The moment that copyright is granted to AI art is the moment that the war against corporations loses. Getty images is just going to generate endless images, copyright them all, and sue any small artist that starts having an independent thought
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Agreed. I believe in a strong public domain and militantly protected fair use; AFAIC, all unaltered AI output should be considered public domain. Direct human authorship (or "substantially transformative" modification) is the benchmark for where copyright should apply.
All of the discussion over copyright of AI is a complete waste of time. Given only a bit of human editing AI art is indistinguishable from art made in entirety by a person. It will be nothing but a "feel good" law that does nothing to help the artists AI has displaced. We should be focusing directly on helping artists or others maintain their livelihood.
That's a single line needed that clarifies that derivative works originally created by AI are not copyrightable, to make it explicit and distinct from the ability to claim copyright on non-transformative works made from public domain content. AI created works cannot be copyrighted (and that should include things like software) and derivative works should now be considered non-copyrightable as well. The onus should be shifted to the creator to prove that their work is transformative in order to claim copyright over the work.
That's not how copyright works. It's perfectly legal to create exactly the same image that someone else made... as long as you didn't copy their image.
True, but that assumes that the people filing copyright lawsuits know the law and are acting in good faith. And that the recipient does, too.
If I'm an artist living paycheck-to-paycheck and I get a copyright-related cease-and-desist, I probably won't have the money or time to fight it even if I know that it's wrong.
Yeah. In a world where lawyers cost money, corporations can and will squash small artists without hesitation, with cease and desists, DMCA takedowns via youtube and similar platforms, and by threatening lawsuits they won't even have to persue because most people can't afford to fight it.
Even companies often can't afford to fight bigger companies. Like, the makers of Kimba the White Lion had a very clear case that Disney plagiarized them in making The Lion King (if you go on youtube you can find shot-for-shot scene comparisons, it's bonkers) but couldn't afford to fight it at all. And that was a company - individual artists have no chance vs disney & etc.
The comparison between photography and AI generated images falls flat on its face when you think about it.
A camera requires not only human interaction, but going some place, setting up and having to process the image after the fact.
Contrast that with an AI farm constantly generating and squeezing out copyrightable material while scraping the web for any human made work it can emulate.
In the end what it will mean is that certain companies will be fuzzing the hell out of the copyright system to gain as much intellectual property as possible while diminishing the creative possibility of human beings.
It is in effect just a way to make companies richer and remove creative jobs from the market. Anybody who doesn't see that is naive.
BUT I think that in cases of that image you should be able to apply for copyright. But just automatically getting it, as is the law in many countries? No. That's a really bad idea.
"Intellectual property" is a silly concept that only exists because under capitalism massive powerful corporations benefit if they can leverage the legal system to permeantly keep knowledge, innovation, and art behind a paywall, and people in society are dependent on monetary gain to survive.
We should, to the fullest extent of the law, make it such that proper credit is given to people who make things, but calling something "theft" when the person you're "stealing" from literally does not lose anything is asinine.
It's not actually called "theft" or "stealing", it's called "infringement" or "violation". Infringement is to intellectual property as trespassing is to real estate. The owners are still able to use their property, but their rights to it have nevertheless been violated.
Also, corporations cannot create intellectual property. They can only offer to buy it from the natural persons who created it. Without IP protection, creators would lose the only protections they have against corporations and other entrenched interests.
Imagine seeing all your family photos plastered on a McDonald's billboard, or in political ad for a candidate you despise. Imagine being told, "Sorry, you can't stop them from using your photos however they want". That's a world without IP protection.
right, but how often does that actually work out in people's favor, and how often does that benefit corporate interests with massive influence? how many musicians don't have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry? how many artists working for large corporations are denied residuals because a condition of their work is that everything they produce is owned by their employer? writers? animators?
that's not even considering the ways in which corporations patent technologies that are the result of publicly funded research efforts. a great deal of pharmaceuticals would not be possible without massive public research grants, but the companies privatize the results of that research using the framework of intellectual property.
in theory, you're right, it does protect you against corporations using your shit without permission, but in practice it just stops you from using your shit without their permission. there are far better ways of ensuring corporations cannot exploit you than to make your creativity and invention a commodity to be bought and sold.
how many musicians don’t have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry?
