Technology

I'm not a lawyer, maybe you are. I can't fully speak to the legalities at play.

But I am a programmer, and speaking technically, AI simply cannot produce an output without consuming other works to be used as training data. In many cases, the training data includes full copyrighted works (images, books, music, etc.) in their entirety.

I'm also an artist and musician, and someone who takes the matter of copyright seriously as any person who creates things should.

There are cases where it's been ruled fair use.

I'm not sure what the relevance of that is. From what I understand, the scope of those judgments are limited to the specific context of those uses, as well as the jurisdiction in which they were made, right?

One use might be deemed fair based on the specifics of that particular case, but that doesn't preclude that all uses of AI are fair, or even that a different/higher court might come to a different conclusion. After all, the opinions of a court are just that, opinions.

Reasonable people can disagree with the conclusions of a court, and until this reaches the height of the SCOTUS I don't think we can pretend like it's settled law. (And even then, they don't seem particularly bound to any precedent...)

It's worth noting, for the sake a more complete discussion, this draft report from the United States Copyright Office from May 2025, that many applications of generative AI are unlikely to be considered fair use when reasonably weighing all of the various factors:

We observe, however, that the first and fourth factors can be expected to assume considerable weight in the analysis. Different uses of copyrighted works in AI training will be more transformative than others. And given the volume, speed and sophistication with which AI systems can generate outputs, and the vast number of works that may be used in training, the impact on the markets for copyrighted works could be of unprecedented scale.

As generative AI involves a spectrum of uses and impacts, it is not possible to prejudge litigation outcomes. The Office expects that some uses of copyrighted works for generative AI training will qualify as fair use, and some will not. On one end of the spectrum, uses for purposes of noncommercial research or analysis that do not enable portions of the works to be reproduced in the outputs are likely to be fair. On the other end, the copying of expressive works from pirate sources in order to generate unrestricted content that competes in the marketplace, when licensing is reasonably available, is unlikely to qualify as fair use. Many uses, however, will fall somewhere in between. [Emphasis mine.]

Going off of basic logic alone...

I think if you look at something as blatant as the OpenAI Studio Ghibli filter, it's very clear that the works that were used in training could have been, and almost certainly should have been licensed from Studio Ghibli for the creation of such a feature, especially considering the output images from those for-profit tools could feasibly be used without restriction without even the most basic consent from Studio Ghibli as a whole (or the individual artists who, in Japan, may have some claim of copyright over the individual contributions, iirc).

How can anyone reasonably argue that this is a "fair" way to use Studio Ghibli's works?

I guess the courts will decide, potentially swayed by the political and corporate interests of our time. But speaking personally, it doesn't pass the smell test to me...

First of all, "Intellectual property[sic]" is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word "property" in that term is biased loaded language.

You don't get to redefine words like "property" or "intellectual property" how you see fit, completely untethered to the way the legal system uses those terms with specific meaning.

Intellectual property rights include all of those things, in the same way that copyright can include copyright over text or musical compositions or sound recordings or photographs or building architectures. But note that copyright over each of those types of media is subject to its own rights and rules, and you'll need to apply the correct rules to the correct contexts. But it's still useful to group similar concepts together, and have a name for the category. That's why people refer to intellectual property.

A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right.

This is a naive take. Property rights are natural rights? No, property rights are defined by the legal system of whatever sovereign nation you're in. And they're limited by whatever rules of that legal system are.

If I own land in the U.S., I'm still required to pay taxes on it, and to enforce my property rights against adverse possession, lest I lose that property to the state or to a squatter. If I don't record my ownership with the county recorder I might lose the property to someone else who comes along and records them buying it from the guy who sold it to me (and fraudulently sold it twice).

Property rights can be chopped up and distributed in different ways. I might own a house but rent it to a tenant and have a mortgage on it from the bank, each of whom will have certain rights over that land, despite me being the owner.

And property can apply to tangible things (a painting, a car), intangible things (a checking account balance at the bank, a certificateless share of stock in a corporation, a domain name registered with ICANN), and all sorts of concepts in between (the right to use a particular mailbox in a post office, an easement to use a driveway over my neighbor's land, the right to use my name and image in a commercial, a futures contract that entitles me to take delivery of a whole bunch of wheat on a particular day at a particular time in the future). All of those are property, and recognized as property rights in U.S. law.

What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It's a license, not a right.

Licenses are a right to do something. In fact, copyright owners assign licenses to others to use that intellectual property all the time.

And the copyright itself is not property over an idea. It's the right to copy something specific that has already been fixed in a particular physical medium. If you come up with an idea for a melody, you don't own the copyright until you write it down.

You're just pretty far off base because you don't understand how broad the word "property" is, and you don't seem to want to examine just how man-made other forms of property are, and think that copyright is something special and different.

Yeah... Checking his website at https://imagination-engines.com/founder.htm, he certainly seems like an "interesting" character.

Exactly.

Most of the comments in this thread are accusing him of trying to take credit for the work of a machine that's just imitating other work. It's the FuckAI echo chamber and people who didn't actually read the article.

In this case, it's more like he's claiming to have created a genuinely creative being that deserves rights previously reserved for humans (like copyrights and patents).

It's a completely different (and IMO, much weirder) story than people are assuming.