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Comment by LegitShady | Hacker News Reader

its not even that on their own those works cant be copywritten. its that even when you make changes to those works, your changes might qualify for copyright but they do not affect the copyright status of the ai generated portions of the work.

if you used ai to design a new superhero and then added pink shoes, yellow hair, and a beard, only those three elements would possibly be able to be protected by copywrite. your additions do not change the status of the underlying ai work which cannot be protected and is available for anyone to use.

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> if you used ai to design a new superhero and then added pink shoes, yellow hair, and a beard

Wouldn't that depend heavily on the prompt used (among other factors such as image to image and ControlNet)? You could be specifying lots of detail about the design in your prompt, and the AI could only be generating concept artwork with little variation from what you already provided.

If I'm already providing the pose, the face, and the outfit for a character (say via ControlNet and Textual Inversion), generating <my_character> should be no different from generating <superman>, that is to say, the copyright already exists thanks to my work and the AI is just a tool, the output of which should have no bearing on who owns that copyright (DC is going to be perfectly able to challenge my commercial use of AI generated superman artwork).

According to the copyright board a promot is not anymore than any person commissioning a work from an artist, which does not provide copyright, and the lack of human authorship for the design decisions still stops it from being protected by copyright.

That makes me think even the copyright board is not confident of their answer.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

They released this guidance earlier this month. It isn't that difficult to understand.

Textual inversion involves providing self-created images, which should confer copyright in the same way AI images of DC's superman are considered to fall under the copyright of DC. In other words, commissioning fanart still allows the original owner of the IP to exert copyright -- shouldn't that be the case here?

How could that be ever really be enforceable?

If I use an AI tool to design my Superhero, can't I just submit it without disclosing the help I received from an AI.

I get that it would be very nice to prevent AI SPAM copyrighting of every possible superhero, but if I use the AI to come up with a concept, then quickly redraw it myself with pen and paper, I feel like it would never be provable that it came from an AI.

you would be committing fraud. what happens if a criminal commits fraud?

Redrawing something by hand creates a new copyrightable work, so it certainly isn't fraud to claim you own the copyright in a work of art you drew based on an AI output.

It depends if your redrawing is substantially different enough from the original image to earn copyright on its own. Your changes to an image from ChatGPT do not affect the copyrightability of the original content. If you've simply redrawn what the computer designed it may not be substantial enough to earn copyright. If you've made changes, it may only be copyrightable for those changes.

The example was redrawing something by hand that was computer generated originally.

It would be pretty much impossible for a hand drawn work of art to not be sufficiently original. Hand drawn art doesn't look the same as what a computer produces. Originality has a very low threshold, simply pointing my camera at something and hitting click is almost always enough to show originality.

At any rate it isn't fraud to take the legal position that you are an original enough artist to have copyright in the work. If taking a legal position was "fraud" any attorney who lost a court motion would be whisked away to jail.

Edited to add: the copyright registration form asks if you are the "author" not if you are "original."

If you think you own a design because you hand drew a version of it someone else invented, you're gonna have a bad time. Please redraw a superman picture someone else made and then go to have it copyrighted, and tell me how that goes for you.

It would go fine, since I see the form has a question "is this a derivative work". I put yes, and this means my claim is only for what was original to me when I drew the drawing based on another drawing of Superman.

But I see we've moved away from the orignal point that it would be difficult for anybody to know an AI helped someone make the drawing if they redrew and didn't disclose it was a redrawing.

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