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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

it's sort of non-controversial at the extreme end I think - where there is no human contribution, why should there be protection?

But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be:

- I wrote the prompt (not enough)

- I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in the US?)

- I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)

- I made equal or more contribution to the final result (this better clearly have copyright protection or we are in real trouble)

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> I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)

Hmm I don't think that would be enough. I'd expect that would only make the modifications themselves copyrightable, but not the whole modified work including the AI parts.

Compare for example the case where the US copyright office ruled that, when assembling AI-generated images and human-written text into a comic book, only the human-made elements themselves (text, arrangement) get copyright protection, but not the images.

E.g. if you generate an AI photo and color grade it, i expect only the color grading would be protected (if that is even significant enough to be protectable), not the rest. And someone else could re-color-grade the same image without infringing your copyright.

I think it should be at least an 80/20 rule.

80% of the code should be hand written by you. 20% can be allocated by AI for corrections or suggestions.

AI generated code should never be copyrighted otherwise. It's objectively common sense.

I'd say that any use of an AI trained on people's creations without (real) consent and compensation should not be protected.

Is it fair to say, then, that artists who have trained on the work of prior artists should also not be able to protect their works unless they have directly received consent and have compensated all the artists whose works they have viewed and potentially learned from over their lifetime?

There's some big differences:

Artist are human

There is a dramatic difference between learning from or being inspired by an artist and incorporating it wholesale into an LLM

Artists can use human judgement and knowledge of social norms to decide what art is or is not appropriate to utilize. (e.g. a painting in the museum versus someone's tribute to a dead loved one on DeviantArt)

There's a big difference both in the amount of learning and the amount of output between an AI and a human.

There's a big difference between an artist and a megacorporation.

Andy Warhol did in fact compensate the artists whose work he incorporated into his art. So there is definitely precident.

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