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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Step one: Take a piece of AI-generated art.

Step two: Very slightly modify it. (Visual art: Apply a color filter, draw in a single element, have a different AI change some details, etc. Music: Subtly change the tempo or add one minor audio effect.)

Step three: Copyright the work as something "made by a human with AI assistance."

If challenged, step four: Claim that humans have been making works of art with all available technical means from the dawn of civilization, and that to draw an arbitrary line in the sand at assisted generation is unprincipled.

And, basically, lmao at the courts, as usual.

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> unprincipled

> lmao at the courts

I see this a lot on HN: the idea that courts rule based on principles. It’s a strange viewpoint. There are courts of law. They rule based on law. To the extent law is messy (it is), court rulings will be messy.

There isn’t a court in the world that would make a ruling based on your, my, or anyone else’s principles.

> I see this a lot on HN

It goes right along with the belief that capitalism is a naturalistic ideal, as opposed to a temporary state of societal organization maintained for the benefit of a few people.

Also, for the reasons you give, copyright itself is devoid of principled logic.

Until capitalism collapses, which is inevitable if we believe Marx's thoughts on the matter, copyright is an important way to protect and pay people who make things so they don't starve.

What? Capitalism is just fine without the artificial notion of copyright.

We can pay labourers for their time producing works. We don't need pay-per-copy.

Artists tend to be very upset when they make a work for hire, it gets popular decades later, and they don't get any royalties.

Big reason why the writer's guild is currently on strike. Super naive view that people who make stuff shouldn't continue to be compensated if someone is getting value from that work. That's part of why programming can be so lucrative.

They’ll likely just decide it’s not different enough. Courts aren’t computers; they can look at intent.

A classic essay:

What colour are your bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

The recent Warhol Foundation vs Goldsmith ruling should make this clear. Warhol basically did just put some color filters on a photo by Goldsmith, and the Supreme Court ruled that no, that's not allowed, it's not transformative enough to be fair use, that's still Goldsmith's photo.

That particular ruling was able to be made because the original work was available to make a comparison with. However, it's well established in the US that the author of an adaptive work is generally entitled to copyright over the modified portions.[0] So a work merely has to be presented as an human-authored adaptation of an AI template.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

The court can rule that you have copyright only on the modifications you did, and if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it.

> if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it.

If the AI generated portion exists nowhere else, and if it's not _obviously_ an AI-generated work, how would a court know what's generated and what's been modified?

It's fun to see people who are unfamiliar with the discovery process in law.

Even easier, use a physical camera and take a very good photo of your laptop screen. You'll own the copyright of the photograph.

My understanding of how this works is that you own a copyright on the modifications to the original image, but not on the original work produced by the AI. The way you're explaining it isn't consistent with how the law may actually be applied.

Do you honestly believe that legal thinkers haven’t been dealing with these types of arguments and problems for centuries?

I mean really. Do you think you’re proposing an original idea here?

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