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Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

Try taking photographs like the ones you see in Nat Geo, or museum exhibits, and you'll quickly realize the camera is most definitely NOT doing all the work.

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But the thing is that you don't need to take Nat Geo-level photographs to be considered the owner and sole creator of the photograph. I can pull out my phone right now and press one button - and I'll be the rightful owner of whatever comes out on the other end. The resulting photo will be produced because of settings that were set automatically (with no intervention or any required knowledge of what any of them do), and run through several image processing algorithms (that very few people understand or even give thought to). Point being - why is any near-zero interaction with a camera enough to be considered proper authorship, but every level of interaction with gAI never authorship, regardless of what is done?

Right. The same can be said for AI art. If you think you can exactly reproduce stylistically of some of the more popular AI work, you would be mistaken.

I agree, to an extent. I mentioned it in another comment but IMO there's a big difference between someone who types a low-effort prompt like "silly image of a cat" and someone who spends hours or days iterating on a prompt. Or someone who uses AI to iteratively tweak an image (which may or may not have initially been AI-generated.) Or someone who creates art out of smaller components created by AI (e.g. textures.)

No there isn't (a big difference)

Like, really. If I open ms paint and just do some low effort scrawl, I have copyright on that. Level of effort has not ever decided if something is copyrightable or not.

For derivative works, there is real effort required to de distinct from the original. Maybe that's a more interesting discussion... Is low effort use of an AI insufficient to prevent the copyright from reverting to the original authors it was trained on?

On top of that "level of effort" is obviously very subjective.

It’s just a new phenomenon that you can get a relatively sophisticated result from a short sentence. But the amount of efforts or iterations doesn’t condition anything here.

The camera is doing the work of recording the image, although certainly the human operator is doing the work of composition, lighting, etc. The fact remains, no matter how much human work goes into every other aspect of producing the photograph, the camera is the object that is capturing the image.

Edit: not to say that I think this is a relevant factor! No more than the computer recording the keys you type or producing the physical printed page should be relevant for a book's copyright.

Right. It's not doing "all the work" as the parent said. (Not to mention the editing process that comes afterwards!) Indeed, some photographers distinguish the two as "taking" a photograph versus "making" a photograph.

If you buy an expensive camera with expensive lenses, you will be able to take such photos, won't you?

In fact, you can take such photos with a cheap camera and cheap lenses if you are skilled. No, equipment does not make a photograph. (source: I own expensive cameras. Taking good photographs is still hard.)

Time and place matter. Your subject matters. Your composition matters. Your lighting matters. When it's done well, the viewer doesn't realize this.

I love Ted Orland's panorama photographs - https://www.anseladams.com/products/tree-in-snowstorm-yosemi... and https://www.freestylephoto.com/making-holga-panoramas

While he shoots with the cheapest of toy cameras, he is very skilled.

> 1966, Ted enrolled in as a fledgling photographer in Ansel Adams' Yosemite Photography Workshop --an event which markedly changed the course of his artistic life. He returned to Yosemite as Ansel's workshop assistant the following year, and in 1970 moved to Carmel to work fulltime as Ansel's Assistant and printer of Adams' Yosemite Special Edition Prints. Ted also returned for fifteen seasons as an Instructor at Ansel's Yosemite Workshops.

Only if you get into the right place at the right time and use your tools well...

Ernest Hemingway: Good pictures, what camera do you use?

Irving Penn: What typewriter do you use?

Maybe.

There's a technical aspect around camera and photo settings. This is largely objective. In certain conditions, certain settings deliver certain qualities.

Then, there's a subjective side. Framing, composition, other artistic decisions.

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