Hacker News Reader

Comment by popohauer | Hacker News Reader

It's going to be interesting to see how the lawsuits against OpenAI by content creators plays out. If the courts rule that AI generated content is a derivative work of all the content it was trained on it could really flip the entire gen AI movement on its head.

View on HN

If it were a derivative work[1] (and sufficiently transformational) then it's allowed under current copyright law and might not be the slam dunk ruling you were hoping for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

"sufficiently transformational" is carrying a lot of water here. At minimum it would cloud the issue and might expose anyone using AI to lawsuits where they'd potentially have to defend each generated image.

Sufficiently transformational only applies to copyrightability, but AI works are not copyrightable under current US law, so it's a non-issue.

Oh, interesting, I didn't realize that's how it worked. Thanks for the additional context around this. Guess it's not as upending as I thought it could be.

Not if it is AI generated. So far only humans can be original enough to warrant copyrights, at least in the US .

BTW, the right to prepare derivative works belongs to the copyright holder of the reference work.

I doubt that many AI works are in fact derivative works. Sure, some bear enough similarity, but a gross majority likely doesn't.

My biggest fear is that the big players will drop a few billion dollars to silence the copyright holders with power go away, and new rules are put in place that will make open-source models that can't do the same essentially illegal.

If the courts do rule that way, I would expect a legislative race between different countries to amend the relevant laws. Visual generative AI is just too lucrative a thing.

…then I'll keep enjoying my Stable Diffusion and pirated models.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com