AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, U.S. Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause
AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, U.S. Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause
A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection.
It’s a good first step, but we also need to address the way they gather the material to train these LLM‘s. That’s the core issue here that spans multiple industries. It’s stealing work in a way that functionally launders it, and then they want to claim it as original work while replacing the very people they’re pulling from. It’s a multi-variable issue here when really digging into the ethics.
It’s stealing work in a way that functionally launders it
Actually in the age of basically permanent copyrigt, this brings at least some balance
Yes, absolutely. They want AI to be people such that copyright applies and such that they can claim the AI was inspired just like a human artist is by the art they're exposed to.
We need a license model such that AI is only allowed to be trained on content were the license explicitly permits it and that no mention is equal to it being disallowed.
We need a license model such that AI is only allowed to be trained on content were the license explicitly permits it and that no mention is equal to it being disallowed.
That is the default model behind copyright, which basically says that the only things people can use your copyrighted work for without a license are those which are determined to be "fair use".
I don't see any way in which today's AI ought to be considered fair use of other people's writings, artwork, etc.
I feel two ways about it. Absolutely it is recorded in a retrieval system and doing some sort of complicated lookup. So derivative.
On the other hand, the whole idea of copyright or other so called IP except maybe trademarks and trade dress in the most limited way is perverse and should not exist. Not that I have a better idea.
Absolutely it is recorded in a retrieval system and doing some sort of complicated lookup.
It is not.
Stable Diffusion's model was trained using the LAION-5B dataset, which describes five billion images. I have the resulting AI model on my hard drive right now, I use it with a local AI image generator. It's about 5 GB in size. So unless StabilityAI has come up with a compression algorithm that's able to fit an entire image into a single byte, there is no way that it's possible for this process to be "doing some sort of complicated lookup" of the training data.
What's actually happening is that the model is being taught high-level concepts through repeatedly showing it examples of those concepts.
We already knew that. This is just upholding an obvious decision that was really already established long before AI was on the scene. If a human didn't create it, it can't be copyrightable.
The problem that the courts haven't really answered yet is: How much human input is needed to copyright something? 5%? 20%? 50%? 80%? If some AI wrote most of a script and a human writer cleaned it up, is that enough? There is a line, but the courts haven't drawn that yet.
Also, fuck copyrights. They only benefit the rich, anyway.
Having some form of copyright IMO is good, like you said putting the line somewhere.
Current copyright is fucked (lifetime of the artist plus 70 years)
The way it used to be (14 years) wasn't bad IMO
Copyrights don't just benefit the rich, in fact they severely limit what big companies can do with what you create. On the other hand, the current copyright term in most places (70 years after the author's death) is just ridiculous, and simply guarantees that you will not live to see most content you saw as a kid move into the public domain, while the current owners continue to make money that the original author will never see.
Copyrights don’t just benefit the rich, in fact they severely limit what big companies can do with what you create.
If a big company chose to copy what you created, and you tried to fight it in court, they would bury you in a years-long legal battle that would continue until you ran out of money, quit, or they themselves declared it not worth the money to defend.
Robert Kearns patented the intermittent windshield wiper, which all of the car companies stole, and he sued Ford. From Wikipedia: The lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company was opened in 1978 and ended in 1990. Kearns sought $395 million in damages. He turned down a $30 million settlement offer in 1990 and took it to the jury, which awarded him $5.2 million; Ford agreed to pay $10.2 million rather than face another round of litigation.
Copyrights. Only. Benefit. The. Rich.
But where do you draw the line between "a human did it using a tool" and "it wasn't created by a human?"
Generative art exists, and can be copyrighted. Also a drawing made with Photoshop involves a lot of complex filters (some might even use AI!)
I agree on the "fuck copyright" part that said.
The problem that the courts haven't really answered yet is: How much human input is needed to copyright something? 5%? 20%? 50%? 80%? If some AI wrote most of a script and a human writer cleaned it up, is that enough?
Or perhaps even coming up and writing a prompt is considered enough human input by some.
This is the U.S., we quite literally can't uphold values to save our lives. Hollywood studios aren't going to pause shit.
If AI-created art isn't copyrightable then that means it's public domain. But it's entirely possible to create something that is copyrighted using public domain "raw materials", you just need to do some work with it. And if those "raw materials" are never published, only the copyrighted final product, it's going to be really hard for anyone else to make use of it. So I don't really see how this is a big deal, especially not to Hollywood.
