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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

> something new based off of that

But where do you draw the line? If AI imagines 3 people around a business table in front of a flip chart, is that copyright infringement on similar stock photos? Note that in the AI created image, the people are unique, they never existed, the business table is unique, the flip chart is unique, and in general you can't point to any existing photo it was trained over and say "it just copied this item here".

If so, why isn't it also copyright infringement when a human photographer stages another similar shot?

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"But where do you draw the line"

Well that's sort of the whole thing with copyright law. It's fairly arbitrary. Copyright specifically forbids derivative works: "A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already exist- ing works."

It's vague on purpose because copyright infringements generally need to be handled on a case by case basis.

Now there are AI's trained on images that are copyrighted. If the image is copyrighted, should the AI have been allowed to train on it?

The reason human training/inspiration isn't specifically forbidden is because it can't be. We are impressioned by things whether we like it or not. Regardless, we can't prove where someone's inspiration came from.

But the act of training an AI on copyrighted images is deliberate. I feel that's a key difference.

> The reason human training/inspiration isn't specifically forbidden is because it can't be. We are impressioned by things whether we like it or not. Regardless, we can't prove where someone's inspiration came from.

And there's plenty of cases that say if you're too inspired, that's illegal and/or you own damagaes/royalties.

https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/blurred-lines-...

Then the AI is performing a sort of collage of copyrighted work and the AI / prompt writer would not own the copyright to the derivative work. If a photographer stages a photo based on an existing photo, and it shares enough features with the original work, it likely would be copyright infringement.

The court has already ruled that you can't own the derivative work anyways, because copyright law requires an individual artist. If I ask bob to make a picture for me, bob actually owns the copyright to start (but can assign it to me). I don't automatically get given copyright because I 'prompted' bob with what I wanted drawn (draw me a mouse). Copyright is given to the artist on the artists specific output.

If I ask an AI for a picture, there is no artist 'bob' to be assigned ownership under copyright law and therefor it's not copyrightable under existing law.

Funny how originally all these pro-AI art people were anti-copyright law but I can see them sometime soon lobbying for MORE restrictive copyright law (granting it in a larger pool or circumstances hence making more things copyrighted) so that they can overcome this.

Why are you comparing a product that's powered by web scraping and GPUs and hundreds of millions of dollars to a human being? This is a product.

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