But not having copyright law doesn't fix that, it makes it worse. Without copyright law if you make music, a big label can grab your music and sell copies without paying you anything. Sure you can try to sell it yourself and try to educate customers that they should buy it from you. But the big label can easily out-advertise you and get into the top spots on streaming services, online and physical stores etc. and get 99% of the sales.
Same for artists, writers, programmers, photographers, or anyone else whose work is protected by copyright.
I fully agree things are not great right now, but that's not copyright laws fault. I think you need other laws and regulations to fix things, like small creators should be able to sue large companies with minimal cost if they infringeme on their copyright. And there should be some sort of provisions so companies can't trap people in horrible contracts. I'd also love to see fair use exceptions broadened in cases where the copyrighted material is just not available anymore, like old games or movies that are not sold anymore. Shorten the length of copyright too. But getting rid of it completely would not work.
But not having copyright law doesn’t fix that, it makes it worse. Without copyright law if you make music, a big label can grab your music and sell copies without paying you anything. Sure you can try to sell it yourself and try to educate customers that they should buy it from you. But the big label can easily out-advertise you and get into the top spots on streaming services, online and physical stores etc. and get 99% of the sales.
this is... really not a good example of copyright stopping this sort of stuff. seriously, look into streaming platforms, they are essentially pulling this exact stunt, down to the part about grabbing artists' music and not paying them anything, and its been extremely profitable for the record companies, who have been found to deliberately manipulate streaming numbers to ensure they get the top spots. most independent artists make very little off of streaming, but are compelled to participate because its captured so much of the market for music. i really can't exaggerate here, the situation you're describing as what would happen without copyright law is happening right now, and is being facilitated directly by copyright law as it currently exists.
Okay so without copyright law, what's the recourse for the creator? What is your suggestion, for example?
Pretty much what happens now--name and shame, get the story out there. If McDonald's wanted to plaster a billboard with someone's personal family photos, the odds that that family could even afford a lawyer for recourse to an appropriate degree is essentially nil. What would likely happen is that McDonald's would settle for some absurdly low dollar value and perhaps take down the billboards--or just as likely, negotiate for use in the settlement agreement, saying "take this and let us use the photo or we'll see you in court."
If someone gets a reputation for stealing others' work continuously, who is ever going to work with them?
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Serious question, when is intellectual property being pirated/stolen (pirating a movie for example), not cause the studio to lose something? You can say that person would've not watched it in the first place, but there's really no evidence suggesting that to be true, and plenty to the contrary. Things that want to be open for knowledge, like open source software or Wikipedia, are consenting to be open, which is in their license. It's not stealing from them because of their license, so why is it also not stealing when there is a license preventing them from doing so? I'm referring to a digital context btw, where pirating is glorified copy&paste over the internet and nothing is technically physically stolen.
I'm not sure of any evidence suggesting that piracy impacts the bottom line in a meaningful way. The piracy problem is primarily one of competition and innovation--people pay for things they find valuable and convenient, and if the barrier to payment is too high, they won't pay it.
Highly pirated movies tend to be the most successful, most profitable ones. I don't know of any high profile, highly regarded pieces of media that didn't earn their investment back purely because everyone pirated it instead of paying for it.
Some links you might find interesting: https://copia.is/library/the-carrot-or-the-stick/
That last one is an especially interesting case study, albeit a perhaps accidental one.
The key here is that as a business your objective isn't to capture every last dollar that you potentially could have if every single use of your IP was completely in your control--you want to make enough people want to pay you so that you can be profitable. Pirates are often just providing free marketing to someone that may or may not have ever heard of your product.
The article compares Photography, (which despite being "created" by nature is copyrightable), to AI art. The difference between AI art and photography is that AI art is derivative of other artists and generalized into a Model. Nature is not derivative of other photography. Derivative work has special exemptions in copyright law which prevents it from being subject to copyright.
Modern copyright sucks balls anyway
There is an error that many in the dispute are making...
Imagine that BORG-AI is an ai that was trained ONLY on GPL2 program-code...
Imagine that you use it to fill-in some functions in your codebase...
What sort of copyright-status should be on those??
I say they should be GPL2, and they should be considered derivative of the ENTIRE training-data-set.
That doesn't mean I think that the BORG-AI should be a copyright holder, though!
