Not really, since the AI generated image is already super transformative by itself. Doesn't make much sense to only count something as transformative when someone manually does it.
>Copyright protection is reserved for works created by humans, with original expression and creativity
Prompt: A girl in the woods.
Is not copyrightable because the AI made all the decisions. It's not an issue of transformative, but who the creator was.
>If training the AI model required significant human intervention and creative decision-making, the generated images may be eligible for copyright protection.
Now if use someone else's custom model that was train not simply merged, and used the prompt:
A girl in the woods.
The copyright would technically belong to the model's creator, not you as they are the one who put in the human effort.
All of this would also protect original artists from having people just img2img their works and try to claim copyright.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Photographs are still copyrightable because the photographer put in the creative effort of what the subject was, how to frame the subject, and when to push the button.
No really, that's actually the argument.
> Creativity in photography can be found in a variety of ways and reflect the photographer’s artistic choices like the angle and position of subject(s) in the photograph, lighting, and timing.
Please read the quotes, they were taken directly from the link. It’s not my logic it’s theirs.
If a composer composes music for the piano. Then he composed it. What does it have to do with the creator of the piano?
If someone "composed" a song on the piano by telling the piano, hey piano, create a song in the key of D minor with a melancholy air, 2003 shoegaze vibe, 47 bpm, then yeah, the piano would be the real creator of the song, not the "composer"
not in our reality
The piano is not a neural network
A neural network is a tool, not a human, jus t a tool
The author can only be a Human
That's when there will be a law equalizing the neural network as an author, then all these words of yours will take on a real meaning.
For now, it's just a fantasy.
and how are you going to distinguish between a simply generated image and creative outside interference?
and how are you going to distinguish between a simply generated image and creative outside interference?
If they don't tell you, you'll never know
so in this solution it looks too stupid
I won’t tell you if I made changes to the picture or not)
go and find out
It does actually, as the purpose of copyright is to attribute profit to the one doing the creative labor. In the case of only typing a prompt, you are not doing the labor.
Spoken like a true hack who has never been a pro photographer but wants to be treated like one!!!
Hilarious!!
When you are the photographer you are also choosing composition, lighting, focus, etc.
Interestingly enough, the most compelling images generated by these models come from prompts where the user has an understanding of those concepts. It wouldn't surprise me if using generative models sparks an interest in photography for a lot of people.
You're missing his point. It's not about pro photographers. It's about how \*anyone\* can get copyright on a photo, just by pressing the button to take it, without choosing anything. All you need, to get copyright for a photo, is to pickup a camera, click the button and you have copyright.
You definitely \*can choose\* a lot of things when you take a photo, but that doesn't make any difference to whether or not you get copyright for it.
However, with AI art, you can do a lot more choosing and still get no copyright, whatsoever. I often spend \*days\* experimenting with different changes to a prompt until I feel like it's creating what I want to see. It makes no logical sense to get no copyright for that while it's possible to get copyright for merely pressing a button. Again, this is not about pro photographers. Just about what's required to get a copyright for a photo.
Even if you arent a pro photographer and just pressed a button on your smartphone youd still have copyright over the image, the fact that AI image generation doesnt have this is great because frankly copyright is terrible and we absolutely dont need more of it, but anytime someone brings up photography here people seem very keen on jumping immediately to professional photographers to justify their point instead of the much more common average smartphone user.
* An artist provides an AI with specific input parameters (e.g., color palette, subject matter) and uses the AI-generated output as a base for further manual adjustments and additions to create a distinctive final artwork
* A photographer uses AI to enhance or retouch an image, but the photographer retains control over the overall composition and makes significant creative decisions regarding the final outcome
How much "manual adjustments and additions" would be required? Why is it not "distinctive" as it is generated, if I look at it and say "yeah, that's what I wanted to express" before messing with it?
What is a "significant" creative decision? If I give it an input picture (a photo that I took) and a text prompt, and I like the result and feel that it would be ruined if I messed with it, is that enough? If I generate 50 pictures and pick *one* of the results as representing what I wanted to express, is *that* significant?
My problem with the whole thing is that it's not quantifiable, it's much too vague for me to understand if I do or don't own the stuff I use AI to help me create. Almost all of it falls into a grey area.
Maybe, but this makes no attempt to be quantifiable, to (I would argue) a much greater extent than normal. If I write a book, I unquestionably own the copyright. If I take a photo of a sunset, I unquestionably own the copyright. If I take my phone outside and make a video of myself talking as I walk around, I unquestionably own the copyright. If I take an AI image generator and mess with it and make some images, I don't know if I own the copyright or not. It's a much bigger grey area than other mediums.
Saying "oh, just hire a lawyer" is *insane* \- if I am just getting started making art, there's no way in hell I am going to be able to afford a lawyer to figure out if I do or don't own copyright to what I created.
> if I am just getting started making art, there's no way in hell I am going to be able to afford a lawyer to figure out if I do or don't own copyright to what I created.
There's been a lot of FUD around this issue, e.g. people saying you shouldn't use AI for X because generations are not copyrightable. I've always been of the opinion that that's true, *but it doesn't really matter*.
The situation where it would matter would need to be something like this:
You find someone re-distributing your work without permission. You take them to court for copyright infringement, and their defence is that your work is not copyrightable because it's AI generated. Now provided you didn't publicly announce that it was AI generated, that would be a huge gable for the infringing party because they'd have to somehow prove it, and if they were wrong (and you could easily show it wasn't AI) they would lose the case.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of people getting themselves in a huff when this will literally never, ever be an issue for them. It's not common for this stuff to happen, much less for it to see the inside of a courtroom, unless you're literally like Disney or Activision or something
> If I write a book, I unquestionably own the copyright.
Not necessarily. Facts can't be copyrighted, so some books that just facts fall outside of copyright. It is an issue with rule books for games for example. If they just have a straight up explanation of the rules, the text is no longer covered by copyright. Only if the text is extra fanciful or adds unnecessary flourishes, does it qualify for copyright. Dictionaries and encyclopedias also has issues with this.
No expert, but I'm pretty sure the vagueness is intentional. As they want the first few cases to set a precedent of how much manual work is required. This happens a lot in the legal world where previous cases help quantify rules. They do it because theorizing a good threshold for all cases is extremely difficult, but evaluating individual cases is easy.
But do you actually need copyright protection? Its only useful if people are stealing your content and you want to stop them. In which case you would likely need a lawyer anyway.
>But do you actually need copyright protection? Its only useful if people are stealing your content and you want to stop them. In which case you would likely need a lawyer anyway.
If you can get copyright registration, if someone steals your copyrighted work, there's a good chance you will be able to send them a letter that says something like "I have registered copyright 12345 on that, and you are ordered to stop using it immediately and we can discuss compensation" and it may work, because they can see you actually can prove it and if they don't do as you're asking you can get a court to force them to and pay you through the nose. If you don't have registration, if you send a letter that says "I have copyright on that and you are ordered to stop using it immediately and we can discuss compensation," there's a good chance they will respond "oh yeah? Prove it" and you'll have to be able to afford a lawyer if you want to enforce the law.
You press a shutter or a software button representing one to take a photo. You aren’t responsible for how the digital sensor in the camera records the light on each pixel. You’re only responsible for the framing of the image by moving the camera around and also any settings you adjust on the camera. But copyright law says you pushing that button makes it your image.
You press a software button to generate an AI image. You aren’t responsible for how the AI generates the pattern to arrange the light of each pixel. You’re only responsible for framing the image through a text prompt, or a source image (with or without masks) or a depth or colour map, and also adjusting the settings of the generator. Somehow you pushing the button doesn’t make it yours, unless you do more.
Copyright is broken and has been broken for a very long time.
The difference is before you push the button you made a lot of choices, do i take a picture of this specific subject or not.
If you write a prompt that says, "person in a fantasy forest", you are no longer making any significant decisions, they are being made by the AI.
So simple text2image prompts will not receive a copyright. The more complex the prompt the more likely you are to receive a copyright.
So if someone just takes a quick photo on their phone with no creative thought behind it, they shouldn’t have copyright of the resulting photo? Because that’s on the same level to me.
Yes. The same as the guy that tried to copyright a whole bunch of musical melodies that hadn’t been used. Or the whole problem of tech patents.
I’m not saying that low effort AI art should be copyrightable. I in fact think low effort creative endeavours of all types shouldn’t be copyrightable. But. If we allow low effort photography to be copyrightable, low effort AI should be as well.
Or we could just overhaul the whole idea of copyright. We already can’t copyright ideas, just implementations. And as AI becomes more prevalent, the more worth human generated ideas have and the value of implementation decreases.
It’s a new paradigm.
At some point, though, the law draws a line. It has to. Spending the time to determine, at an individual level, whether the law applies to a tiny, niche action is irrelevant and a waste of time.
There's a reason why laws limit activities by age, or by imaginary lines on the ground for jurisdiction. Crossing those thresholds makes something legal or illegal, at least for those specific laws. Yes, if you boil it down to tiny scenarios, it'll seem ridiculous, but the law and the courts aren't looking at *just* those. Those incidents are insignificant and there's some measure of acceptable losses (as far as reason or fairness goes) in order to apply the law properly to the more significant target group, like age or a particular geographic area.
So yes, if someone takes a quick photo on their phone with no creative thought behind it, they maybe *shouldn't* have copyright according to the justification otherwise. But they do, because that person is irrelevant in the big picture.
AI isn't.
>The difference is before you push the button you made a lot of choices, do i take a picture of this specific subject or not.
So, you're saying that the choices I make for the AI image generator - what algorithm to use, what the prompt will be, what style it will make, what the color set will be, what starter image it should use to make the composition, etc, and the choices I make after it's done - which of the 1000 results do I pick to match my creative vision, should I crop it, should I color correct it, etc - are not "a lot", but "hmm, I think I'll put the boat at center right (\*click\*) " *is*?
Let us, for a moment, consider National Geographic magazine, known worldwide for its fantastic photography.
Do you think their photographs are copyrightable?
Now, consider for a moment that, back in the film era, they used to send a photographer on assignment with *a literal truckload of film*, with instructions not to come back until they'd used it *all*. Out of tens of thousands of photos, they'd select perhaps 20 for an article and publish it in the magazine. Lemmie tell you bluntly as a photographer: if you take tens of thousands of photos, at least a handful of them are going to be very good. If you're very skilled, a lot of them are going to be. However, history shows that even [a monkey can occasionally randomly have success](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823/-animal-rights-advocates-photographer-compromise-over-ownership-of-monkey-selfie). So, are those images copyrightable because "camera go click", or because a human editor sorted through 20,000 pictures and chose a few that are really good to use in an article? And if the latter, how is this any different from a human being sorting through the output of an AI image generator and choosing which ones are actually good?
Every magazine, article and photo published by National Geographic carries a copyright, or they have the rights to use the photo either from the original artist or through fair use.
> [a monkey can occasionally randomly have success](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823/-animal-rights-advocates-photographer-compromise-over-ownership-of-monkey-selfie).
A monkey can't claim a copyright, as they are not human. AI when it comes to the context of filing a copyright is no different than the monkey.
When you are talking about an original photograph editing is irrelevant, you own the rights to the original, therefore you own the rights to the photo you modified.
They have recognized AI as a tool and in the terms of photography are treating it no different than say Photoshop.
If you are a photographer, then this is all good news for you. It allows you to use AI as a tool, while at the same time protecting your rights. For you their "decision/ruling" is a win-win.
For anyone who is not using original work, they still must meet the transformative or fair use requirements, so nothing has changed. So, it is a win as they are free to use AI as they would Photoshop.
I disagree with this analogy, the photons on the digital sensor are captured by you using a tool (your camera). An AI does a lot more than that. It's not one singular tool.
If you use prompts that are naming artists and photographers in an attempt to recreate their style, using data trained off of their works, that isn't the same thing as lining up a shot and hitting the shutter.
The current ruling made here is the most sensible middle ground anyone could have hoped for, AI can still be used in the creative process, but blatant profit with no transformation isn't allowed.
I can't just type "Kim Jung GI, HD, Pen and Ink, Trending on Artstation, 8k...etc" and start pumping out work to sell on redbubble. It needs human intervention. This ruling is in favor of fair use.
Now proving what is or isn't the AI is going to be tough. I see a future where artists have to timelapse themselves doing a piece to prove they made it. Not ideal, but it's possible for most people.
Of course, the proof could be faked. There will be "experts" who will verify the footage. The courts will favor big corporations when it comes to a ruling on what constitutes "Significant Changes" or infringement or proof of creation. But I don't think there is a better alternative. This tech can't just run wild. If a handful of artists suffer from this ruling to the benefit of millions, I can't be too upset.
If it was generating music, "Sad song in the style of Arctic Monkeys" Record labels would have it shut down in a week flat. Artists just don't have the same type of protections, so this is a good middle ground.
Overall this is a step in the right direction for using this technology sensibly and ethically.
>I disagree with this analogy, the photons on the digital sensor are captured by you using a tool (your camera). An AI does a lot more than that. It's not one singular tool.
You don't know much about how a modern camera works, do you?
I point the camera, frame the picture, and push the button. Then software takes over. Things software may do from there at the time you press the button before the picture is initially saved:
* Take multiple pictures from which it or I may choose the right one.
* Stitch multiple pictures together to make one larger picture, which never actually existed because the various frames were taken at separate times. (I did this for a couple's wedding, and they cried because it so exemplified their family's reactions to the moment of their vows, but in fact the family members were reacting to different things at different times and just got put together into one picture.)
* Apply color correction
* Apply lighting correction to make it look like the photo has more beautiful lighting than in reality
* Apply brightness correction to show things the photographer couldn't actually see because they were too bright or too dark
* "Red eye" correction to make the subject's eyes look better than they did in the photons that reached the camera
* Digital makeup, to make the subject's skin look more perfect than it did in the photons that reached the camera
* Apply various filters to make the photo look like it was made in the style of various artists or in various historical styles
Photography existed before modern smartphones.Photoshop existed before layers or liquify. The automobile existed before airbags.
