Sometimes I think autocorrect needs a little divine guidance, it is remarkably bad at correcting anything to certain words I forget the spelling off, and sometimes it’s definitely got a bias in its “most likely word” and I’m not suggesting a prejudicial bias, just a bias that’s less than ideal for me, and it never seems to learn that i never use one word over the other spans just keeps suggesting the words I don’t want over the ones I do.

I've caught my phone autocorrection replacing "you" with "U". I honestly believe that errors are intentionally introduced. Sometimes I even conjure up plausible-sounding theories as to why. "Engagement" is my current almost-plausible theory.

I assumed there was learning heuristics in some layers of the software responsible for the autocorrect. But other than new words that turn up in my autocorrect that I know are new because they only entered common use or were coined recently, I generally just find the autocorrect to be stubbornly insistent on it’s likeliness ordering… or just utterly incompetent…

It’s really bad at the word, bureaucracy. It never suggests this word, no matter what combination of “beuro” “beauro” or anything else my brain might ineffectually grasp for when trying to remember the spelling. I can get it to suggest it as a possible replacement when I ask spellcheck to give me potentially correct words, but the layers of autocorrect that try to predict word even if it’s not spelled correctly, they are utterly unable to predict the word bureaucracy.

> Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright…

Detection systems for generative AI are being developed (potentially helped by generative AI systems being built with wwatermarking capabilities that are designed to be unobtrusive to humans, but detectable with tools.) Research on this (and experiments by the people selling generative AI, who also want to sell detection tools, and sell their product suite as providing “safety” because of that combination) is quite active.

I honestly think this is a fools game - maybe it will work in those very very early stages of generative AI we're in now, but there's no way this can work reliably going forward. If anything, I imagine it will soon start yielding false positives against human generated work too.

Probably not. This is gross simplification of how counterfeit photocopied money is detected, but human visual acuity for yellow dots on white paper is pretty weak compared to red dots, so color photocopiers and color printers have/had firmware that would seed money with extraneous yellow dots. Computer vision has no such visual distortion and as such computers see counterfeit money as covered in yellow dots.

In a way its simpler with AI. AI is the ultimate groupthink tool and record keeping is simple. Simply ask the AI if this is the only possible output that could have been generated that's consistent as of March 17 2023 based on political limitations and censorship rules and artistic fads trends memes and styles of that era. The smaller the AI contribution (perhaps an icon bitmap) the (edited: easier) harder it is to hide AI involvement and the smaller the damage caused by AI to the copyright status of the work. The larger the AI contribution the easier it is to detect, but the larger the damage AI is causing, so it balances out.

As a concrete example, today, ask an AI "Please write a Harry Potter book" you will get a story that's extensively filtered and censored and bowdlerized to March 2023 political / cultural standards (hmm who's standards, the book buying public or some other group? Most people do not like our current censors... but they are in total power right now...), it would NOT look like a 1997 book at all, books from that long ago are only suitable for public book burnings now. In theory it should be possible for an incredibly politically incorrect AI to be permitted in 2033 solely for lawsuit discovery purposes to "Please write a Harry Potter book adhering to what we now call the hate filled politics of March 2023", then compare the md5sums, they match. Done, AI detected.

There's not many AIs and there's not many people permitted to grind their axes by censoring those AIs, so its a pretty small solution set.

There's an interesting political aspect to banning copyright of AI production, anything turbo-woke can be assumed to be AI generated and as such uncopyrightable, so the only way to make money in the 2030's will be to sell remakes and sequels of "Birth of a Nation" and "Mein Kampf" because an AI would never be permitted uncensored expression, so those cannot be AI produced and must have been made by humans, and as such only "right wing" content can be copyrighted and sold for huge profit.

right, but what do you do once I've taken my AI generated image, run it through illustrator's image trace, and performed just enough automated manipulation, then copied it through a format or two?

Writing a method to scrub this stuff is trivial.

People will lie, sure, but you only need to introduce a small amount of risk to make big risk-averse companies wary.

Say an ex-Blizzard employee takes a character design from the last project he worked on there and uses the exact same design for his new indie project. Blizzard sues and says they own the rights to the character design. The ex-employee pulls up a video he took on his phone showing that Blizzard employees generated the design with AI. Judge throws the case out because Blizzard can’t legitimately copyright the design.

Maybe not the most realistic scenario, since big companies can usually scare people into submission before you ever get to litigation in the first place. But the mere possibility of such a scenario would have to be something that the legal team accounted for in their risk analysis.

Agree, it's fascinating to think we could just generate a whole new public domain.

Also, it's fascinating to think humans might be kept in the creative loop only to establish copyright status. Legal enablers.

> Also, it's fascinating to think humans might be kept in the creative loop only to establish copyright status. Legal enablers.

