> We're still at
I didn't hear we were ever there?
I didn't hear we were ever there?
https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-copyright
"Can AI Art Be Copyrighted? It has long been the posture of the U.S. Copyright Office that there is no copyright protection for works created by non-humans, including machines. Therefore, the product of a generative AI model cannot be copyrighted."
Is that last bit from the Copyright Office, or is it the author's interpretation? Because I could just as easily imagine the battle being over who or what was the actual creator of the content (i.e. is it a derivative work), rather than whether the thing the machine created is eligible for copyright.
To remove the AI from the equation for a second, imagine that I took four images of living artists' work, placed them in a 2x2 grid, and called that a new artwork. There are two seperate questions to consider: (1) have I infringed upon the original authors' copyrights, and (2) is the new thing I have created eligible for copyright.
The stance that there is "no copyright protection for works created by non-humans" only addresses the second question, not the first question of how it interacts with existing copyrights.
Just like you don't grant copyright on a PDF to Adobe Photoshop... you grant it to the human who guided the program. Photoshop is a tool and the human is the creator.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/ai_art_copyright_usco...
> "For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology – not the human user.
> "Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist – they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output."
> "The USCO will consider content created using AI if a human author has crafted something beyond the machine's direct output. A digital artwork that was formed from a prompt, and then edited further using Photoshop, for example, is more likely to be accepted by the office. The initial image created using AI would not be copyrightable, but the final product produced by the artist might be."
Then where is the line? If I use a painting program that runs a Math.random() on a brush and I use this brush to draw something then is that also created by a non-human?
If I program a robot arm to draw a picture then is that picture also created by a non-human? What if I use a printer?
From what I gather, they just don't consider it a creation in a way that pertains to copyright laws. Like a rock on the beach.
It's a tool, not a conscious being with rights.
Let's be realistic here: there is no oracle indicating something was generated by AI. Most graphic artists have been using partially machine generated work from tools like Photoshop for a decade or more. They just don't mention it.
https://copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf is the letter that lays out why they don't think Midjourney is a paintbrush rather than a monkey.
I can't tell that this is a long-standing interpretation, rather than a recent ruling, conceivably a blip.