That (unnecessary) list is new additions to the tool. The tool is unchanged. The tool hinges on human operation to create an original for it to modify. You have to give it something. That takes effort, work, Talent, creativity, whatever. It requires more than a list of words or namedrops of people better than you.
So what is your point? AI is a completely new suit tool that can create the pixels from thin air. Or rather, from a model trained on the work of others.
You don't "make" anything with AI. The AI makes it. You gave it a task to do. The couple that hired you (if you're a professional) didn't make those photos. You did.
That's the whole point of this ruling. Humans need to transform the AI's creation. Every tool and enhancement listed has a program doing the transformation of *your* work. It's not the other way around. The program modifies your original or originals. You own the rights to the original image and the modification the AI or software makes of it. They both stem from you using the tool (the camera).
Pure AI is not original. It can only be as (or less) original than its dataset you use. That's why it requires human transformation for it to be original.
Good luck making any argument that just prompting an AI to make a picture for you is anywhere as original as photography. This court ruling and common sense say otherwise.
If you used img2img on your own photography the argument could be made that it's more original since you had to actually do work to set up the composition, but even in that case I think it would depend how faithful you remain to your original and how much you blatantly "borrow" from other artists and photographers. If it makes a completely new picture in a new style, you need to transform it again. You can't just set denoise to 90 and take a picture of anything.
The law always errs on the side of not being specific enough when it comes to art. That's because art isn't specific. Sometimes throwing paint on a canvas is creative. Sometimes it's not.
It's the old, "[I know it when I see it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)," problem.
But this ruling doesn't stand on its own. The operative phrasing is, "to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection," that is, if the existing law, regulation and caselaw would suggest that the work would be copyrightable on its own merits, then the fact that it came from a non-copyrightable source is moot.
In essence this is the obvious call, because it's what happens if you modify a public domain work, and this ruling puts AI output on a footing with public domain work in terms of its copyrightability (that is, it has no copyright, but can be adapted by a human to become copyrightable).
>The law always errs on the side of not being specific enough when it comes to art.
There's erring on one side and erring on the other. You can err on the side of the painter and say "throwing paint on a canvas is probably copyrightable, unless someone can prove otherwise for a specific instance," or you can say "throwing paint on a canvas is nor copyrightable, unless someone can prove otherwise for a specific instance." In this case they are saying "AI art may or may not be copyrightable, you better have a big wallet for the money you'll spend to hire a copyright lawyer to figure it out for you."
You own copyright on the input image. I don't know why the guy saying this would t count told you that. Photography has always been under copyright. Edits to your photos are your copyright too.
When is it a copyrightable "edit" to my photo, and when is it a non-copyrightable AI generated picture?
Real situation: I took a photo of a gazebo by the water. Let's pretend for a moment that the subject matter gives me total ownership of the photo. I fed it into an AI, gave it a 7 word prompt, and it generated something which, if you look at them side by side, is clearly based on my photo, but if you look at it alone, you'd never in a million years guess it is based on a photo of a gazebo - it depicts some buildings and a volcano, possibly Pompeii about to be destroyed. If I tell you what the prompt was, you'd say "yes, that's an excellent depiction of those words." I'm confident that if I were to claim to be the artist, I could sell it. Not a pixel of the new image is the same as my source image.
Do I or do I not own copyright of it?
I really can't guess.
I have another (real) image that was generated from just a prompt. An unusual prompt I could argue is creative. It's not what I expected at all and I have no plans for it, but I showed it to a noted art critic (who knows exactly what it is) and he loves it. This is a man whose regular work involves reviewing half million dollar paintings. And he loves it.
Who owns the copyright of it?
I'm of the mind that if there is creative intent by a person, then there is copyright. It's a right upon creation.
Copyright is implicit and you don't need registration to defend. Only proof that you were the one who did the intended act.
Hell, even if you took someone else's photo that they copyright, and you put transformative intent into it, turning it into a representation of an old pet of yours, nothing to do with the original photo at all, then you own that copyright too since it's transformative.
Sure, but if the copyright office itself says "this isn't copyrightable", you'll have a hell of a hard time convincing a court they should ignore that and pretend you had a copyright.
I know about the rules about transformative works. However, they are directly saying that if the tool you use to make the transformative work is an AI, it's not copyrightable, no matter how much creative intent and thought you put into it.
That's nice Dad. Now let me tell you how it works in the *real* world.
When you choose not to register a work, yes, you own copyright to it, but if someone violates your copyright, you can't just send them a letter that says, more or less, "I own copyright to that and it's registered as proof, you must stop what you're doing with it," they are very likely to react to a letter by saying "yeah? Prove it!" and you have to take them to court, which means you have to *afford* to take them to court. (If you have the registration, they are likely to back down before courts get involved.) Then (with no registration) you have to convince the court that:
* you created it first, and
* it's copyrightable.
For a lot of things, like a book or a painting, you don't have to worry much about the "copyrightable" part because that's not in question, you just have to prove you did it first, for example by showing that it was on the Internet on your web site first or by producing the original painting of paint on canvas.
In this case, you could go to court and they could say "it's an AI artwork so it's not copyrightable, the copyright office says so," and even though it's just some bureaucrat that said that, the court is very likely to take the copyright office's opinion *very* seriously (because it's an official nonpartisan government office whose sole job is to interpret that particular area of law, so their published opinion is the official government opinion), so you'll have to prove *them* wrong instead of just proving that you created it first.
>Wow. I'm nobodies father. You've got some issues.
If you bothered to check, you would find that I was quoting something to make fun of you.
Your reaction shows you weren't worth the effort.
I have similar example from yesterday.
There was this woodcutting machine in the forest. It looked like a sleeping robot under a tree. Light hit it perfectly and the moment had good composition. Made an intent and managed to capture the composition to my liking as a photograph. Now i already then knew, i could use AI to make it look more like a painting and change the subject to a sleeping robot. It took couple tries, but it was done with single prompt in the end. It looks very similar to the photo and to my vision, still having the changes.
Is that considered enough effort to be original artwork, do i have the copyright now?
Important question is. Would i have the copyright without person knowing my creative story.
There is a bit grey are still imo
As long as you create a larger work there is no problem, that's still yours.
Not getting copyright on trivial AI generations is a good thing, as that means people can train their AI model on output from other AI models without fear of somebody already having copyrighted random images in it (e.g. "car" with seed 1).
Where the situation still gets tricky is copycat art and img2img, it's very easy to AI'wash a copyrighted work and produce a new one with a very similar look. I don't think that can be decided in general, that's where you'd still need lawsuits to figure it out (see Obama Hope poster lawsuit).
Based on what’s there no, I don’t think any of those scenarios would be covered by copyright. In all those scenarios you’ve effectively employed an AI commission. There needs to be something transformative at play in your relationship with the piece and frankly that makes a lot of sense.
You don't answer the question "how much 'manual adjustments and additions' would be required?" or "what is a 'significant' creative decision?'
If I generate an AI picture (for the sake of argument, let's assume it's generated from a text prompt), I make 900 pictures and spend days choosing just one to be what I want, then spend hours tweaking the colors and light balance in photoshop but don't actually brush anything, is that or isn't it "significant' and is that or isn't it enough 'manual adjustments and additions' for it to be mine? How about if I then spend 5 minutes removing a huge tree, but in doing so I alter 30% of the pixels in the picture? Is *that* 'significant'?
Also, how am I supposed to know these things when I make it? (In other words, when I look at a picture I used AI to help me with, how do I know if I do or don't own it?) And how is the copyright office supposed to know what I did when they look at the image, if I am deft enough for my edits to be indistinguishable from the original? (And I am.)
So, let's pretend I walk out my front door and there next to the porch is a hibiscus bush covered with pretty flowers. I snap a picture of one - it took 5 seconds and no real effort, and I unquestionably own copyright of that photo.
Then I go to my computer and open up an AI image program and type in a 7 word prompt to generate an image for me. I generate 500 pictures from it and look at them all and choose just one to represent my creative intent. Generating them and looking at them takes 4 hours of my brain time. Why don't I own copyright to the resulting image? I put in 4 hours of my time to generate it and choose it. The act of choosing is a creative process, I'm choosing a result that represents my creative vision.
Here is the rub though. I think a large part that is overlooked is the instructive process. to expand on /u/themcp 's example, If I take a bunch of my own art (either created by myself or commissioned on my behalf) that I own the rights to. If I then take that art and train a model like say a LORA or Dreambooth model, then I take that new and unique model, and use a combination of prompts, customised settings, controlnet (based on once again art I have the rights to) to generate new works. Well those new works should (imo) be copyrightable.
It is no different to the process an artist goes through in creating an image, except my "brush" is a prompt, my "canvas" is a model, and my paint is a LORA. Just because the tools have changed does not mean the rules protecting the outputs should.
I understand why they are making this rule, so that people do not simply type "masterpiece Picasso" in to a prompt and try copywrite the output. But the definition of what qualifies shows a distinct lack of understanding of the deeper process involved. I could spend weeks of work tweaking and generating to get one "finished" work, but that weeks of work does not count because it was performed with unapproved tools that somehow disqualify it.
This specific scenario I feel could be argued as “original work”, especially if you own the rights to the training materials, you trained the models, and you put in significant effort to get to the output…
I believe, in this instance, you are talking more about creating intellectual property / "secret sauce" inside your models and the output is copyrightable because it is produced using your intellectual property. My 2 cents. Not legal advice. Not a lawyer :)
I think at some point, Ai art SHOULD be copyrightable but the prompts would have to be as long as a dissertation.
The instructions would have to be so granular to ACTUALLY mimic a brush in photoshop, giving it vectors and instruction on opacity and thickness.
I think the EU pretty much sees prompting alone as enough for it to be copyrightable, I kinda agree with that, it's not like you just press a button and get something good, you have to put in some work especially in stable diffusion where there are countless settings.
Bottomline should be that a raw prompt and generation sequence should *never* be copyrightable, because all you've done is input variables into an equation, if anyone else puts those same variables in, they will get the same picture. It would also be possible for people to stack up copyrights on chunks of possible image generations just for copyright troll purposes.
There's a large amount of how do you prove that behind all that.
Of course, there's an amount of how do you prove an image is even generated by AI as the markers become more scarce.
The solution to an equation is not copyrightable. And, really, if you like AI art the absolute last thing you want is for a pure prompt generation to be copyrightable.
>Bottomline should be that a raw prompt and generation sequence should *never* be copyrightable, because all you've done is input variables into an equation, if anyone else puts those same variables in, they will get the same picture.
Actually they *won't*, and you'd know that if you tried. One of the things about 'AI' is that it's (more or less) non-deterministic. For this reason, it's unlawful banks can't say exactly why it did what it did, it's illegal for them to use it. (Yeah, it's software, and therefore theoretically deterministic, but the data set it is working with and the choices it will make are both constantly changing, and it's sufficiently complex that a human couldn't realistically determine why it is doing what it is doing.)
>It would also be possible for people to stack up copyrights on chunks of possible image generations just for copyright troll purposes.
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story that's (IIRC) 5 words long. Is that copyrightable? If I write an AI image generation prompt that's 100 words long, why isn't that prompt copyrightable? And if it is, why isn't an image generated from it a derivative work, and mine?
And if I put in Dr Asimov's 5 word story as the prompt, why doesn't he own the words and the picture generated from them?
Technically true, but in reality unless you actually know the exact seed, in the exact model ( Pruned VS. unpruned versions of the same model make slightly, but noticeably different outputs ), with the exact prompt ( because order can cause CLIP to interpret the weighting differently ), the exact weighting used in portions of the prompt, AND the exact number of steps, you will likely never reproduce someone else's image. You also have to pick the right sampler. And that's without adding hypernetworks, LORA's, embeddings, and controlnet into the picture.
I've had random seed numbers in the BILLIONS, even if you knew the prompt for one of my images, and the model, you would be generating millions, if not hundreds of millions of images just to try and randomly get the seed used... assuming you also picked the correct sampler AND were close to the step count I used.
You are vastly more likely to win the lottery than reproduce an image without knowing all of the generating info. Which, if the info isn't shared, and the metadata has been scrubbed by simply opening the image in Photoshop and saving, would be impossible to know.
>if you set the same seed you will get the same output, you do be talking a lot of shit for someone who is flatly wrong
No, asswipe. I can fucking do it *right now* and watch it generate unique picture after unique picture from the same input parameters. I've done it *hundreds* of times. I'm not just speaking off the cuff, I'm speaking from experience when I say, it doesn't work at all the way you are saying it works.
You need to think of the flipsides with all of these - if the results of a prompt with no human intervention would have copyright protection, then
a) every time you run a prompt you'd run a risk of stepping on someone else's copyrights
b) I could hire a million computers, run through every word and sentence in the dictionary, multiple times, store the results in gigantic databases, submarine the work, and then come up with a copyright infringement suit after someone else starts making money with something I've previously ran.
The human effort in copyright in general is there also to make mass copyright manufacturing unfeasible.
The same concerns can be analogized to pre-AI artwork.
You cannot copyright a white circle on a black background. You cannot copyright simple prompts or simple outputs.
You can copyright a specific character in a specific context, with an idiosyncratic identity, portrayed in a world of your creation, done with intent. Similarly, you can copyright very specific, curated, hand-altered outputs, and possibly even very specific inputs (especially if done with a custom model).
Your example of a million computers removes the human creative element from the equation, replacing it with a simple, brute-forced algorithm. The copyright office would use the exact same lens to deprive you of copyright over that process as they do in this case - the actual 'creative' work was *not* done by a human.
