Artist appeals copyright denial for prize-winning AI-generated work
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That is hilarious. Either he's a very dedicated troll, or he genuinely has no idea how MJ was trained and doesn't grasp how absurd his demand is.
The art community has already solved that for the time being: ask for WIPs, sketches, or a speedpaint video. A proof of process, rather than of work.
> "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" is a wholly original image expressing his idea, Allen said, and to produce that human expression, he dedicated more than 100 hours to refining Midjourney text prompts through an iterative process that he estimates took more than 600 prompts.
Then his work are the prompts and the idea, not the image. He can copyright the text he input into the machine, and perhaps patent a description of the iterative process he employed - but not the graphical result.
Proof of process is totally reasonable, since all art should have a clear provenance, and I’m sure the original prompt & seed could prove his ownership.
This goes beyond your point, but the argument that AI Art can’t be copyrighted because it was trained on copyrighted works is a little hackneyed. Every human artist is trained on copyrighted works, reproduces that art during school, and often incorporates referential elements into their own art.
The problem is that while some people view machine learning as equivalent to human learning (including some case law apparently) I do not believe most people see it that way. The way machine learning algorithms work today is decidedly very unique.
A human artist learns to draw or paint a picture, but diffusion models are literally going from noise to final image directly. There is no sketching, or painting. If it generates artifacts that make an image look "drawn" it is because it "learned" what those artifacts look like.
Even if a program really did paint something from scratch, and you sat there and directed it by typing in "over 600 prompts"... That's a lot closer to commissioning an artist than it is producing art. (Apparently, an artist who is very hard to communicate with, but thankfully has unlimited patience.)
Photography is an interesting comparison point specifically because it is one of the lowest effort things that a human can possibly do to have copyright eligibility. I'm not saying photography is not a valid art form, but every picture you take is eligible for copyright equally even if it is not particularly creative. That's not the point of photographs being eligible for copyright, though. As flawed as copyright may be, one thing you can say about copyright is that it is very nuanced and specific, and the reasoning that led to the legal status of copyright in photography is not likely to be repeated for diffusion models. The legal status for photography seems to hinge on the fact that it clears the "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" requirement. This is a pretty complicated concept and I'm not a lawyer and won't try to conjecture on whether or not results from machine learning models used today could clear this bar.
Either way, let's stop directly comparing "learning" for machine models that do things that humans literally can't and don't, such as "synthesize a fully-formed painting out of a bunch of latent noise" by analyzing trillions of pictures, to human learning wherein spend years and thousands of hours learning how to draw and paint (needless to say, analyzing factors fewer pictures in the process). They both behave very differently and accomplish very different goals. The only thing they really have in common is probably that they both boil down to statistics on some level.
At 600 prompts, I think it's at least worth considering whether that similarity is just a superficial matter of the medium you're interacting with the tool in (text) as opposed to actual deficiency of creative input to the work.
Moreover, your actions can be exactly the same as directing a human yet still qualify you as the author of the work when that human is replaced by a tool - as with, say, a voice-activated camera.
> [...] the "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" requirement. This is a pretty complicated concept and I'm not a lawyer and won't try to conjecture on whether or not results from machine learning models used today could clear this bar.
Whether it's fixed in a tangible medium isn't the contentious term for generated outputs. That just means the the work is, for instance, written on a piece of paper - as opposed to being only a general idea in your head. It's well-established that the medium of digital images counts for this and, even if not, Allen's work had been printed out.
All this says is you have no idea how much skill, theory and planning goes into digital photography when people are pursuing it as an art form and not just record keeping
Really artistic photographers put in an enormous amount of work into a photo, scouting locations, finding the right time and lighting for the shot they want, sometimes even waiting for the right season
The artistic value of digital photography is embedded in the artists skills, knowledge, and time
Comparing Digital Photographers to AI prompters who can generate a mountain of sludge with a single prompt is a joke
The guy invested 100+ hours into creating one image. You should be ashamed of yourself for your shallow dismissal of his work.
I will never respect "prompters" as artists. No one should. A shallow dismissal is all they deserve
Photographers are not artists btw. They just point a lens and press a button. Anyone can do that, no skill required. I will never respect them.
Why should we consider someone an artist when they write prompts to a computer to have it create paintings? It's clear that the painting is not being created by them
Continuing to draw this false equivalence between prompting and photography is not helping you. And simply replacing words in what I'm saying, mad-libs style, to parrot back to me, is not the own you think it is
Well then, no copyright on any digital artworks. You can copyright the idea and mouse movements and clicks you input into the machine, but not the graphical result. The machine drew that.
Pixar gets to copyright the sequence of mouse clicks they did in RenderMan, but the rendered frames of Toy Story are not protected. A bunch of algorithms did that.
Your specific implementation of algorithms that you came up with that generate a detailed game world are yours, but the generated assets that you ship with your game are in the public domain. No copyright for you.
A few replies have been concerned with artwork, but this interpretation would mean basically no executable software could be copyrighted, only source code. People write source code, and a compiler turns that into executable code, performing many transformations and optimisations that the programmer might not even be aware of as part of the process of compilation.
Would an artist who creates a private AI model on their own art be allowed to copyright everything that comes out? What about if it is a small model, based on top of a much larger model with other people's art but copies their personal artstyle very closely (a low rank adapter, or LoRA, in stable diffusion terms)? What if the artist sketches the outline then uses a model that matches the image to that (known as a controlnet), along with the above?
The answer might just be "never", if Chancellor Masters and Scholars of The University of Oxford v. Narendra Publishing house's ruling is upheld, since mathematical formulas can't be copyrighted, and if AI art is reduced to an output of a mathematical formula, then it makes sense to always treat it as copyright-free.