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US rejects AI copyright for famous state fair-winning Midjourney art
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Why do photographers get copyright over their pictures then?
They're just pointing a camera at something and pressing a button.
AI is a tool like any other.
Because photographs don't require other people photographs to work. It just requires the labour of the engineers at Nikon and you payed them by buying the camera.
Use an AI algorithm with no training set and see how good your tool is.
What if I used an open source algo with my own photographs as a dataset 🤔
Then absolutely go ahead. That isn't what the guy in the post did tough.
I don't see why you wouldn't be able to keep copyright then. Everything involved would have been owned by you.
That is a big difference to how other generative models work though, which do use other people's work.
Because you would have to prove that the AI only learned from your work and it’s my understanding that there is no way to track what is used as learning material or even have an AI unlearn something.
The people that is stealing art designed their algorithm to not contain proof that they stole art. If they are legally required to prove what training data they used in order to get a copyright then they will design the AI around that. That would immediately disqualify most of the current AIs because they have all been fed stolen art but I am sure they have the tech and capital to start over. And you know, Fuck em.
Did you know that it is illegal to take a photograph of the Eiffel tower at night? France lacks the right of panorama, and the lighting system was designed by someone still living. So photographs do require violating copyright law sometimes.
no no. You are not REQUIRED to break other peoples copyright in order to produce something with a camera. It is something you CAN do if you want to. AI literally cant function without a library of other peoples photos.
Someone else brought this up in this thread and it is the only circumstance should be able to copyright an AI artwork. If you own the copyright to every single piece of art in the training data. If I take 10.000 photos that are mine and feed them into an AI that produces more photos that are entirely based on my work then it should be copyrightable.
Everything in this world is owned by someone, either privately or by the government. (Well, astrophotography is an exception, but I did say 'in this world') You CANNOT take a photo without pointing it at something that is owned by someone. Is photography theft then?
Let's break down some of the confusion you're experiencing.
If you want to learn more you can google "photography usage rights" or "photography license agreement" and deep dive the untold number of blog posts about it. You can check out this blog post for a crash course if you need good starting point.
If books are more your fancy there's Nancy Wolff's The Professional Photographer's Legal Handbook and the American Society of Media Photographer's Professional Business Practices in Photography; both are pretty old but a very easy to understand. John Harrington's Best Business Practices for Photographers also goes into detail and is more recent, but very broad in what it covers. Technically, there's the demo for fotobiz X which will let you make a sample contract from their templates.
I'm sure you'll find more resources but these books were my go-tos when I was working as a photographer. If you feel like socializing you check out your local APA (American Photographic Artists) or ASMP (American Society of Photographic Artists) chapters. Not sure if membership is still a requirement for attending events but it doesn't hurt to ask.
Owning something and owning the copyright to something isn't the same. You cant just make insane claims about something and expect me to engage with it. You are fully capable of taking photos that you own with the current copyright framework or photographers wouldnt be a profession and nothing would have pictures of anything.
And, as you said, you are fully capable of taking images that you own with the current copyright framework and creating legal AI images. If you don't see the parallel between the two concepts and instead revert to insults and name calling, well, then I think I'll just invoke "don't feed trolls" and move on.
What insults and name calling? Shit, If I had known that you were this fragile I wouldn't have bothered to respond properly and just called you retarded.
Because the human element is in everything they had to do to set up the photograph, from physically going to the location, to setting up the camera properly, to ensuring the right lighting, etc.
In an AI generated image, the only human element is in putting in a prompt(s) and selecting which picture you want. The AI made the art, not you, so only the enhancements on it are copywritable because those are the human element you added.
This scenario is closer to me asking why can't I claim copyright over the objects in my photograph, be
This scenario is closer to me asking why I can't claim the copyright of the things I took a photograph of, and only the photograph itself. The answer usually being because I didn't make those things, somebody/something else did, I only made the photo.
Edit: Posted this without realising I hadn't finished my last paragraph. Oops
It's honestly pretty much the same with ai, there's lots of settings, tweaking, prompt writing, masking and so on.. that you need to set up in order to get the result you desire.
A photographer can take shitty pictures and you can make shitty stuff with AI but you can also use both tools to make what you want and put lots of work into it.
The difference is it's not you making the art.
The photographer is the one making the photo, it is their skill in doing ehat I described above that directly makes the photo. Whereas your prompts, tweaking, etc. are instructions for an AI to make the scenery for you based on other people's artwork.