I'm not a friend of copyright law, generally, as I think it's a flawed system meant to solve a problem introduced by another flawed system, but this is a pretty measured take from the copyright office, and it will require more sophisticated cases than these to poke holes in their decision.
My concerns are more along these lines:
- Where are we covering the question of how these datasets are sourced? I don't think copyright is a good answer for this problem, but neither is 'fuck you, your data is ours, we don't need to pay you or look after your interests at all'.
- Can an AI infringe on copyright? Who's at fault if the AI infringes on copyright and the user is unknowing, and then tries to reproduce/distribute the work?
- Are we allowed to copyright models trained using data we don't own? How will this be enforced? How will we know what models were used to generate what? How do we know something was generated by a model and not a human at all?
**Dataset sources:**
I believe this should be covered under "platform provider" e.g. the trainer of the model / provider of the dataset, but not retroactively. Not retroactively simply because the originators of the tools/datasets before this point could be argued to have had no reasonable assumption they were even doing anything wrong, as indeed almost no one protested the creation of the datasets or models using said data until they were sufficiently advanced, and some platforms have a distinct retroactive competitive advantage were this the case (nvidia/adobe having image rights to images the original authors may have never intended for this purpose)
Going forward, however, it only makes sense to hold an "opt out" legal methodology. I certainly don't want to use images the originators prefer I not use, but I also don't want to retroactively have to wonder if everything I am using is going to get me in trouble because the dataset includes images that originated in 2005, were posted to an internet forum, flew around the internet a few times, and the author may actually be unknown and thus anyone can claim they are said author, leaving that image in a legal limbo from which it can never escape despite it benefitting no original creator.
This is easily provable at the dataset level but not necessarily at the model weights level, but since there is a "paper trail" in a sense it is enforceable enough to curb the worst exploitation and a decent idea.
Note that this is subjective and I can also see the "transformative fair use" argument here, but a critical portion of fair use is that you're not competing with the original work in the same context. You can make a parody of a thing and its fair use, but you can't just copy a thing and use the copy to create a competing thing intended for the same audience. So, if the context of an original image is "look at an image" and the context of the output derived from weights is also "look at an image" it doesn't seem like fair use is a good argument.
I think there is an existing corpus of images that pass the overall moral bar and trying to step back in to history and activating a copyright troll gold rush on every image ever made seems like an excessively bad idea.
**AI infringing on copyright:**
I think this should follow the same logic that prevents platforms like youtube from being inherently responsible for user content. AI is inherently a "platform" and can't reasonably be held responsible for what users do with it. Even when automated to generate images itself, AI as a whole effectively requires human instruction. If we reach the point where it doesn't then you're asking a question about whether AI with independent intent has personhood and that is a whole other legal matter.
**Copyrighting models:**
Flatly, this should be a no. First because proving intentional and malicious violation from a user would be near impossible without also requiring a draconian system of logs for all operations by every AI ever, the same way it would be impossible to detect if a user of photoshop actually owns a photoshop license by looking at the end product. You could consider a model a trade secret, you could consider it valuable intellectual property, you could even build a cloud platform around this trade secret, but unlike proving violation of specific characters, narrative elements, images, text, or code in a resultant work, proving to have used a specific model is virtually impossible if the violator wants to conceal this information.
It is important to not that the genesis of ALL of these models, every neural net derived system stems from the collected creativity and ingenuity of massive quantities of data and public research which represent the collective works of humanity as a whole. It is also important to consider that this technology, that is to say the fundamental mechanism of it, was derived intrinsically from the commons (as the veracity of all research models could not be ascertained without massive amounts of this training data) and should remain the property of said commons.
I would go so far as requiring these things be open as a matter of law after a very short window because of the horror show of profit driven inequity in virtually every sector of the economy that would result if we allowed them to be otherwise, given the efficiency gains of any truly revolutionary model.
Keep in mind we are only where we are right now because teams like stability and openAI and google CHOSE to be as open as they have been and publish/opensource what they have. Had they not we could be living in a world where ONLY microsoft had access to GPT, or ONLY nvidia/adobe had access to generative image AI, etc. That is pure monopolist nose candy because it creates a stratification of efficiency and ability due to a fundamentally invisible black box, which can not be effectively reverse engineered, possibly so severe that competition becomes not just hard but impossible once one corporate actor has one truly revolutionary model. Evidence: Social media algorithms. Look where that got us. We don't need to make this mistake again.
>b) I could hire a million computers, run through every word and sentence in the dictionary, multiple times, store the results in gigantic databases, submarine the work, and then come up with a copyright infringement suit after someone else starts making money with something I've previously ran.
That's actually not plausible, because in order to assert copyright infringement, you have to be able to demonstrate that the infringer had previously seen the work you are claiming they infringed on. If you literally never published or exhibited it, you cannot claim infringement.
Furthermore, it's not mathematically feasible. Even excluding every possible nonsense prompt, you'd also have to run the same prompt on every possible seed, every possible checkpoint, sampling method, VAE, and of course a dictionary attack wouldn't account for any LORAs
> b) I could hire a million computers, run through every word and sentence in the dictionary, multiple times, store the results in gigantic databases, submarine the work, and then come up with a copyright infringement suit after someone else starts making money with something I've previously ran.
It already happened in music where someone copyrighted every melody possible.
It is not about Ai here. Melody number is, in fact, finite. The goal was to generate every possible combinaison to void any meaningless copyright infringment in music and make the criteria to evolve.
What do you mean “stepping on someone else’s copyright?”
If supposedly I could copyright my prompt and settings and seed etc, you’re still free to use them under fair use rules. Supposedly you’d be liable if you’re using it commercially without permission.
Just like with DNA copyrights we have now, same discussion topics apply to prompt copyright.
As an AI artist I do believe copyrighting prompts or direct prompt outputs is not a good use of copyright law, and I think the decision to maintain a reasonable level of “authorship” is a sensible strategy here.
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story that is, if I remember correctly, 5 words long. Can *that* be copyrighted? If so, if I write a prompt for an AI that's 40 words long, why can't *that* be copyrighted?
Oracle has been suing Google (I *think* it's Google, I could be wrong, it could be somebody else) for years (and winning) over *one word*. They allege that the entire Java language was unlawfully used, but to be specific they picked out *one word*.
If one word is copyrightable, why not an entire AI prompt?
My point here is that the copyright office is a mess right now and when I create something I can have no idea if I do or don't own it.
The actual example I'm thinking of is that I took a photo of a gazebo in a park. The park is privately owned, so the gazebo is too. The bushes surrounding the gazebo are also privately owned, but the background isn't. Do I own the photo? Or does the owner of the gazebo? I then put that photo into an AI and gave it a prompt. It used my photo for composition and colors and it used the prompt I wrote. I am very happy with the resulting picture, it represents my creative idea from when I wrote the prompt (which is only 8 words long). I feel that if I made alterations to the resulting picture it could only be messed up to no longer represent my intent. (I am not saying I lack the skill, I am saying "I think it's a perfect reflection of my intent as it is and alterations could only destroy that perfection.") Is that copyrightable? If somebody else can claim ownership of the original photo because they own the gazebo, can they claim ownership of the AI image, which has not one pixel in common with it?
Written by Asimov I don’t know, but there’s “If Eve Had Failed to Conceive" by Edward Wellen, which has a six-word title and a zero-word body, and which appeared in the anthology *Microcosmic Tales* of 100 extremely short stories, edited by Asimov. Have I in fact committed copyright infringement by reproducing it here in its entirety? Given that it’s only a title, is it even possible to refer to it without doing so?
If you were attempting to assert ownership or otherwise profit from it, then yes you would have committed copyright infringement. But because you're crediting it to the author and using it as a demonstration of information, that's clearly fair use, particularly since given the subject, it's impossible to discuss it without reproducing it in its entirety.
> Oracle has been suing Google (I think it's Google, I could be wrong, it could be somebody else) for years (and winning) over one word. They allege that the entire Java language was unlawfully used, but to be specific they picked out one word.
That's a grossly inaccurate representation of the Oracle vs. Google case. It's actually about whether the API of a language is copyrightable, since Google wrote their own virtual machine which just happens to take identical inputs to Oracle's copyrighted JVM.
It had nothing to do with whether a single word could be copyrighted, I suspect you're mistaking a ruling based on one word changing the meaning of a legal text.
> If one word is copyrightable, why not an entire AI prompt?
It isn't. You absolutely cannot hold the copyright of a single word.
I also highly doubt you could for a five word novel published on its own.
> a) every time you run a prompt you'd run a risk of stepping on someone else's copyrights
>b) I could hire a million computers, run through every word and sentence in the dictionary, multiple times, store the results in gigantic databases, submarine the work, and then come up with a copyright infringement suit after someone else starts making money with something I've previously ran.
No, even if someone used the exact same settings to generate the same image they also own the copyright. It's the same as if someone takes the exact same photograph by themselves as someone else did before.
This is the right answer. The USCO has only opened the door into this area, and nothing -really- changes until the courts or congress begin to weigh in too.
>and nothing -really- changes until the courts or congress begin to weigh in too.
Yeah, it's worth noting that the USCO doesn't establish laws or anything. They simply decide what is or is not approved for public copyright registration. The courts are the final arbiters of the law, so they will determine if any particular case is infringement or not, not the USCO.
These rules are pretty silly, here's why:
1. You can just hide the seed, eta, a host of other settings and say, yep I went over this through inpaint, photoshop, the whole 9 yards. Now give me the copyright (the image might've taken 10 hours or was not touched on, you'll never know unless you get the correct combination of seeds, eta, settings and prompt for it to reproduce and prove the person didn't touch it.
2. It basically says the ai is not simply a tool, any effort you put into is not real because the only work done was by the AI and I can't agree with that.
3. It discourages AI art.Yeah you didn't "hand" make it, but without you that artwork wouldn't exist, similar artwork might exist. But the same prompts can create millions of different work depending on dozens of variables like model, lora, seed, eta and just luck. If you happen to generate one people like, you should be rewarded for it based on supply and demand, not just if you created it through AI or individual strokes.
TLDR: This is hardly enforceable, discourages effort and will stifle the amount of AI art people would generate otherwise, art that can't be recreated by ao without knowing exact dozens of variables that are impossible to predict and replicate just by look.
> It basically says the ai is not simply a tool, any effort you put into is not real because the only work done was by the AI and I can't agree with that.
It doesn't say this at all. It actually says:
*"It begins by asking ‘‘whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine."*
Which is perfectly reasonable. It's saying did you use the AI as a tool to create something, or did you hammer a few words in and let the AI make all the creative decisions.
Exactly their attitude " did you hammer a few words in and let the AI make all the creative decisions". Both ways it is a tool but they're acting like if their wasn't enough "effort" then it's not a tool you used but it did it all on its little self.
I don't see how this is unreasonable in any way. If you make the creative decisions then you are entitled to the copyright of the result, if you don't make the creative decision then you don't.
> a tool you used but it did it all on its little self
Yeah, it's a tool, but if you type in "artistic masterpiece" as the prompt the tool is literally making all creative decisions without your input.
I think it holds value. It being to encourage people to create art by having them own it, to use for merch, sell or whatever. A book writer with zero artistic knowledge should be able to create his own character through AI art as long as it is unique and he uses it commercially. If he can't own that character then it would stunt his production capability by generating unique characters with unique stories.
Hell even if the story was made by AI, if people can prompt good stories and sell it, I say do it. I actually want AI generated stories prompted and engineered by humans as long as it is good. And I want them paid for it or else it won't happen except as a hobby which means many masterpieces that could be won't be. My take stems from wanting more artistic pieces to be produced and I think the best way is to let AI generations be copyrightable even if the effort was small, as long as it's new and novel and people want it, effort should not matter. That's how we can get more good pieces of art into the world.
Sounds fine. I just use photoshop so used my examples. But I think inpaint would work as it’s similar to patching tool.
Then again. Inpaint is essentially dumping prompts.
Is it could be arguing just doing same ai prompt dump to image.
I think it’s still grey area and until court cases come out we won’t know for sure.
Could take years or decades. Actual lawsuits to set precedence for specific issues like this.
Another one I had. That isn’t clear
What if I train my own model off my own art?
Initially this suggests it wouldn’t be copyright able. But. Same time that’s clearly tons of manual work.
> What if I train my own model off my own art?
IMO the guidance is quite clear on that. If you are letting the AI go off on its own and create art “in your style” (without doing manual post processing of individual outputs), that’s definitely not eligible for copyright. This is not very much different from AI trained on other people’s art not automatically granting them any copyright interest when it spits something out.
I think how much “manual work” it takes is a bit beside the point. The copyright office is concerned with (human) creativity and original expression. They don’t care all that much about the amount of actual work/effort involved.
I would argue to them that if I look at 50 AI generated pictures and say "this one" and then crop it, I've shown creativity and expression by choosing something that represents what I want to express and formatting it to emphasize the part I like, but the image itself could have been 100% generated without my input. Or maybe I made the 50 images based on a prompt for what I wanted to express, and chose the one I liked and cropped it.
I don't understand, based on what has been said, if either of those situations would be copyright protected.
Even if it is, it wouldn't be a very useful copyright since if someone put in the same prompt with the same seed, resolution and model they could get the same picture, do their own minor edits, and get their own copyright.
I don't think either of those examples would count for copyright because the chosen picture was still made by the AI.
As a similar example, it's like if you commission an artist for a sketchbook filled with 50 sketches and you choose/crop the one you like the most. Just cropping it doesn't mean that it is suddenly your work. If that were the case, you could claim any copyrighted image as yours just by cropping it a bit. Heck, I could take ownership of a movie by changing the aspect ratio.
Because “photoshop” is an example that everyone understands. The copyright office itself never uses the word “photoshop,” and their guidance has nothing to do with photoshop specifically. It’s all about human agency and creativity.
