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Comment by 40yearoldman | Hacker News Reader

How is this different than attaching 10 paint cans of different color from strings and poking hold in them and letting them swing?

Could the creator of the ai producing code then hold copyright, or maybe it’s those who found the weights?

This ruling seems to suggest any method of automating works would not qualify for copyright.

If so. We are just one step closer to abandoning the notion of a copyright, which still is the only logical solution in a world where we can have and do anything we desire at the click of a button.

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> How is this different than attaching 10 paint cans of different color from strings and poking hold in them and letting them swing?

The "creator" of the art in that case is also the creator of the system which generates the art. You didn't create Stable Diffusion, MidJourney or whatever else, it's just a tool you have access to.

I'm not sure if that's a difference that should matter, but it's clearly a notable difference.

So you think the creators of mid journey could copyright this art piece?

I doubt it, that would be like someone setting up the hypothetical "swinging paint cans" for public use then trying to claim copyright on the product. I think the slam dunk case would be you create your own system, train it on data you own, and then you own the output.

Again, this doesn't strike me as a useful standard for copyright, but I think it's the state of the law today. Obviously with new technology there's a need to revisit the law, and honestly even without the new tech copyright law was already a steaming mess.

I bet I can create a machine that uses those 10 cans of paint to do computations. That's all a computer is, really. Those 10 cans of paint swung by an artist are a creative endeavor, but my output as a software engineer with the 10 cans of paint is not? Seems arbitrary and unfair and probably shouldn't stand careful legal scrutiny.

The law is nothing if not arbitrary.

If a developer writes their own Stable Diffusion variant from scratch, uses nothing more supportive than Numpy and writes all the supporting code themself, scrapes the web for data themself, trains image generating models on their own hardware, and then uses their own self created tool/system to generate AI, should that be copyrightable? In this case, everything short of Numpy would be the hand written code logic of that one developer (or small team). The data used to train the system could be argued is no different than a person viewing the world they live within... copyrightable?

Stepping into the thread, but as someone who agrees with the copyright office, in the case you laid out, I think there would be a better argument there actually for copyright, yes. Personally, I disagree with the last part (a tired argument about AI imho) but it feels like it would have a better argument.

I disagree with the copyright office. I think my creative output as an engineer is not necessarily less creative or original than an artist. We are making an arbitrary distinction here. Artists make devices, machines sometimes. Is the output of those machines not copyrightable? I bet it is.

So. The string lengths, colors, and hole position in the paint cans along with initial velocity and angle are what can qualify for copyright?

Are paint brushes just tools people have access to, does the manufacturer of the paint brush own the painting?

Prompts are no different than positions and angles the artist instructs the tool to motion. The only real difference is the ratio of perceived work to output.

Even a prompt could take years to derive. I am 40. And 30 years ago I could have not com up with the following, making the prompt below 40 years in the making.

“Field of dead dreams, with copyright monsters flying above looking for there next meal”.

Spell check fixed a few things, along with typo correction, does Apple know own a copyright of my work?

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