I'm saying that there should be a NEW category, between uncopyrighted & copyrighted, and that the training-sets need to be segregated by license, so that derivatives CAN know what their legal licensing-status is.
GPL2, GPL3, BSD, LGPL2, whatever... it needs to be consistent within the training-data-set, so that the derivative of THAT module/expert can be having the same license, see?
This is the first actually decent article I've read on AI art. It absolutely covers my concerns and fits with my own experiences using the technology. A lot of this is stuff I've been saying, and it's nice to see that I'm not alone here.
AI art is not at all straight-forward and absolutely requires creative input in order to get something usable. Prompt engineering, to me, is itself a type of art. You may at times find that there's something you want AI to generate that it's actually quite good at, like old women playing cards around a table, but usually you're going to be looking for something it struggles with. This is when you need to be creative and inventive with prompts, thinking about things from the perspective of what's probably out there in abundance.
Recently I needed to make some rings for my upcoming Planescape-themed Conan Exiles server. I started out by asking NightCafe for rings and it output a bunch of useless junk. Using my brain, I realized it's probably much more likely that it'll have a reference point for 'wedding band', and then I'll have my ring shape and can work from there. This worked quite nicely and it started producing rings, but it was often shoving them half out of the picture as it tends to do. There are some negative prompts that sometimes help with this, but I have my own technique that I think works better.
My method for framing objects in AI art generators is to surround them with something. If you add 'surrounded by' and some other object that's slightly smaller than the object you need a clean shot of, usually you'll get your image of the whole thing. Which object you pick to surround your target object with makes all the difference.
In this particular case, I first tried to put the ring on a table surrounded by small dogs, but it got caught up in the dogs and forgot to render the ring. Eventually I landed on 'surrounded by berries', and that was the jackpot. I'm guessing this one was a good choice because of Christmas themed ads, because suddenly my pictures were all full of mistletoe blasted with the kind of bokeh you only see in jewelry ads and wedding photos. And within each shot, a nicely centered ring in half-decent focus.
Now this is where I got really lucky. During my 'surrounded by berries' iterations, the generator decided to do something weird. It put a bunch of tiny little purple berries along the outer surface of a ring, standing on its side. It was perfect. I took this iteration and used it as a base, feeding it back into NightCafe and decreasing the noise ratio down to like 20-40% while turning up the prompt weight a little and changing my prompt. Now instead of berries and wedding bands, I go back to my initial search for magic rings encrusted with glowing gems. And in one step, my berries are a gorgeous array of gemstones. A few iterations later, I have a couple of decent rings to bring into GIMP and do some work with.
After pathing out the rings, separating the gems, adjusting the colors, and creating a few iterations with different colored bands and gem stones for my different finalized options, I had my results. A little blurry, okay, but totally fine for an inventory item thumbnail. Looks gorgeous.
Personally, I've dipped my toes into all sorts of art. I write, I take pictures, I sing, I play around with painting, I've made animations, games, mods, videos, weird unpalatable noise music; if it's a method of creative expression I may not be particularly good at it but I've almost certainly tried some version of it. And to me, this feels like creative expression. It feels like art.
Working with AI art feels like trying to collaborate on a project with an alien robot. You're trying to take these presumptions that we have and figure out how to get a workable result from something that fundamentally doesn't understand any of it. It's this really fascinating exercise in exploring this almost dream-like logic that's heavily rooted in media consumption, and weirdly enough your own understanding of media culture can be a way of teasing out what you want.
I don't just go and say 'please give me one rabbit' and get a rabbit. It doesn't feel like handing the project off to another artist with some notes and coming back to see what they made, it feels like an actively creative process. It doesn't feel more creative when I'm editing those images than when I'm digging through this strange robot-logic dreamscape looking for them.
And like, given that I could literally just take a picture one of my own rings and edit that, I don't see how it's less mine via creative output. I bought the ring, I didn't spend an hour digging it out of a morass of nonsense.
Frankly, I care little about law and less about money. I'll make the things I'm inspired to make with the methods I'm inspired to make them with and we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll make something people like, maybe I'll cut my own ear off and die penniless, but the opinions of the copyright office on what legal claims I can make around my work aren't really a primary factor in that or in my decision making when it comes to art.
I do hope they'll read articles like these and talk to folks with similar perspectives and find a better take, though.