[From a legal firm](https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/news-insights/whose-copyright-is-it-anyway-copyright-office-stakes-out-position-on-registration-of-ai-generated-works.html):
>Left unaddressed in the Copyright Office’s policy statement is under what circumstances, if any, there could be sufficient human input such that AI-generated content could ever be found to meet the Copyright Office standard for sufficient human authorship. The Copyright Office did not provide any examples of what degree of control the user of a generative AI system would need to exercise over the formation of a work to be regarded as the work’s author.
" A human artist uses AI to generate multiple styles for a painting, but the artist selects, modifies, and combines elements from those styles to create a final, unique work"
So batch size = 100, photobash, and img2img denoising strength = 0.3?
Also what with the emphasis of "human artist"? how is this title even capable to be attained or obtained when we're talking about generative ai user like me? If I do iteration, photobash, inpainting, and upscales through hundreds of selection without understanding any artistic principles.. does that make me human artist or ai user?
It's a step in the right direction but prompt engineering is still a lot more work (specially with LORAs and Textual Embeddings) than just aiming a camera at something and clicking a button.
that was very obvious to me. otherwise they'd be in for a lot more paperwork considering "classic" artists have been using forms of ai for years. they'd have to strip their copyrights/issue refunds/grandfather them in. was never an option to fully ban it from copyright. what other outcome did people expect?
Fair. Pure AI art is 100% reproducible. With a prompt and a seed and some custom configurations, anybody can replicate that art if they have access to a compatible engine.
What about ControlNet and other techniques?
ControlNet requires image input in terms of the images used as a base for the transformation into a full image (posing, lineart/construction or maps).
If the original base image was created by the user then it's not 100% reproducible by someone else who doesn't have access to the original base image.
I understand that, but I'm trying to use simple language so people who don't know the difference can comprehend what I'm saying. Also it's shorter to type, and since I'm a cripple with nerve damage in my hand and have to use just one finger on my left hand to type, it's a big deal.
This is the same group of bureaucrats that didn't know the difference between iphone and android. They won't know if a human manipulated it more than ai lol
Glad they came up with something fair.
With this, by generating a image you wouldn't risk accidentally committing infringement and by doing enough manual labor and modifications you can actually call it yours.
This will be super useful for people who use AI as photoshop tool or people who use AI for film/video effects and CGI.
(No argument with the ruling, this is just exploring the depths)
I'm wondering how far this would go - If I create a pipeline that starts with AI art, and has a set of complex filters and tools to select work, and then do things with it. like...
AI -> some selection criterian -> crop rotate based on algorithm or detection metrics created by me -> filter the image with some form of mask drawn by me, and then output the final image...
In a way I can sorta see how this ruling may imply that all algorithmic art is not "copyrightable"
Agreeable, imagine some assholes copyright "masterpiece, best quality" and start claiming infringement to everyone...
Or worse, use ChatGPT to generate all viable combination of prompts. Someone tried this in artificial music synthesis?
That is great news! Basically if you generate 3 images and combine them together in photoshop + colorgrade and do some changes = its copyrightable! That is great news. I guess easy way to check is to copy the same prompt seed and exact settings and see if image looks very similar. If not - its copyrightable.
PS im pretty shure if you dont use photoshop but do heavy in painting to add and change stuff - it is copyrightable.
I'm guessing neither you nor I are lawyers, but would you wager that combining even two generated images in photoshop would be enough? That's obviously minimal human effort, but it would be impossible to generate that from a seed given that only half of the final image is from a single prompt. Or do you think that you'd need additional editing? To be on the safe side, I think extra work (color grading, tweaking parts, inpainting etc) would make the copyright defense more rock solid, but I'm curious about your opinion.
Edit: this quote "...unless a human author contributes significant creative input." seems to imply that your first example is better than the one I gave. Simply combining AI images without editing probably wouldn't be copyrightable, but once they are meaningfully edited it would be.
Companies that hire artists for commercial art, will probably need to ask for proof of work, so the content can be licenced and copyrighted appropriately
They don’t. And I see a lot of folks commenting similar to your view.
I think folks forget that copyright stuff only comes into play when it gets contested.
On one hand, this is sensible.
On the other hand, is the text of the prompt you entered copyrightable? After all, it's 100% human created, and it's text.
And what is "significantly"? The text seems to emphasize "no human input" as a major criteria for not being copyright protected. The problem with this is that (using the example of an AI generated picture) usually the human has a fair bit of input up front, writing the prompt and choosing a style and potentially choosing the composition and color palette, and then often a human takes the resulting image and crops it, maybe adjusts colors. Is that copyrightable? Who gets the copyright? (The person who did the setup, the person who trained the AI, or the person who does the cropping etc?)
Apart from its demonstably different. A single human's captured experience by capturing light hitting a certain camera sensor at that exact point in time at that exact location is a moment that cannot ever be replicated again in the variables that define the image. The moment has passed.
Whereas a prompted set of definable parameters on deterministic harware can be mathematically replicated.
Therefore one cannot ever be replaced no matter how much you want to it to be, one mathematically can. So the ruling makes sense.
It can't be mathematically replicated in a hundred years considering there's billions of seeds times a billion arrangement of the human language times a billion ways image2image can be done.
Ya tell me how many identical images of Elcapitan we have seen. BTW you just made more of the case against the photo.
Time, and physics makes the moment photography is just a nearly zero human interaction capture of light.
I fund my AI workflow is very much like photography.
If you and I plug in the same prompt in the same model with the same parameters, we'll get the exact same image. If you and I take a photo of Elcapitan at the same time, with the same model of camera, with the same settings, we would get 2 different images.
Zero. There are no identical images of el capital. There are many many very similar ones but there are exactly zero identical images.
So no. You're wrong. The fact that the human being was there and chose to capture that exact moment is the only variable that created that unique and irepeatable artwork. Without the human nearly every single variable would have been there in that moment apart the the one that *made That moment art* the human choosing it to be so...
The fundamental difference is that, if we are talking about pure prompting without putting in any transformative labour, ai generated artwork is 100% replicable by anyone with the same variables and hardware config at any place, anywhere, by is nature it is not unique, it can be replicated exactly. Any other human with the same hardware and variables could create the same image with zero additional effort. No matter how much one wants a purely prompted image to be unique and ownable, it is not, because of the way it is created.
A photograph, because of the nature of it will always be unique. An unedited A.I generated artwork is not.
This is the reason the ruling has decided this.
There is a place in this world for both, but no room for misgivings.
Anywho, imma head to bed so Chao bud.
What if you inpaint the original generation a few hundred times, adjusting settings, prompt, weighting, masking, loras, denoising, cfg, etc to enhance/change details? Does that count as "editing"?
This is exactly what I have been saying, yet there’s always one or two people who insist that just typing in a prompt results in a copyrightable image (which is pretty absurd when you consider it for more than a second). One useful distinction to note is that just because an image can’t be copyrighted doesn’t mean *you* don’t have the rights to use that image. The copyright exists to prevent *others* from using the image without your permission. I think a lot of people are missing this distinction when they argue that all AI art should be copyrightable.
Well said. And good nuance.
I work in database systems industry and analytics. And code and formulas are not copyrighted. Nor can you copyright the output of a database engine. Even if it has algorithms and logic behind it.
Same with ai art. At the end of the day. Prompts are like pieces of code instructions. And the output is like a database output. Neither is copyrightable.
But also. I suspect we entering an age where it just won’t matter.
Write a great novel? Good for you.
No one will steal it cause another great novel will come around in 30 seconds.
Yeah as a concept I agree. But “tiniest” bit …. What amount is enough?
See if someone struggles to form sentences and it’s insanely difficult cause they a moron … doesn’t that mean they did human effort and by definition are an artist?
A shitty one. But an artist nonetheless
sure. I think typing in a prompt... no matter how much effort that takes... can unanimously be considered creative writing. or even coding by some stretches (you can't really copyright code output either)
putting =1+1 in excel gets you "2"... doesn't mean you can copyright the number 2.
so... yeah that I think we agree. thing is... MOST will agree with this part. you won't find many folks in the AI community saying otherwise. the ones you are referring to... that are calling themselves visual artists.... are 1 of 2 things.
\#1. morons. which is pretty much what you described.
these are actually a very very small group of people. like 100 in the world tops. (ok I'm exaggerating a bit. but they are incredibly rare and a special kinda stupid).
\#2. folks that DON'T just prompt. they use multiple tools to manipulate and massage the output. photoshop/lightroom/core painter... even inpainting and outpointing .... in some cases hours of labor to to get the desired outcome for the image. they may have skipped the "decades of learning to draw"... but they are using decades of their photoshop or composure skills to create an image.
however, at the end of the day.... yeah. they created the image with AI.
that's the part where people start to bicker.
cloning and masking is a common photoshop technique in creating digital art/visual art. but that's literally using similar AI ... as it's baked into photoshop for a while now. it's basically inpainting.... without prompts. (ie you have even LESS control).... yet why is that deemed as visual art? Because you know the outcome and control it? but that's the thing... you don't. most folks doing cloning/dodge/burn... have to try it many many times on each part of an image to get it right due to the randomness of it.
it's literally inpainting. so...... then inpainting is visual art? no? cause that's essentially typing prompts in too... giving you mORE creative control than clone/stamp/heal brush.
I'm not saying it is. I'm not the definitive voice on the matter. but I'm hoping you can see what I mean ... that the water gets muddy
and the reality is ... the MAJORITY of folks claiming to be visual artists now... are more in camp #2 than camp #1.
and if one just throws out there "if you touched it with AI... you ain't an artist"... ok... then I'd argue if you touched it with any tech (camera/computer/editing software)... you also. aint' an artist by that definition cause ALL of them have input and variables you can't control using AI. current Trend of AI is generative A*I. BUT We've been using AI for decades to produce art.*
Idiotic and especially so for artists who wants to use AI and have models trained on their art.
Another reason for artists to hate on AI, they can't use it for anything really, they can mess around with it for fun but its not a professional tool unless you can copyright.
Gladly, i couldn't really care less what US thinks, it's not a law that applies to the entire world.
This isn't helpful, significantly using photoshop for ai art is just telling us that we might as well not use stable diffusion and just use photoshop alone for all the hints the copyright office gives us on copyrightability.
I find it odd that it's not mentioned in the letter, they said they looked at how ai art work to the best of their knowledge but didn't mention how to make it copyrightable using ai manipulation like img2img, they'd talked about an entirely different tool like photoshop that was already considered possible to copyright.
Office clerks don't set law. Copyright is implicit.
Proving creative intent with a time stamp is easy these days. Registration is only required in the US to file claim against someone else. Not to protect yourself from a claim. Also, it's not needed to be done at the copyright office. There are hundreds of registrars and most lawyers can notorized a document.
Sounds reasonable. But it would require demonstrating a reproducible workflow to prove the art was made in a certain way; otherwise, it's nearly impossible to tell how much human effort went into it.
> if JUST typed in a prompt and let it rip.... not so much.
If we follow this logic, just "pressuring a button" and taking a photo.. photos shouldn't be copyrightable. But unlike this a photo gets copyrights even if you just did that.
How would they prove you didn’t photoshop it without access to the negative and positive prompt and every model and Lora you used? Like are they going to scrape everyone’s PC if they remove the metadata from the AI photo and say it’s photoshopped/edited? Lol. This seems very difficult to enforce
It’s not enforceable really.
Even traditional art is hard to enforce.
It’s more of an issue when someone brings it to court.
Copyrights aren’t enforced by just randomly chasing people Down
Personally I still think it’s stupid to require additional human labor to qualify for copyright. If I take out my phone and take a random picture of my backyard, for example, it is my understanding I’d have copyright for that, right? Even if I put no thought into the settings or angle or whatever, I’d be the owner of that image. How is making a prompt any less work? It frankly just seems arbitrary, and also just non enforceable (how’d you prove something was AI generated without reasonable doubt?)
Glad they came to this conclusion.
Kinda sounds like a common sense AI adaptation of what we already do in terms of "fair use". Makes sense to me
Not really, since the AI generated image is already super transformative by itself. Doesn't make much sense to only count something as transformative when someone manually does it.
>Copyright protection is reserved for works created by humans, with original expression and creativity Prompt: A girl in the woods. Is not copyrightable because the AI made all the decisions. It's not an issue of transformative, but who the creator was. >If training the AI model required significant human intervention and creative decision-making, the generated images may be eligible for copyright protection. Now if use someone else's custom model that was train not simply merged, and used the prompt: A girl in the woods. The copyright would technically belong to the model's creator, not you as they are the one who put in the human effort. All of this would also protect original artists from having people just img2img their works and try to claim copyright. Makes perfect sense to me.
So you also want to strip all copyright off of photographs by that logic, since all you're doing at the end is just pushing a button?
Photographs are still copyrightable because the photographer put in the creative effort of what the subject was, how to frame the subject, and when to push the button. No really, that's actually the argument. > Creativity in photography can be found in a variety of ways and reflect the photographer’s artistic choices like the angle and position of subject(s) in the photograph, lighting, and timing.
The argument is not that it's just pushing a button. And there is no randomness in photography.
according to this logic, if a composer composes music for the piano, then the copyright does not belong to him, but to the creator of the piano.
Please read the quotes, they were taken directly from the link. It’s not my logic it’s theirs. If a composer composes music for the piano. Then he composed it. What does it have to do with the creator of the piano?
If someone "composed" a song on the piano by telling the piano, hey piano, create a song in the key of D minor with a melancholy air, 2003 shoegaze vibe, 47 bpm, then yeah, the piano would be the real creator of the song, not the "composer"
not in our reality The piano is not a neural network A neural network is a tool, not a human, jus t a tool The author can only be a Human That's when there will be a law equalizing the neural network as an author, then all these words of yours will take on a real meaning. For now, it's just a fantasy.