I actually have a better analogy for you...
If I trained a monkey to take photos, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting photo are, I don't own those photos, the monkey does. Though in actuality, the work goes to the public domain in lieu as non-human animals cannot claim copyright.
If you edit that monkey's photo, you own the edit, but you still don't own the photo because the monkey took it.
The same should, does currently seem to, apply to AI. It is especially true when that AI is trained on information you don't hold copyright or licensing for.
Actually... If an animal you own/trained makes art... you did get to have the copyright to the art, until recently with these same legal developments. Now it's less clear.
I also agree more with the other posters interpretation in general. We copyright art made by random chance emergent effects (Polluck et al.), process based art (Morris Louis et al.), performance art (so many examples.. Adrian Piper comes to mind), ephemeral art, math art, and photography, as the poster says. None of those artists are fully in control of every aspect of the final project- the art makes itself, in part, in each example.
If a human uses a math equation for the geometric output of a printer, and they tweak the variables to get the best looking output, we consider that art by law. Ai is exactly the same.
It's funny, I find that illustrators hate ai art, but "studio" artists (for lack of a better term) usually adore it
If you're referring to Wikimedia's infamous Monkey Selfie Dispute, which is the case I'm most aware of, then the reason its less clear is because its hard to determine the sufficient amount of human creativity required to render a human copyright over an animals work.
I'd argue that last bit doesn't apply to the AI, because while you do provide inspiration in terms of your prompting, tweaking, etc., it is ultimately always the AI that interprets those prompts and creates the artwork. Supervising an AI is not the same thing as setting up and taking a photograph, or drawing a painting.
If you're going to cite artists, it would be a good idea to at least link their work for context for those who aren't in the know... As I don't know these artists, I can't make an informed response, so I'll move on.
There's a big difference between a human designing a math formula to output a desired geometry, and a human instructing an AI to do the same.
By having the AI do the artistic work, it'll always be the one making the artistic choices based on your instruction, and therefore the art is not yours to own.
Actually, that’s a really good analogy, and it helped me think about this in a different way.
What if the monkey is the camera in this situation, and the training the monkey part is like designing the sensor on the camera. You can copyright the sensor design(AI Model), and the photo taken using the sensor (output), so the same should apply to AI art, shouldn’t it?
You're losing the analogy here because these things aren't analogous. You can only copyright what comes out of the sensor because you took the photograph. Not everything that comes out of a camera sensor is copyrightable, such as photos taken by non-humans.
There's a fundemental difference between a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do, and an independent thing that acts based on your instruction. When you take a photo, you have a direct hand in making it - when you direct an AI to make art, it is the one making the art, you just choose what it makes.
I understand what you mean, but you’re still directing the Camera; you’re placing it, adjusting the shot, perfecting lighting etc. Isn’t AI art the same? You have a direct hand in making what you want; through prompting, controlnet, Loras and whatever new thing comes along.
No, because the human involvement in creating AI art is so little that it's considered de minimis --i.e. so minimal that it's not worth talking into account. All you're doing is putting a prompt into the generator--regardless of how much time and effort you put into crafting the prompt, it's the AI interpreting that prompt and deciding how to convert it into an image, not you. In comparison, when you take a photograph, you're interpreting the scene, you're deciding that the object you're photographing is interesting enough for a photo, you're deciding what should and shouldn't be in the shot, you're deciding the composition of the shot, and you're deciding what settings and filters to use in the shot.
It's like the difference between someone taking a sketch of a model and making 20 revisions/alterations to the sketch before inking/coloring it, and a picky commissioner paying an artist to draw something and asking the artist to make 20 revisions before approving color/lines.
I get where you’re coming from about human involvement in AI art. But consider this: the artist isn’t just dropping a prompt and walking away. They’re often curating the dataset, fine-tuning the model, and making tons of decisions that influence the final piece. It’s kind of like a movie director who shapes every scene even if they’re not on camera.
Also, AI art usually isn’t a one-shot deal. Artists go through multiple iterations, making tweaks and changes to get to the final result. Think of it as sculpting, chipping away until it feels right. It takes hundreds if not thousands of different tries with prompts.
And don’t underestimate the prompt. A well-crafted prompt can guide the AI in ways that make the end product unique and meaningful. So while the AI is a tool, the human is still very much the artist here.