Thank you for describing your process in such detail. I'm sorry if this is going to come off as overtly contrary; that's such an impersonal convoluted way to make an image. There are good illustrators out there that can sketch roughs and make a beautiful finished painting in a night, all right out of their head. Frank Frazetta would be laughing in his grave at AI art.
I'm in it to make stuff, not to impress you or any dead person. What are you making?
Right now, a game, an album, and um.. oil painted MTG Myr Tokens?
Cool!
I am not a good illustrator though, but I'm good at working with AI and Photoshop. Using generated images as a base gives me the best quality in a reasonable time.
I'm pretty sure there are musicians who would roll in their graves at the thought of generating music in synthesizers, yet without we would have electronic music.
I don't think that is a fair comparison. Electronic musicians don't outsource song construction to an algorithm that copies all the other songs on the Internet. Even though they can use midi instruments, sequencers, and samples (which do carry a known risk of copyright violation) they're still composing or performing.
The entire point of generative AI is to generate things not present in the training set by teaching it to abstract the concept.
It's a very fair comparison because in both cases you take the physical skill requirement that takes years to learn and even longer to master out of producing art. To make a good electronic song you need to compose, but you don't need to know how to physically play the instruments. To make a good image you need to know how to compose it, but not how to physically draw it.
That's a good argument. I get this. The problem that I see is that you aren't very present in the art. The AI is 100% leading you with what it knows. AI is essentially helping you create a collage of all the styles and bits of image content on the Internet. How are we going to develope new styles? A human can use their imagination and skill to create something groundbreaking and pioneering (artists had to break ground and fill the world with this art for AI to be even able to do this). AI is just going to continue to remix remixes of remixes. It's sad to me. That's not really what art is about. I'm not saying AI art isn't useful. It's a remix machine.
The problem that I see is that you aren’t very present in the art.
Now that depends on how much agency you give yourself, doesn't it? If you just give Midjourney a prompt and call it a day then yes. But the result won't be very good, will it? Similar how you could just input random notes to a synthesizer and get shitty music in return.
The problem is that the majority of people does exactly that and then shares the resulting images online, making it appear that is all there is to it. You can however express yourself artistically by using prompt engineering to get something good and than working with that to further approach what you imagine by editing the result. There are many people out there who could not artistically express themselves as they lacked the ability to translate their vision to a canvas. With the help of image generating AI they can finally express themselves. I think this is something beautiful.
How are we going to develope [sic] new styles?
While I do agree with you that our current AI image generators won't be very innovative, this is by design and not necessity.
This is what you would have gotten in let's say 2017 when asking an AI what it thinks a dog looks like (s. DeepDream).
And a couple years later you can achieve this with Midjourney.
Things are developing very fast and in the end of the day, even if we would never get an AI that can innovate art there is nothing stopping humans from just doing it themselves as we have always done over millennia. You can already greatly increase the creativity of existing image generators by tweaking the randomness factors and those algorithms don't just remix existing images, they are actually creating their own. You need the training set of existing labeled images to train the AI as it doesn't know what a frog is, nor a tree or anything really.
AI is just going to continue to remix remixes of remixes
This is indeed a concern. If you feed too much AI generated images into the training of an image generator it causes a sort of degenerative disease in the AI that results in inferior results. Some sort of AI incest so to speak. The prevalence of AI art on the internet and the inability to reliably differentiate it from human art is proving to be a challenge for making new training sets.
I'm really good at searching Google. I'm a "prompt engineer" too
This photography analogy is getting more tiresome the more it is repeated. It reduces the extensive work and techniques that photographers do to "using a tool", ignoring we also have tools like photocopiers whose mechanical results are not considered separate artworks, while also trying to pass the act of iterating prompts and selecting results as something much more involved than it actually is. Like many people pointed out already, what is being described is the role of a commissioner or employer. Is Bob Iger an artist because he picked what works are suitable for release? I don't think so.
The argument relies a lot on an analogy to photographers, which misunderstands the nature of photography. A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.
A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won't have a copyright on the photo.
A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.
I like this analogy a lot.
"Prompts" are actually used a lot in creative circles, whether for art or writing. But no matter how specific you are when you write a prompt for, say, r/WritingPrompts (and some of them are incredibly specific due to posters literally having an idea and hoping someone else will write it for them), the resulting story will never be copyrighted to you.
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