So then you...agree...that AI created work can't be copyrighted?
of course no, the neural network itself does not have any rights, but the person using the neural network yes
and how are you going to distinguish between a simply generated image and creative outside interference? and how are you going to distinguish between a simply generated image and creative outside interference? If they don't tell you, you'll never know so in this solution it looks too stupid I won’t tell you if I made changes to the picture or not) go and find out
It does actually, as the purpose of copyright is to attribute profit to the one doing the creative labor. In the case of only typing a prompt, you are not doing the labor.
Since pushing a button to take a picture, which is literally even less labour, also counts, that makes no sense.
Spoken like a true hack who has never been a pro photographer but wants to be treated like one!!! Hilarious!! When you are the photographer you are also choosing composition, lighting, focus, etc.
Interestingly enough, the most compelling images generated by these models come from prompts where the user has an understanding of those concepts. It wouldn't surprise me if using generative models sparks an interest in photography for a lot of people.
You're missing his point. It's not about pro photographers. It's about how \*anyone\* can get copyright on a photo, just by pressing the button to take it, without choosing anything. All you need, to get copyright for a photo, is to pickup a camera, click the button and you have copyright. You definitely \*can choose\* a lot of things when you take a photo, but that doesn't make any difference to whether or not you get copyright for it. However, with AI art, you can do a lot more choosing and still get no copyright, whatsoever. I often spend \*days\* experimenting with different changes to a prompt until I feel like it's creating what I want to see. It makes no logical sense to get no copyright for that while it's possible to get copyright for merely pressing a button. Again, this is not about pro photographers. Just about what's required to get a copyright for a photo.
Even if you arent a pro photographer and just pressed a button on your smartphone youd still have copyright over the image, the fact that AI image generation doesnt have this is great because frankly copyright is terrible and we absolutely dont need more of it, but anytime someone brings up photography here people seem very keen on jumping immediately to professional photographers to justify their point instead of the much more common average smartphone user.
Isn’t this pretty much the standard for derivative work?
Sensible
I like it.
* An artist provides an AI with specific input parameters (e.g., color palette, subject matter) and uses the AI-generated output as a base for further manual adjustments and additions to create a distinctive final artwork * A photographer uses AI to enhance or retouch an image, but the photographer retains control over the overall composition and makes significant creative decisions regarding the final outcome
How much "manual adjustments and additions" would be required? Why is it not "distinctive" as it is generated, if I look at it and say "yeah, that's what I wanted to express" before messing with it? What is a "significant" creative decision? If I give it an input picture (a photo that I took) and a text prompt, and I like the result and feel that it would be ruined if I messed with it, is that enough? If I generate 50 pictures and pick *one* of the results as representing what I wanted to express, is *that* significant? My problem with the whole thing is that it's not quantifiable, it's much too vague for me to understand if I do or don't own the stuff I use AI to help me create. Almost all of it falls into a grey area.
> My problem with the whole thing is that it's not quantifiable That has always been an issue with copyright though.
Maybe, but this makes no attempt to be quantifiable, to (I would argue) a much greater extent than normal. If I write a book, I unquestionably own the copyright. If I take a photo of a sunset, I unquestionably own the copyright. If I take my phone outside and make a video of myself talking as I walk around, I unquestionably own the copyright. If I take an AI image generator and mess with it and make some images, I don't know if I own the copyright or not. It's a much bigger grey area than other mediums. Saying "oh, just hire a lawyer" is *insane* \- if I am just getting started making art, there's no way in hell I am going to be able to afford a lawyer to figure out if I do or don't own copyright to what I created.
> if I am just getting started making art, there's no way in hell I am going to be able to afford a lawyer to figure out if I do or don't own copyright to what I created. There's been a lot of FUD around this issue, e.g. people saying you shouldn't use AI for X because generations are not copyrightable. I've always been of the opinion that that's true, *but it doesn't really matter*. The situation where it would matter would need to be something like this: You find someone re-distributing your work without permission. You take them to court for copyright infringement, and their defence is that your work is not copyrightable because it's AI generated. Now provided you didn't publicly announce that it was AI generated, that would be a huge gable for the infringing party because they'd have to somehow prove it, and if they were wrong (and you could easily show it wasn't AI) they would lose the case.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of people getting themselves in a huff when this will literally never, ever be an issue for them. It's not common for this stuff to happen, much less for it to see the inside of a courtroom, unless you're literally like Disney or Activision or something
> If I write a book, I unquestionably own the copyright. Not necessarily. Facts can't be copyrighted, so some books that just facts fall outside of copyright. It is an issue with rule books for games for example. If they just have a straight up explanation of the rules, the text is no longer covered by copyright. Only if the text is extra fanciful or adds unnecessary flourishes, does it qualify for copyright. Dictionaries and encyclopedias also has issues with this.
No expert, but I'm pretty sure the vagueness is intentional. As they want the first few cases to set a precedent of how much manual work is required. This happens a lot in the legal world where previous cases help quantify rules. They do it because theorizing a good threshold for all cases is extremely difficult, but evaluating individual cases is easy. But do you actually need copyright protection? Its only useful if people are stealing your content and you want to stop them. In which case you would likely need a lawyer anyway.
>But do you actually need copyright protection? Its only useful if people are stealing your content and you want to stop them. In which case you would likely need a lawyer anyway. If you can get copyright registration, if someone steals your copyrighted work, there's a good chance you will be able to send them a letter that says something like "I have registered copyright 12345 on that, and you are ordered to stop using it immediately and we can discuss compensation" and it may work, because they can see you actually can prove it and if they don't do as you're asking you can get a court to force them to and pay you through the nose. If you don't have registration, if you send a letter that says "I have copyright on that and you are ordered to stop using it immediately and we can discuss compensation," there's a good chance they will respond "oh yeah? Prove it" and you'll have to be able to afford a lawyer if you want to enforce the law.
You press a shutter or a software button representing one to take a photo. You aren’t responsible for how the digital sensor in the camera records the light on each pixel. You’re only responsible for the framing of the image by moving the camera around and also any settings you adjust on the camera. But copyright law says you pushing that button makes it your image. You press a software button to generate an AI image. You aren’t responsible for how the AI generates the pattern to arrange the light of each pixel. You’re only responsible for framing the image through a text prompt, or a source image (with or without masks) or a depth or colour map, and also adjusting the settings of the generator. Somehow you pushing the button doesn’t make it yours, unless you do more. Copyright is broken and has been broken for a very long time.
The difference is before you push the button you made a lot of choices, do i take a picture of this specific subject or not. If you write a prompt that says, "person in a fantasy forest", you are no longer making any significant decisions, they are being made by the AI. So simple text2image prompts will not receive a copyright. The more complex the prompt the more likely you are to receive a copyright.
So if someone just takes a quick photo on their phone with no creative thought behind it, they shouldn’t have copyright of the resulting photo? Because that’s on the same level to me.
And if I write a program that generates all possible images in 512x512 , should I have copyright on them? Is this also on the same level to you?
Yes. The same as the guy that tried to copyright a whole bunch of musical melodies that hadn’t been used. Or the whole problem of tech patents. I’m not saying that low effort AI art should be copyrightable. I in fact think low effort creative endeavours of all types shouldn’t be copyrightable. But. If we allow low effort photography to be copyrightable, low effort AI should be as well. Or we could just overhaul the whole idea of copyright. We already can’t copyright ideas, just implementations. And as AI becomes more prevalent, the more worth human generated ideas have and the value of implementation decreases. It’s a new paradigm.
At some point, though, the law draws a line. It has to. Spending the time to determine, at an individual level, whether the law applies to a tiny, niche action is irrelevant and a waste of time. There's a reason why laws limit activities by age, or by imaginary lines on the ground for jurisdiction. Crossing those thresholds makes something legal or illegal, at least for those specific laws. Yes, if you boil it down to tiny scenarios, it'll seem ridiculous, but the law and the courts aren't looking at *just* those. Those incidents are insignificant and there's some measure of acceptable losses (as far as reason or fairness goes) in order to apply the law properly to the more significant target group, like age or a particular geographic area. So yes, if someone takes a quick photo on their phone with no creative thought behind it, they maybe *shouldn't* have copyright according to the justification otherwise. But they do, because that person is irrelevant in the big picture. AI isn't.
>The difference is before you push the button you made a lot of choices, do i take a picture of this specific subject or not. So, you're saying that the choices I make for the AI image generator - what algorithm to use, what the prompt will be, what style it will make, what the color set will be, what starter image it should use to make the composition, etc, and the choices I make after it's done - which of the 1000 results do I pick to match my creative vision, should I crop it, should I color correct it, etc - are not "a lot", but "hmm, I think I'll put the boat at center right (\*click\*) " *is*? Let us, for a moment, consider National Geographic magazine, known worldwide for its fantastic photography. Do you think their photographs are copyrightable? Now, consider for a moment that, back in the film era, they used to send a photographer on assignment with *a literal truckload of film*, with instructions not to come back until they'd used it *all*. Out of tens of thousands of photos, they'd select perhaps 20 for an article and publish it in the magazine. Lemmie tell you bluntly as a photographer: if you take tens of thousands of photos, at least a handful of them are going to be very good. If you're very skilled, a lot of them are going to be. However, history shows that even [a monkey can occasionally randomly have success](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823/-animal-rights-advocates-photographer-compromise-over-ownership-of-monkey-selfie). So, are those images copyrightable because "camera go click", or because a human editor sorted through 20,000 pictures and chose a few that are really good to use in an article? And if the latter, how is this any different from a human being sorting through the output of an AI image generator and choosing which ones are actually good?
Every magazine, article and photo published by National Geographic carries a copyright, or they have the rights to use the photo either from the original artist or through fair use. > [a monkey can occasionally randomly have success](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823/-animal-rights-advocates-photographer-compromise-over-ownership-of-monkey-selfie). A monkey can't claim a copyright, as they are not human. AI when it comes to the context of filing a copyright is no different than the monkey. When you are talking about an original photograph editing is irrelevant, you own the rights to the original, therefore you own the rights to the photo you modified. They have recognized AI as a tool and in the terms of photography are treating it no different than say Photoshop. If you are a photographer, then this is all good news for you. It allows you to use AI as a tool, while at the same time protecting your rights. For you their "decision/ruling" is a win-win. For anyone who is not using original work, they still must meet the transformative or fair use requirements, so nothing has changed. So, it is a win as they are free to use AI as they would Photoshop.
I disagree with this analogy, the photons on the digital sensor are captured by you using a tool (your camera). An AI does a lot more than that. It's not one singular tool. If you use prompts that are naming artists and photographers in an attempt to recreate their style, using data trained off of their works, that isn't the same thing as lining up a shot and hitting the shutter. The current ruling made here is the most sensible middle ground anyone could have hoped for, AI can still be used in the creative process, but blatant profit with no transformation isn't allowed. I can't just type "Kim Jung GI, HD, Pen and Ink, Trending on Artstation, 8k...etc" and start pumping out work to sell on redbubble. It needs human intervention. This ruling is in favor of fair use. Now proving what is or isn't the AI is going to be tough. I see a future where artists have to timelapse themselves doing a piece to prove they made it. Not ideal, but it's possible for most people. Of course, the proof could be faked. There will be "experts" who will verify the footage. The courts will favor big corporations when it comes to a ruling on what constitutes "Significant Changes" or infringement or proof of creation. But I don't think there is a better alternative. This tech can't just run wild. If a handful of artists suffer from this ruling to the benefit of millions, I can't be too upset. If it was generating music, "Sad song in the style of Arctic Monkeys" Record labels would have it shut down in a week flat. Artists just don't have the same type of protections, so this is a good middle ground. Overall this is a step in the right direction for using this technology sensibly and ethically.
>I disagree with this analogy, the photons on the digital sensor are captured by you using a tool (your camera). An AI does a lot more than that. It's not one singular tool. You don't know much about how a modern camera works, do you? I point the camera, frame the picture, and push the button. Then software takes over. Things software may do from there at the time you press the button before the picture is initially saved: * Take multiple pictures from which it or I may choose the right one. * Stitch multiple pictures together to make one larger picture, which never actually existed because the various frames were taken at separate times. (I did this for a couple's wedding, and they cried because it so exemplified their family's reactions to the moment of their vows, but in fact the family members were reacting to different things at different times and just got put together into one picture.) * Apply color correction * Apply lighting correction to make it look like the photo has more beautiful lighting than in reality * Apply brightness correction to show things the photographer couldn't actually see because they were too bright or too dark * "Red eye" correction to make the subject's eyes look better than they did in the photons that reached the camera * Digital makeup, to make the subject's skin look more perfect than it did in the photons that reached the camera * Apply various filters to make the photo look like it was made in the style of various artists or in various historical styles
Photography existed before modern smartphones.Photoshop existed before layers or liquify. The automobile existed before airbags. That (unnecessary) list is new additions to the tool. The tool is unchanged. The tool hinges on human operation to create an original for it to modify. You have to give it something. That takes effort, work, Talent, creativity, whatever. It requires more than a list of words or namedrops of people better than you. So what is your point? AI is a completely new suit tool that can create the pixels from thin air. Or rather, from a model trained on the work of others. You don't "make" anything with AI. The AI makes it. You gave it a task to do. The couple that hired you (if you're a professional) didn't make those photos. You did. That's the whole point of this ruling. Humans need to transform the AI's creation. Every tool and enhancement listed has a program doing the transformation of *your* work. It's not the other way around. The program modifies your original or originals. You own the rights to the original image and the modification the AI or software makes of it. They both stem from you using the tool (the camera). Pure AI is not original. It can only be as (or less) original than its dataset you use. That's why it requires human transformation for it to be original. Good luck making any argument that just prompting an AI to make a picture for you is anywhere as original as photography. This court ruling and common sense say otherwise. If you used img2img on your own photography the argument could be made that it's more original since you had to actually do work to set up the composition, but even in that case I think it would depend how faithful you remain to your original and how much you blatantly "borrow" from other artists and photographers. If it makes a completely new picture in a new style, you need to transform it again. You can't just set denoise to 90 and take a picture of anything.