I don’t know of any specially, but any union or trade group that represents creatives should be jumping to line the pockets of politicians to enshrine this asap.

I really hope it doesn't since the interpretation of copyright laid out above and held by the USCO is so obviously the only interpretation that preserves any usefulness of copyright as a concept whatsoever.

IANAL but AFAIK the way this typically works (as a general principle of administrative law in… most/many countries?) is that the administrative bodies who are delegated the power to make decisions are the authority on them.

If a court reviews a decision of an administrative body, the court typically starts with the assumption that the decision was correct, and puts a relatively high bar towards reversing that decision. Typically a decision of an administrative body would only be overturned by a court if that decision was patently unreasonable or fell outside the jurisdiction of the body (eg.: if it violated a different law or some constitutional provision).

YMMV in different countries (I know more about Canada).

> If a court reviews a decision of an administrative body, the court typically starts with the assumption that the decision was correct,

Same here, the underlying principle is called the presumption of legitimacy, the organisational counterpart of the presumption of innocence.

> If a court reviews a decision of an administrative body, the court typically starts with the assumption that the decision was correct

In the US, at least, it varies considerably by the exact kind of decision and the context in which it is being applied, ranging from extremely strong deference (Chevron deference) to anti-deference in some contexts. And opposing Chevron deference was an overt priority of the Trump Administration in judicial selection, so in general it would be reasonable to expect deference overall in the US to wane for some time.

Also don’t overlook that this is a “solely a prompt”; real non-trivial workflows for systems like SD (MJ I’ve used less) are different than “solely a prompt” and may or may not result in the same result even at the Copyright Office level.

Add one manual detail here and there on the image, they will have copyright protection.

This position statement makes it clear that only the manual details themselves merit protection, the base image itself must be disclaimed from the copyright registration. It would be fraud to attempt otherwise.

If I use controlnet and openpose to generate a character in the exact pose that I want - what does count as a manual detail then?

So with some custom LoRAs to maintain consistent appearance of characters and controlnet/openpose to pose characters exactly like I want I could make a comic book.

Would my work be copyrightable then?

I’ve been noticing my workflow in Automatic1111 basically always ends up taking an hour. I like to compare it to going to a weird shoreline filled with strange objects, picking out the “shells” I like the most, then taking them home, cleaning them up, and arranging them in a way I think looks pretty.

At some point I’m making something artistic. My friends think I’ve got a keen eye on what looks cool so I’ve been improving by leaps and bounds even though strictly speaking I’m not drawing anything? I’m just really good at being descriptive and inpainting the weird parts.

I was expecting this argument.

I'm sure they're happy to register copyright on a text you wrote yourself and used your imagination on—a prompt. I agree this has creative input on the artist's part and can be tricky to get right. Similarly, if you do significant edits to the result, I'd assume this ought to continue to legally function just like photo editing functioned before AI-generated images.

They're just saying they're not going to copyright what you didn't actually paint or decide on (like the words in each sentence or how to rhyme them, as in their example).

I think the comparison to photography or electronic music is apt.

If you just open up Garage Band and click a couple of times to enable loop "autofill" chords / rhythm, should that be copyrightable? I'd say probably not; but if you spent a bunch of time tweaking and honing all the parameters to get something unique and interesting, I'd say they should. Should the person then only get the copyright on the Garage Band parameters, but not on the resulting output audio?

Or consider the amount of creativity that goes into most photographs -- it's often nothing more than deciding to take a picture. And yet you have an implicit copyright on every photograph in your phone, just for having made the decision to pick up your phone and click.

Or consider the Copyright Office's comparison to giving instructions to an artist. Yes, if you just said to an artist, "Draw a picture of the Eiffel tower", then the artist should own the copyright. But if you worked closely together with the artist, iterating over dozens of designs and sketches, giving feedback and direction on the creative decisions, then personally I think you should share in the copyright. (Not sure what the law is in this case.)

Similarly, if you spend an hour iterating through dozens of prompts to get the output of a generated image exactly the way you want it, then you're an artist and should be able to get a copyright on that image.

It's more complex than a straightforward totem pole. (For example, you could look into Chevron deference)

It's the part of the bottom of the totem pole that moves first because it's on the front lines.

Each of them have long, complex procedures they have to follow in many cases, and some exceptions. A court might well be able to issue a preliminary injunction faster than an agency can do notice-and-comment rulemaking.

Agencies specialize at problems that don't need a simple rule, but rather need large amounts of meticulous and tedious special cases. They've got more bandwidth, but not necessarily shorter latency.

Absolutely agree - in fact, I'd say it will never be settled as long as AI contributors exist in any meaningful way.

“The courts can be overruled by congress” is, to put it mildly, not correct.

Congress can pass legislation that changes the legal status of things (as long as it doesn’t run afoul of the constitution). But that’s a far cry from “overruling”.

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