I think about it along this analogy:
You ring up your artist friend and would really like to see this specific thing drawn. Your friend gets inspired and is happy to oblige completely for free as they make art for fun. You give them specifications, they send you progress pictures and you tell them how to tweak those WIP pictures until you get the piece you envisioned, drawn by this artist friend of yours.
Now, who owns the work? The artist, right? You don't get to claim ownership just because your instructions got that piece done.
And yet that effort to make something from AI is trivial compared to the effort required to become a professional artist or photographer. If I commission art from a human, I'm curating and fine-tuning the output by browsing the artist's gallery, deciding which artist to commission based on their art style, deciding on a prompt to give the artist, and revising the output by adjusting my prompt based on the artist's preliminary sketch. Yet despite all that effort, I don't get the copyright for the completed artwork, because I didn't make it.
I wholeheartedly and completely reject the notion that human creativity has any more than de minimis influence on AI art. It's no more a tool than an actual live artist is a tool.
I disagree on the notion that a person that prompted the AI didn’t „make“ the picture. This is the same argument as with digital art, you aren‘t making it, you are simply moving your pen on a screen to create lines and fillings to impress an image. (Also, when it was becoming popular a lot of artists complained that is wasn’t „real art“). To be fair, what someone thinks is art is quite subjective (many people scoff at these random blocks standing around in cities like statues) so it’ll ultimately be up to the lawmakers (that mark my word will lobby to eternity for this to exist) to decide. I respect your opinion, but don’t agree with it. It’s not like you or I can’t enjoy something just because someone else doesn’t.
It's literally not the same as digital art and I find the comparison offensive. One is a human directly putting pixels on the screen, the other is output from a program that processed millions of pieces of actual artwork into the creative equivalent of pink slime.
I disagree on the notion that a person that prompted the AI didn’t „make“ the picture. This is the same argument as with digital art, you aren‘t making it, you are simply moving your pen on a screen to create lines and fillings to impress an image. (Also, when it was becoming popular a lot of artists complained that is wasn’t „real art“). To be fair, what someone thinks is art is quite subjective (many people scoff at these random blocks standing around in cities like statues) so it’ll ultimately be up to the lawmakers (that mark my word will lobby to eternity for this to exist) to decide. I respect your opinion, but don’t agree with it. It’s not like you or I can’t enjoy something just because someone else doesn’t.
It is interesting that you could spend a week tweaking the variables in your prompt to get the desired results in your image, and that won't be considered art.
But spend a second to click a button on a camera someone else made and voila, art..
It doesn't matter who made the camera, in the same way it doesn't matter who made an artist's paintbrush and canvas.
It is the human's direct involvement in choosing what to take a photograph of, and in taking that photo that determines it as art, even if it turns out to be shitty art.
The problem with AI is that no matter how good your prompting is, ultimately you're not the one doing the painting, the AI is.
The camera is a tool you directly control, the AI is an independent entity acting on your instruction. They're not the same, and that distinction is fundemental to this arguememt.
It's interesting that you completely missed the point of my post and how there's a fundamental difference between taking a photo and typing a prompt into an AI. :D
There's a physical difference sure, in that one is way easier to use as it's just a button you press while looking at something.
And generative AI is literally just typing shit into a computer without even needing to travel anywhere to get something even mildly interesting.
I know reading comprehension and wit isn't the strongest point of AI chuds but you could at least fucking put a little effort into your trolling.
Taking a photo on my phone is literally pointing it at something and pressing a button, yet I own the rights to that.
An argument against the work involved in AI art is fucking stupid, and anybody who makes it is stupid.
Talk about how AI art devalues real art. Talk about how (as it has been popularized), it literally steals from legitimate artists.
The " AI isn't really work" argument is stupid, and I'm tired of it.
The camera simply puts what you see through the viewfinder into a form that can be stored, you're the one who decides everything about the shot.
Whereas no matter how good your prompting is, it is ultimately the AI who interprets your parameters, who creates the images for you. It is the one doing the artistic work.
Do you not notice the difference? As I said in my last reply, your camera is a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do. An AI acts independently of you based on your instruction. It is not the same thing.
Also, I absolutely agree with @Eccitaze
The scene isn’t copyrighted, anyone could go to the scene (theoretically) and take their own photo from a different angle. What’s copyrighted is the expression that went into staging the shot.
An AI tool is the one doing the creative expression when generating its images is the argument. The prompt is where the creative expression of the user ends, and copyrighting just a phrase seems ridiculous. I tend to agree with these sort of arguments, especially when models like this are often trained on other people’s copyright work.