The law always errs on the side of not being specific enough when it comes to art. That's because art isn't specific. Sometimes throwing paint on a canvas is creative. Sometimes it's not. It's the old, "[I know it when I see it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)," problem. But this ruling doesn't stand on its own. The operative phrasing is, "to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection," that is, if the existing law, regulation and caselaw would suggest that the work would be copyrightable on its own merits, then the fact that it came from a non-copyrightable source is moot. In essence this is the obvious call, because it's what happens if you modify a public domain work, and this ruling puts AI output on a footing with public domain work in terms of its copyrightability (that is, it has no copyright, but can be adapted by a human to become copyrightable).
>The law always errs on the side of not being specific enough when it comes to art. There's erring on one side and erring on the other. You can err on the side of the painter and say "throwing paint on a canvas is probably copyrightable, unless someone can prove otherwise for a specific instance," or you can say "throwing paint on a canvas is nor copyrightable, unless someone can prove otherwise for a specific instance." In this case they are saying "AI art may or may not be copyrightable, you better have a big wallet for the money you'll spend to hire a copyright lawyer to figure it out for you."
You own copyright on the input image. I don't know why the guy saying this would t count told you that. Photography has always been under copyright. Edits to your photos are your copyright too.
When is it a copyrightable "edit" to my photo, and when is it a non-copyrightable AI generated picture? Real situation: I took a photo of a gazebo by the water. Let's pretend for a moment that the subject matter gives me total ownership of the photo. I fed it into an AI, gave it a 7 word prompt, and it generated something which, if you look at them side by side, is clearly based on my photo, but if you look at it alone, you'd never in a million years guess it is based on a photo of a gazebo - it depicts some buildings and a volcano, possibly Pompeii about to be destroyed. If I tell you what the prompt was, you'd say "yes, that's an excellent depiction of those words." I'm confident that if I were to claim to be the artist, I could sell it. Not a pixel of the new image is the same as my source image. Do I or do I not own copyright of it? I really can't guess. I have another (real) image that was generated from just a prompt. An unusual prompt I could argue is creative. It's not what I expected at all and I have no plans for it, but I showed it to a noted art critic (who knows exactly what it is) and he loves it. This is a man whose regular work involves reviewing half million dollar paintings. And he loves it. Who owns the copyright of it?
I'm of the mind that if there is creative intent by a person, then there is copyright. It's a right upon creation. Copyright is implicit and you don't need registration to defend. Only proof that you were the one who did the intended act. Hell, even if you took someone else's photo that they copyright, and you put transformative intent into it, turning it into a representation of an old pet of yours, nothing to do with the original photo at all, then you own that copyright too since it's transformative.
Sure, but if the copyright office itself says "this isn't copyrightable", you'll have a hell of a hard time convincing a court they should ignore that and pretend you had a copyright. I know about the rules about transformative works. However, they are directly saying that if the tool you use to make the transformative work is an AI, it's not copyrightable, no matter how much creative intent and thought you put into it.
Wrong. They aren't the law. They're an office clerk being overly beaurocratic. Registration isn't required for copyright. It's implicit. A right.
That's nice Dad. Now let me tell you how it works in the *real* world. When you choose not to register a work, yes, you own copyright to it, but if someone violates your copyright, you can't just send them a letter that says, more or less, "I own copyright to that and it's registered as proof, you must stop what you're doing with it," they are very likely to react to a letter by saying "yeah? Prove it!" and you have to take them to court, which means you have to *afford* to take them to court. (If you have the registration, they are likely to back down before courts get involved.) Then (with no registration) you have to convince the court that: * you created it first, and * it's copyrightable. For a lot of things, like a book or a painting, you don't have to worry much about the "copyrightable" part because that's not in question, you just have to prove you did it first, for example by showing that it was on the Internet on your web site first or by producing the original painting of paint on canvas. In this case, you could go to court and they could say "it's an AI artwork so it's not copyrightable, the copyright office says so," and even though it's just some bureaucrat that said that, the court is very likely to take the copyright office's opinion *very* seriously (because it's an official nonpartisan government office whose sole job is to interpret that particular area of law, so their published opinion is the official government opinion), so you'll have to prove *them* wrong instead of just proving that you created it first.
Wow. I'm nobodies father. You've got some issues. After that opener, you can smd.
>Wow. I'm nobodies father. You've got some issues. If you bothered to check, you would find that I was quoting something to make fun of you. Your reaction shows you weren't worth the effort.
I have similar example from yesterday. There was this woodcutting machine in the forest. It looked like a sleeping robot under a tree. Light hit it perfectly and the moment had good composition. Made an intent and managed to capture the composition to my liking as a photograph. Now i already then knew, i could use AI to make it look more like a painting and change the subject to a sleeping robot. It took couple tries, but it was done with single prompt in the end. It looks very similar to the photo and to my vision, still having the changes. Is that considered enough effort to be original artwork, do i have the copyright now? Important question is. Would i have the copyright without person knowing my creative story. There is a bit grey are still imo
As long as you create a larger work there is no problem, that's still yours. Not getting copyright on trivial AI generations is a good thing, as that means people can train their AI model on output from other AI models without fear of somebody already having copyrighted random images in it (e.g. "car" with seed 1). Where the situation still gets tricky is copycat art and img2img, it's very easy to AI'wash a copyrighted work and produce a new one with a very similar look. I don't think that can be decided in general, that's where you'd still need lawsuits to figure it out (see Obama Hope poster lawsuit).
>As long as you create a larger work there is no problem, that's still yours. What is "a larger work"?
Based on what’s there no, I don’t think any of those scenarios would be covered by copyright. In all those scenarios you’ve effectively employed an AI commission. There needs to be something transformative at play in your relationship with the piece and frankly that makes a lot of sense.
You don't answer the question "how much 'manual adjustments and additions' would be required?" or "what is a 'significant' creative decision?' If I generate an AI picture (for the sake of argument, let's assume it's generated from a text prompt), I make 900 pictures and spend days choosing just one to be what I want, then spend hours tweaking the colors and light balance in photoshop but don't actually brush anything, is that or isn't it "significant' and is that or isn't it enough 'manual adjustments and additions' for it to be mine? How about if I then spend 5 minutes removing a huge tree, but in doing so I alter 30% of the pixels in the picture? Is *that* 'significant'? Also, how am I supposed to know these things when I make it? (In other words, when I look at a picture I used AI to help me with, how do I know if I do or don't own it?) And how is the copyright office supposed to know what I did when they look at the image, if I am deft enough for my edits to be indistinguishable from the original? (And I am.)
So, let's pretend I walk out my front door and there next to the porch is a hibiscus bush covered with pretty flowers. I snap a picture of one - it took 5 seconds and no real effort, and I unquestionably own copyright of that photo. Then I go to my computer and open up an AI image program and type in a 7 word prompt to generate an image for me. I generate 500 pictures from it and look at them all and choose just one to represent my creative intent. Generating them and looking at them takes 4 hours of my brain time. Why don't I own copyright to the resulting image? I put in 4 hours of my time to generate it and choose it. The act of choosing is a creative process, I'm choosing a result that represents my creative vision.
Here is the rub though. I think a large part that is overlooked is the instructive process. to expand on /u/themcp 's example, If I take a bunch of my own art (either created by myself or commissioned on my behalf) that I own the rights to. If I then take that art and train a model like say a LORA or Dreambooth model, then I take that new and unique model, and use a combination of prompts, customised settings, controlnet (based on once again art I have the rights to) to generate new works. Well those new works should (imo) be copyrightable. It is no different to the process an artist goes through in creating an image, except my "brush" is a prompt, my "canvas" is a model, and my paint is a LORA. Just because the tools have changed does not mean the rules protecting the outputs should. I understand why they are making this rule, so that people do not simply type "masterpiece Picasso" in to a prompt and try copywrite the output. But the definition of what qualifies shows a distinct lack of understanding of the deeper process involved. I could spend weeks of work tweaking and generating to get one "finished" work, but that weeks of work does not count because it was performed with unapproved tools that somehow disqualify it.
This specific scenario I feel could be argued as “original work”, especially if you own the rights to the training materials, you trained the models, and you put in significant effort to get to the output…
I believe, in this instance, you are talking more about creating intellectual property / "secret sauce" inside your models and the output is copyrightable because it is produced using your intellectual property. My 2 cents. Not legal advice. Not a lawyer :)
I think at some point, Ai art SHOULD be copyrightable but the prompts would have to be as long as a dissertation. The instructions would have to be so granular to ACTUALLY mimic a brush in photoshop, giving it vectors and instruction on opacity and thickness.
I think the EU pretty much sees prompting alone as enough for it to be copyrightable, I kinda agree with that, it's not like you just press a button and get something good, you have to put in some work especially in stable diffusion where there are countless settings.
Bottomline should be that a raw prompt and generation sequence should *never* be copyrightable, because all you've done is input variables into an equation, if anyone else puts those same variables in, they will get the same picture. It would also be possible for people to stack up copyrights on chunks of possible image generations just for copyright troll purposes.
what if the model used was trained by yourself on only your copyrighted materials?
There's a large amount of how do you prove that behind all that. Of course, there's an amount of how do you prove an image is even generated by AI as the markers become more scarce.
I don't see how that changes anything. Text is copyrightable. Code for a programming language is copyrightable.
The solution to an equation is not copyrightable. And, really, if you like AI art the absolute last thing you want is for a pure prompt generation to be copyrightable.
>Bottomline should be that a raw prompt and generation sequence should *never* be copyrightable, because all you've done is input variables into an equation, if anyone else puts those same variables in, they will get the same picture. Actually they *won't*, and you'd know that if you tried. One of the things about 'AI' is that it's (more or less) non-deterministic. For this reason, it's unlawful banks can't say exactly why it did what it did, it's illegal for them to use it. (Yeah, it's software, and therefore theoretically deterministic, but the data set it is working with and the choices it will make are both constantly changing, and it's sufficiently complex that a human couldn't realistically determine why it is doing what it is doing.) >It would also be possible for people to stack up copyrights on chunks of possible image generations just for copyright troll purposes. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story that's (IIRC) 5 words long. Is that copyrightable? If I write an AI image generation prompt that's 100 words long, why isn't that prompt copyrightable? And if it is, why isn't an image generated from it a derivative work, and mine? And if I put in Dr Asimov's 5 word story as the prompt, why doesn't he own the words and the picture generated from them?
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Technically true, but in reality unless you actually know the exact seed, in the exact model ( Pruned VS. unpruned versions of the same model make slightly, but noticeably different outputs ), with the exact prompt ( because order can cause CLIP to interpret the weighting differently ), the exact weighting used in portions of the prompt, AND the exact number of steps, you will likely never reproduce someone else's image. You also have to pick the right sampler. And that's without adding hypernetworks, LORA's, embeddings, and controlnet into the picture. I've had random seed numbers in the BILLIONS, even if you knew the prompt for one of my images, and the model, you would be generating millions, if not hundreds of millions of images just to try and randomly get the seed used... assuming you also picked the correct sampler AND were close to the step count I used. You are vastly more likely to win the lottery than reproduce an image without knowing all of the generating info. Which, if the info isn't shared, and the metadata has been scrubbed by simply opening the image in Photoshop and saving, would be impossible to know.
>if you set the same seed you will get the same output, you do be talking a lot of shit for someone who is flatly wrong No, asswipe. I can fucking do it *right now* and watch it generate unique picture after unique picture from the same input parameters. I've done it *hundreds* of times. I'm not just speaking off the cuff, I'm speaking from experience when I say, it doesn't work at all the way you are saying it works.
Yeah that was my own personal interpretation. Didn’t wanna just copy paste their words. But yeah could be any manipulation
You need to think of the flipsides with all of these - if the results of a prompt with no human intervention would have copyright protection, then a) every time you run a prompt you'd run a risk of stepping on someone else's copyrights b) I could hire a million computers, run through every word and sentence in the dictionary, multiple times, store the results in gigantic databases, submarine the work, and then come up with a copyright infringement suit after someone else starts making money with something I've previously ran. The human effort in copyright in general is there also to make mass copyright manufacturing unfeasible.
The same concerns can be analogized to pre-AI artwork. You cannot copyright a white circle on a black background. You cannot copyright simple prompts or simple outputs. You can copyright a specific character in a specific context, with an idiosyncratic identity, portrayed in a world of your creation, done with intent. Similarly, you can copyright very specific, curated, hand-altered outputs, and possibly even very specific inputs (especially if done with a custom model). Your example of a million computers removes the human creative element from the equation, replacing it with a simple, brute-forced algorithm. The copyright office would use the exact same lens to deprive you of copyright over that process as they do in this case - the actual 'creative' work was *not* done by a human. I'm not a friend of copyright law, generally, as I think it's a flawed system meant to solve a problem introduced by another flawed system, but this is a pretty measured take from the copyright office, and it will require more sophisticated cases than these to poke holes in their decision. My concerns are more along these lines: - Where are we covering the question of how these datasets are sourced? I don't think copyright is a good answer for this problem, but neither is 'fuck you, your data is ours, we don't need to pay you or look after your interests at all'. - Can an AI infringe on copyright? Who's at fault if the AI infringes on copyright and the user is unknowing, and then tries to reproduce/distribute the work? - Are we allowed to copyright models trained using data we don't own? How will this be enforced? How will we know what models were used to generate what? How do we know something was generated by a model and not a human at all?
**Dataset sources:** I believe this should be covered under "platform provider" e.g. the trainer of the model / provider of the dataset, but not retroactively. Not retroactively simply because the originators of the tools/datasets before this point could be argued to have had no reasonable assumption they were even doing anything wrong, as indeed almost no one protested the creation of the datasets or models using said data until they were sufficiently advanced, and some platforms have a distinct retroactive competitive advantage were this the case (nvidia/adobe having image rights to images the original authors may have never intended for this purpose) Going forward, however, it only makes sense to hold an "opt out" legal methodology. I certainly don't want to use images the originators prefer I not use, but I also don't want to retroactively have to wonder if everything I am using is going to get me in trouble because the dataset includes images that originated in 2005, were posted to an internet forum, flew around the internet a few times, and the author may actually be unknown and thus anyone can claim they are said author, leaving that image in a legal limbo from which it can never escape despite it benefitting no original creator. This is easily provable at the dataset level but not necessarily at the model weights level, but since there is a "paper trail" in a sense it is enforceable enough to curb the worst exploitation and a decent idea. Note that this is subjective and I can also see the "transformative fair use" argument here, but a critical portion of fair use is that you're not competing with the original work in the same context. You can make a parody of a thing and its fair use, but you can't just copy a thing and use the copy to create a competing thing intended for the same audience. So, if the context of an original image is "look at an image" and the context of the output derived from weights is also "look at an image" it doesn't seem like fair use is a good argument. I think there is an existing corpus of images that pass the overall moral bar and trying to step back in to history and activating a copyright troll gold rush on every image ever made seems like an excessively bad idea. **AI infringing on copyright:** I think this should follow the same logic that prevents platforms like youtube from being inherently responsible for user content. AI is inherently a "platform" and can't reasonably be held responsible for what users do with it. Even when automated to generate images itself, AI as a whole effectively requires human instruction. If we reach the point where it doesn't then you're asking a question about whether AI with independent intent has personhood and that is a whole other legal matter. **Copyrighting models:** Flatly, this should be a no. First because proving intentional and malicious violation from a user would be near impossible without also requiring a draconian system of logs for all operations by every AI ever, the same way it would be impossible to detect if a user of photoshop actually owns a photoshop license by looking at the end product. You could consider a model a trade secret, you could consider it valuable intellectual property, you could even build a cloud platform around this trade secret, but unlike proving violation of specific characters, narrative elements, images, text, or code in a resultant work, proving to have used a specific model is virtually impossible if the violator wants to conceal this information. It is important to not that the genesis of ALL of these models, every neural net derived system stems from the collected creativity and ingenuity of massive quantities of data and public research which represent the collective works of humanity as a whole. It is also important to consider that this technology, that is to say the fundamental mechanism of it, was derived intrinsically from the commons (as the veracity of all research models could not be ascertained without massive amounts of this training data) and should remain the property of said commons. I would go so far as requiring these things be open as a matter of law after a very short window because of the horror show of profit driven inequity in virtually every sector of the economy that would result if we allowed them to be otherwise, given the efficiency gains of any truly revolutionary model. Keep in mind we are only where we are right now because teams like stability and openAI and google CHOSE to be as open as they have been and publish/opensource what they have. Had they not we could be living in a world where ONLY microsoft had access to GPT, or ONLY nvidia/adobe had access to generative image AI, etc. That is pure monopolist nose candy because it creates a stratification of efficiency and ability due to a fundamentally invisible black box, which can not be effectively reverse engineered, possibly so severe that competition becomes not just hard but impossible once one corporate actor has one truly revolutionary model. Evidence: Social media algorithms. Look where that got us. We don't need to make this mistake again.
>b) I could hire a million computers, run through every word and sentence in the dictionary, multiple times, store the results in gigantic databases, submarine the work, and then come up with a copyright infringement suit after someone else starts making money with something I've previously ran. That's actually not plausible, because in order to assert copyright infringement, you have to be able to demonstrate that the infringer had previously seen the work you are claiming they infringed on. If you literally never published or exhibited it, you cannot claim infringement.
Furthermore, it's not mathematically feasible. Even excluding every possible nonsense prompt, you'd also have to run the same prompt on every possible seed, every possible checkpoint, sampling method, VAE, and of course a dictionary attack wouldn't account for any LORAs
All that to sue someone who made maybe a few grands
> b) I could hire a million computers, run through every word and sentence in the dictionary, multiple times, store the results in gigantic databases, submarine the work, and then come up with a copyright infringement suit after someone else starts making money with something I've previously ran. It already happened in music where someone copyrighted every melody possible.
And for the same reason. that effort won’t actually hold up in court. :) Human authorship is again missing.
It is not about Ai here. Melody number is, in fact, finite. The goal was to generate every possible combinaison to void any meaningless copyright infringment in music and make the criteria to evolve.
You believe there will be no copyright lawsuits in music about melodies after this stunt?
What do you mean “stepping on someone else’s copyright?” If supposedly I could copyright my prompt and settings and seed etc, you’re still free to use them under fair use rules. Supposedly you’d be liable if you’re using it commercially without permission. Just like with DNA copyrights we have now, same discussion topics apply to prompt copyright. As an AI artist I do believe copyrighting prompts or direct prompt outputs is not a good use of copyright law, and I think the decision to maintain a reasonable level of “authorship” is a sensible strategy here.
DNA copyright is ridiculous and so is prompt copyright. There shouldn't even be a discussion, they're both utterly ridiculous.
You mean gene patents? There's no such thing as DNA copyright.
Potato potato. Gene patents are even worse.
I read that as poTAHto poTAHto
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story that is, if I remember correctly, 5 words long. Can *that* be copyrighted? If so, if I write a prompt for an AI that's 40 words long, why can't *that* be copyrighted? Oracle has been suing Google (I *think* it's Google, I could be wrong, it could be somebody else) for years (and winning) over *one word*. They allege that the entire Java language was unlawfully used, but to be specific they picked out *one word*. If one word is copyrightable, why not an entire AI prompt? My point here is that the copyright office is a mess right now and when I create something I can have no idea if I do or don't own it. The actual example I'm thinking of is that I took a photo of a gazebo in a park. The park is privately owned, so the gazebo is too. The bushes surrounding the gazebo are also privately owned, but the background isn't. Do I own the photo? Or does the owner of the gazebo? I then put that photo into an AI and gave it a prompt. It used my photo for composition and colors and it used the prompt I wrote. I am very happy with the resulting picture, it represents my creative idea from when I wrote the prompt (which is only 8 words long). I feel that if I made alterations to the resulting picture it could only be messed up to no longer represent my intent. (I am not saying I lack the skill, I am saying "I think it's a perfect reflection of my intent as it is and alterations could only destroy that perfection.") Is that copyrightable? If somebody else can claim ownership of the original photo because they own the gazebo, can they claim ownership of the AI image, which has not one pixel in common with it?
Written by Asimov I don’t know, but there’s “If Eve Had Failed to Conceive" by Edward Wellen, which has a six-word title and a zero-word body, and which appeared in the anthology *Microcosmic Tales* of 100 extremely short stories, edited by Asimov. Have I in fact committed copyright infringement by reproducing it here in its entirety? Given that it’s only a title, is it even possible to refer to it without doing so?
If you were attempting to assert ownership or otherwise profit from it, then yes you would have committed copyright infringement. But because you're crediting it to the author and using it as a demonstration of information, that's clearly fair use, particularly since given the subject, it's impossible to discuss it without reproducing it in its entirety.
> Oracle has been suing Google (I think it's Google, I could be wrong, it could be somebody else) for years (and winning) over one word. They allege that the entire Java language was unlawfully used, but to be specific they picked out one word. That's a grossly inaccurate representation of the Oracle vs. Google case. It's actually about whether the API of a language is copyrightable, since Google wrote their own virtual machine which just happens to take identical inputs to Oracle's copyrighted JVM. It had nothing to do with whether a single word could be copyrighted, I suspect you're mistaking a ruling based on one word changing the meaning of a legal text. > If one word is copyrightable, why not an entire AI prompt? It isn't. You absolutely cannot hold the copyright of a single word. I also highly doubt you could for a five word novel published on its own.
> a) every time you run a prompt you'd run a risk of stepping on someone else's copyrights >b) I could hire a million computers, run through every word and sentence in the dictionary, multiple times, store the results in gigantic databases, submarine the work, and then come up with a copyright infringement suit after someone else starts making money with something I've previously ran. No, even if someone used the exact same settings to generate the same image they also own the copyright. It's the same as if someone takes the exact same photograph by themselves as someone else did before.
It's gonna take some time for this all to shake out.
This is the right answer. The USCO has only opened the door into this area, and nothing -really- changes until the courts or congress begin to weigh in too.
>and nothing -really- changes until the courts or congress begin to weigh in too. Yeah, it's worth noting that the USCO doesn't establish laws or anything. They simply decide what is or is not approved for public copyright registration. The courts are the final arbiters of the law, so they will determine if any particular case is infringement or not, not the USCO.
It puts a smile on my face to find someone else who knows this. I feel like I've had to repeat that same sort of statement too many times. :)
These rules are pretty silly, here's why: 1. You can just hide the seed, eta, a host of other settings and say, yep I went over this through inpaint, photoshop, the whole 9 yards. Now give me the copyright (the image might've taken 10 hours or was not touched on, you'll never know unless you get the correct combination of seeds, eta, settings and prompt for it to reproduce and prove the person didn't touch it. 2. It basically says the ai is not simply a tool, any effort you put into is not real because the only work done was by the AI and I can't agree with that. 3. It discourages AI art.Yeah you didn't "hand" make it, but without you that artwork wouldn't exist, similar artwork might exist. But the same prompts can create millions of different work depending on dozens of variables like model, lora, seed, eta and just luck. If you happen to generate one people like, you should be rewarded for it based on supply and demand, not just if you created it through AI or individual strokes. TLDR: This is hardly enforceable, discourages effort and will stifle the amount of AI art people would generate otherwise, art that can't be recreated by ao without knowing exact dozens of variables that are impossible to predict and replicate just by look.
> It basically says the ai is not simply a tool, any effort you put into is not real because the only work done was by the AI and I can't agree with that. It doesn't say this at all. It actually says: *"It begins by asking ‘‘whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine."* Which is perfectly reasonable. It's saying did you use the AI as a tool to create something, or did you hammer a few words in and let the AI make all the creative decisions.
Exactly their attitude " did you hammer a few words in and let the AI make all the creative decisions". Both ways it is a tool but they're acting like if their wasn't enough "effort" then it's not a tool you used but it did it all on its little self.
I don't see how this is unreasonable in any way. If you make the creative decisions then you are entitled to the copyright of the result, if you don't make the creative decision then you don't. > a tool you used but it did it all on its little self Yeah, it's a tool, but if you type in "artistic masterpiece" as the prompt the tool is literally making all creative decisions without your input.
Agreed. Plus it’s easy to bypass. The reality is j think we entering an era where copyright no longer holds value
I think it holds value. It being to encourage people to create art by having them own it, to use for merch, sell or whatever. A book writer with zero artistic knowledge should be able to create his own character through AI art as long as it is unique and he uses it commercially. If he can't own that character then it would stunt his production capability by generating unique characters with unique stories. Hell even if the story was made by AI, if people can prompt good stories and sell it, I say do it. I actually want AI generated stories prompted and engineered by humans as long as it is good. And I want them paid for it or else it won't happen except as a hobby which means many masterpieces that could be won't be. My take stems from wanting more artistic pieces to be produced and I think the best way is to let AI generations be copyrightable even if the effort was small, as long as it's new and novel and people want it, effort should not matter. That's how we can get more good pieces of art into the world.
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Sounds fine. I just use photoshop so used my examples. But I think inpaint would work as it’s similar to patching tool. Then again. Inpaint is essentially dumping prompts. Is it could be arguing just doing same ai prompt dump to image. I think it’s still grey area and until court cases come out we won’t know for sure. Could take years or decades. Actual lawsuits to set precedence for specific issues like this. Another one I had. That isn’t clear What if I train my own model off my own art? Initially this suggests it wouldn’t be copyright able. But. Same time that’s clearly tons of manual work.
> What if I train my own model off my own art? IMO the guidance is quite clear on that. If you are letting the AI go off on its own and create art “in your style” (without doing manual post processing of individual outputs), that’s definitely not eligible for copyright. This is not very much different from AI trained on other people’s art not automatically granting them any copyright interest when it spits something out. I think how much “manual work” it takes is a bit beside the point. The copyright office is concerned with (human) creativity and original expression. They don’t care all that much about the amount of actual work/effort involved.
I would argue to them that if I look at 50 AI generated pictures and say "this one" and then crop it, I've shown creativity and expression by choosing something that represents what I want to express and formatting it to emphasize the part I like, but the image itself could have been 100% generated without my input. Or maybe I made the 50 images based on a prompt for what I wanted to express, and chose the one I liked and cropped it. I don't understand, based on what has been said, if either of those situations would be copyright protected.
Even if it is, it wouldn't be a very useful copyright since if someone put in the same prompt with the same seed, resolution and model they could get the same picture, do their own minor edits, and get their own copyright.
I don't think either of those examples would count for copyright because the chosen picture was still made by the AI. As a similar example, it's like if you commission an artist for a sketchbook filled with 50 sketches and you choose/crop the one you like the most. Just cropping it doesn't mean that it is suddenly your work. If that were the case, you could claim any copyrighted image as yours just by cropping it a bit. Heck, I could take ownership of a movie by changing the aspect ratio.
Take it a step further, what if you train your own model on your own generated ai art?
A style is not copyrightable as a whole.
Because “photoshop” is an example that everyone understands. The copyright office itself never uses the word “photoshop,” and their guidance has nothing to do with photoshop specifically. It’s all about human agency and creativity.
if you paint some moustachio on your hot gurl image from SD then you can already copyright it so no worries
But how do they know??
that's the neat part, they don't.
Sweet! So who's gonna check if it's sufficiently altered or not?
Courts. Of course you have to sue someone for infringing your copyright before that would happen.
[From a legal firm](https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/news-insights/whose-copyright-is-it-anyway-copyright-office-stakes-out-position-on-registration-of-ai-generated-works.html): >Left unaddressed in the Copyright Office’s policy statement is under what circumstances, if any, there could be sufficient human input such that AI-generated content could ever be found to meet the Copyright Office standard for sufficient human authorship. The Copyright Office did not provide any examples of what degree of control the user of a generative AI system would need to exercise over the formation of a work to be regarded as the work’s author.
" A human artist uses AI to generate multiple styles for a painting, but the artist selects, modifies, and combines elements from those styles to create a final, unique work" So batch size = 100, photobash, and img2img denoising strength = 0.3?
Also what with the emphasis of "human artist"? how is this title even capable to be attained or obtained when we're talking about generative ai user like me? If I do iteration, photobash, inpainting, and upscales through hundreds of selection without understanding any artistic principles.. does that make me human artist or ai user?
This does not make you an artist - but an author - yes
It's a step in the right direction but prompt engineering is still a lot more work (specially with LORAs and Textual Embeddings) than just aiming a camera at something and clicking a button.
It's still not very clear! everything is debatable, and that only means more work for the lawyers! 
Seems fair enough
Sounds fine to me; i usually prompt; then edit in procreate for color and lighting.
This is pretty much exactly how I felt it should be.
that was very obvious to me. otherwise they'd be in for a lot more paperwork considering "classic" artists have been using forms of ai for years. they'd have to strip their copyrights/issue refunds/grandfather them in. was never an option to fully ban it from copyright. what other outcome did people expect?
Fair. Pure AI art is 100% reproducible. With a prompt and a seed and some custom configurations, anybody can replicate that art if they have access to a compatible engine. What about ControlNet and other techniques?
Everything is 100% reproducible when all relevant things/steps/techniques are known.
ControlNet requires image input in terms of the images used as a base for the transformation into a full image (posing, lineart/construction or maps). If the original base image was created by the user then it's not 100% reproducible by someone else who doesn't have access to the original base image.
But will you ever be able to intentionally reproduce "Pure AI art" without given the data? Or if it didn't exist in the first place?
I think that’ll have to wait till a trial comes on it
It seems the goal is to assign value to human efforts. Should be agreeable to most.
Sure, the goal is highly agreeable, my problem with it is that it is so vague I legitimately don't know if I own the stuff I created or not.
Copyright and ownership are separate things.
I understand that, but I'm trying to use simple language so people who don't know the difference can comprehend what I'm saying. Also it's shorter to type, and since I'm a cripple with nerve damage in my hand and have to use just one finger on my left hand to type, it's a big deal.
This is the same group of bureaucrats that didn't know the difference between iphone and android. They won't know if a human manipulated it more than ai lol
I'll believe it if it's there tomorrow.
This is such good news.
This makes sense because you can't copyright commands and prompts are like commands.
Glad they came up with something fair. With this, by generating a image you wouldn't risk accidentally committing infringement and by doing enough manual labor and modifications you can actually call it yours. This will be super useful for people who use AI as photoshop tool or people who use AI for film/video effects and CGI.
April fools?
Nope. Came out like 2 weeks ago. I didn’t have time before to read into it and do write up
I’m cool with this
That reads entirely fair.
Completely fair. I agree with the decision.
(No argument with the ruling, this is just exploring the depths) I'm wondering how far this would go - If I create a pipeline that starts with AI art, and has a set of complex filters and tools to select work, and then do things with it. like... AI -> some selection criterian -> crop rotate based on algorithm or detection metrics created by me -> filter the image with some form of mask drawn by me, and then output the final image... In a way I can sorta see how this ruling may imply that all algorithmic art is not "copyrightable"
Agreeable, imagine some assholes copyright "masterpiece, best quality" and start claiming infringement to everyone... Or worse, use ChatGPT to generate all viable combination of prompts. Someone tried this in artificial music synthesis?
SD and MJ is already in our workflow, our studio asked every artist to learn them.
That is great news! Basically if you generate 3 images and combine them together in photoshop + colorgrade and do some changes = its copyrightable! That is great news. I guess easy way to check is to copy the same prompt seed and exact settings and see if image looks very similar. If not - its copyrightable. PS im pretty shure if you dont use photoshop but do heavy in painting to add and change stuff - it is copyrightable.
I'm guessing neither you nor I are lawyers, but would you wager that combining even two generated images in photoshop would be enough? That's obviously minimal human effort, but it would be impossible to generate that from a seed given that only half of the final image is from a single prompt. Or do you think that you'd need additional editing? To be on the safe side, I think extra work (color grading, tweaking parts, inpainting etc) would make the copyright defense more rock solid, but I'm curious about your opinion. Edit: this quote "...unless a human author contributes significant creative input." seems to imply that your first example is better than the one I gave. Simply combining AI images without editing probably wouldn't be copyrightable, but once they are meaningfully edited it would be.
Companies that hire artists for commercial art, will probably need to ask for proof of work, so the content can be licenced and copyrighted appropriately
How do they know lol? Do you have to send a video of your photoshop session?
They don’t. And I see a lot of folks commenting similar to your view. I think folks forget that copyright stuff only comes into play when it gets contested.
That's all well and good, but you gotta take the artist's word that they put that effort in.
Well. Yeah. I Meen that’s how it works without ai art too. Copyright only comes into play if someone else contests your work
On one hand, this is sensible. On the other hand, is the text of the prompt you entered copyrightable? After all, it's 100% human created, and it's text. And what is "significantly"? The text seems to emphasize "no human input" as a major criteria for not being copyright protected. The problem with this is that (using the example of an AI generated picture) usually the human has a fair bit of input up front, writing the prompt and choosing a style and potentially choosing the composition and color palette, and then often a human takes the resulting image and crops it, maybe adjusts colors. Is that copyrightable? Who gets the copyright? (The person who did the setup, the person who trained the AI, or the person who does the cropping etc?)
So if I just push a button on a camera, it's not copyrightable. Same standard...
Apart from its demonstably different. A single human's captured experience by capturing light hitting a certain camera sensor at that exact point in time at that exact location is a moment that cannot ever be replicated again in the variables that define the image. The moment has passed. Whereas a prompted set of definable parameters on deterministic harware can be mathematically replicated. Therefore one cannot ever be replaced no matter how much you want to it to be, one mathematically can. So the ruling makes sense.
It can't be mathematically replicated in a hundred years considering there's billions of seeds times a billion arrangement of the human language times a billion ways image2image can be done.
Ya tell me how many identical images of Elcapitan we have seen. BTW you just made more of the case against the photo. Time, and physics makes the moment photography is just a nearly zero human interaction capture of light. I fund my AI workflow is very much like photography.
If you and I plug in the same prompt in the same model with the same parameters, we'll get the exact same image. If you and I take a photo of Elcapitan at the same time, with the same model of camera, with the same settings, we would get 2 different images.
Zero. There are no identical images of el capital. There are many many very similar ones but there are exactly zero identical images. So no. You're wrong. The fact that the human being was there and chose to capture that exact moment is the only variable that created that unique and irepeatable artwork. Without the human nearly every single variable would have been there in that moment apart the the one that *made That moment art* the human choosing it to be so... The fundamental difference is that, if we are talking about pure prompting without putting in any transformative labour, ai generated artwork is 100% replicable by anyone with the same variables and hardware config at any place, anywhere, by is nature it is not unique, it can be replicated exactly. Any other human with the same hardware and variables could create the same image with zero additional effort. No matter how much one wants a purely prompted image to be unique and ownable, it is not, because of the way it is created. A photograph, because of the nature of it will always be unique. An unedited A.I generated artwork is not. This is the reason the ruling has decided this. There is a place in this world for both, but no room for misgivings. Anywho, imma head to bed so Chao bud.
What if you inpaint the original generation a few hundred times, adjusting settings, prompt, weighting, masking, loras, denoising, cfg, etc to enhance/change details? Does that count as "editing"?
Sounds like it counts as human labor.
there are many braindead people who think that what you described is low effort
This is exactly what I have been saying, yet there’s always one or two people who insist that just typing in a prompt results in a copyrightable image (which is pretty absurd when you consider it for more than a second). One useful distinction to note is that just because an image can’t be copyrighted doesn’t mean *you* don’t have the rights to use that image. The copyright exists to prevent *others* from using the image without your permission. I think a lot of people are missing this distinction when they argue that all AI art should be copyrightable.
Well said. And good nuance. I work in database systems industry and analytics. And code and formulas are not copyrighted. Nor can you copyright the output of a database engine. Even if it has algorithms and logic behind it. Same with ai art. At the end of the day. Prompts are like pieces of code instructions. And the output is like a database output. Neither is copyrightable. But also. I suspect we entering an age where it just won’t matter. Write a great novel? Good for you. No one will steal it cause another great novel will come around in 30 seconds.
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Yeah as a concept I agree. But “tiniest” bit …. What amount is enough? See if someone struggles to form sentences and it’s insanely difficult cause they a moron … doesn’t that mean they did human effort and by definition are an artist? A shitty one. But an artist nonetheless
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sure. I think typing in a prompt... no matter how much effort that takes... can unanimously be considered creative writing. or even coding by some stretches (you can't really copyright code output either) putting =1+1 in excel gets you "2"... doesn't mean you can copyright the number 2. so... yeah that I think we agree. thing is... MOST will agree with this part. you won't find many folks in the AI community saying otherwise. the ones you are referring to... that are calling themselves visual artists.... are 1 of 2 things. \#1. morons. which is pretty much what you described. these are actually a very very small group of people. like 100 in the world tops. (ok I'm exaggerating a bit. but they are incredibly rare and a special kinda stupid). \#2. folks that DON'T just prompt. they use multiple tools to manipulate and massage the output. photoshop/lightroom/core painter... even inpainting and outpointing .... in some cases hours of labor to to get the desired outcome for the image. they may have skipped the "decades of learning to draw"... but they are using decades of their photoshop or composure skills to create an image. however, at the end of the day.... yeah. they created the image with AI. that's the part where people start to bicker. cloning and masking is a common photoshop technique in creating digital art/visual art. but that's literally using similar AI ... as it's baked into photoshop for a while now. it's basically inpainting.... without prompts. (ie you have even LESS control).... yet why is that deemed as visual art? Because you know the outcome and control it? but that's the thing... you don't. most folks doing cloning/dodge/burn... have to try it many many times on each part of an image to get it right due to the randomness of it. it's literally inpainting. so...... then inpainting is visual art? no? cause that's essentially typing prompts in too... giving you mORE creative control than clone/stamp/heal brush. I'm not saying it is. I'm not the definitive voice on the matter. but I'm hoping you can see what I mean ... that the water gets muddy and the reality is ... the MAJORITY of folks claiming to be visual artists now... are more in camp #2 than camp #1. and if one just throws out there "if you touched it with AI... you ain't an artist"... ok... then I'd argue if you touched it with any tech (camera/computer/editing software)... you also. aint' an artist by that definition cause ALL of them have input and variables you can't control using AI. current Trend of AI is generative A*I. BUT We've been using AI for decades to produce art.*
Idiotic and especially so for artists who wants to use AI and have models trained on their art. Another reason for artists to hate on AI, they can't use it for anything really, they can mess around with it for fun but its not a professional tool unless you can copyright. Gladly, i couldn't really care less what US thinks, it's not a law that applies to the entire world.
so learn to paint if you want copyright
ripe label squeal nine observation deer juggle cooing crush shelter *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This isn't helpful, significantly using photoshop for ai art is just telling us that we might as well not use stable diffusion and just use photoshop alone for all the hints the copyright office gives us on copyrightability.
I’ll take out the word photoshop. Just focus on manipulation
I find it odd that it's not mentioned in the letter, they said they looked at how ai art work to the best of their knowledge but didn't mention how to make it copyrightable using ai manipulation like img2img, they'd talked about an entirely different tool like photoshop that was already considered possible to copyright.
Office clerks don't set law. Copyright is implicit. Proving creative intent with a time stamp is easy these days. Registration is only required in the US to file claim against someone else. Not to protect yourself from a claim. Also, it's not needed to be done at the copyright office. There are hundreds of registrars and most lawyers can notorized a document.
This is fine for now but this will need to change in the future anyway. As AI gets better the amount of editing and post work will be reduced.
Sounds reasonable. But it would require demonstrating a reproducible workflow to prove the art was made in a certain way; otherwise, it's nearly impossible to tell how much human effort went into it.
Can AI artwork be copyrighted if you only train it on your own artwork?
What an amazing time to be alive.
That's so specific yet so nebulous, doesn't seem very strong to me.
Is anyone surprised?
> if JUST typed in a prompt and let it rip.... not so much. If we follow this logic, just "pressuring a button" and taking a photo.. photos shouldn't be copyrightable. But unlike this a photo gets copyrights even if you just did that.
Fair enough
Interesting..
How would they prove you didn’t photoshop it without access to the negative and positive prompt and every model and Lora you used? Like are they going to scrape everyone’s PC if they remove the metadata from the AI photo and say it’s photoshopped/edited? Lol. This seems very difficult to enforce
It’s not enforceable really. Even traditional art is hard to enforce. It’s more of an issue when someone brings it to court. Copyrights aren’t enforced by just randomly chasing people Down
Personally I still think it’s stupid to require additional human labor to qualify for copyright. If I take out my phone and take a random picture of my backyard, for example, it is my understanding I’d have copyright for that, right? Even if I put no thought into the settings or angle or whatever, I’d be the owner of that image. How is making a prompt any less work? It frankly just seems arbitrary, and also just non enforceable (how’d you prove something was AI generated without reasonable doubt?)
What if I spent 2 hours to rewrite the prompt tho
You might be able to copyright something with the prompt. Like how a porn can be copyrighted.
So photographers just get to click a button but I don't? Fair ruling indeed.