You can also copyright the original character and make AI generate all the motions of that character. Since the originals was (human) created and copyrighted, it doesn’t matter that AI created art derived from that character isn’t copyrightable in of itself.
Plus there is also trademarks for character likeness.
All in all, I agree with you, this is a non issue for Hollywood studios.
While cameras generated a mechanical reproduction of a scene, she explained that they do so only after a human develops a “mental conception” of the photo, which is a product of decisions like where the subject stands, arrangements and lighting, among other choices.
I agree. The types of AIs that we have today are nothing more than mixers of various mental conceptions to create something new. These mental conceptions comes with life experience and is influenced by a person's world view.
Once you remove this mental conception, will the AIs that we currently have today be able to thrive on their own? The answer is no.
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But this weird, almost religious devotion to some promise of AI and the weird white knighting I see folks do for it is just baffling to watch.
When you look at it through the lens of the latest get-rich-quick-off-some-tech-that-few- people-understand grift, it makes perfect sense.
They naively see AI as a magic box that can make infinite "content" (which of course belongs to them for some reason, and is fair use of other people's copyrighted data for some reason), and infinite content = infinite money, just as long as you can ignore the fundamentals of economics and intellectual property.
People have invested a lot of their money and emotional energy into AI because they think it'll make them a return on investment.
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When I generate AI art I do so by forming a mental conception of what sort of image I want and then giving the AI instructions about what sort of image I want it to produce. Sometimes those instructions are fairly high-level, such as "a mouse wearing a hat", and other times the instructions are very exacting and can take the form of an existing image or sketch with an accompanying description of how I'd like the AI to interpret it. When I'm doing inpainting I may select a particular area of a source image and tell the AI "building on fire" to have it put a flaming building in that spot, for example.
To me this seems very similar to photography, except I'm using my prompts and other inputs to aim a camera at places in a latent space that contains all possible images. I would expect that the legal situation will eventually shake out along that line.
This particular lawsuit is about someone trying to assign the copyright for a photo to the camera that took it, which is just kind of silly on its face and not very relevant. Cameras can't hold copyrights under any circumstances.
This is the Stephen Thaler thing, which is pretty much just a nonsense digression from the real issues of AI art. For some reason Thaler is trying to assert that the copyright for an AI-generated piece of art should belong to the AI itself. This is a non-starter because an AI is not a person in a legal sense, and copyrights can only be held by legal persons. The result of this lawsuit is completely obvious and completely useless to the broader issues.
They really are screwing up the headlines on these articles and giving everyone terrible takes on AI. As if their takes weren't ignorant enough to begin with.
Yay! Creatives can a decent job and they can eat too now!
I wouldnt say all copyright is bad, but rather copyright law as it is is rife with abuse and bad actors. Big corporations use it like a hammer, and small creators arent able to go up against big corporations if they steal copyrighted work. And copyright/patent trolls are able to shut down anything and everything no questions asked.
There needs to be some way for individuals to have some protections for their work, but the current system aint it. (And this is before AI)
Not much changes with this ruling. The whole thing was about trying to give an AI authorship of a work generated solely by a machine and having the copyright go to the owner of the machine through the work-for-hire doctrine.
The current status quo is basically “we can vacuum up anything we want, create anything we want, and claim anything we want.“ It’s really hard to overstate how much power is in the hands of those developing LLM‘s right now.  I will take any ruling that even hints at future rulings pushing back on this lol
These models are just a collection of observations in relation to each other. We need to be careful not weaken fair use and hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep developing our own models. Mega corporations already have their own datasets, and the money to buy more. They can also make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. Regular people, who could have had access to a corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off with fewer rights than where they started.
The only thing this ruling really says is "AIs are not legal persons and copyright can only be held by legal persons." Which is not particularly unexpected or useful when deciding other issues being raised by copyrighting AI outputs.
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More than 100 days into the writers strike, fears have kept mounting over the possibility of studios deploying generative artificial intelligence to completely pen scripts.
The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI.
Copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found.
His complaint argued that the office’s refusal was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of agency actions.
While cameras generated a mechanical reproduction of a scene, she explained that they do so only after a human develops a “mental conception” of the photo, which is a product of decisions like where the subject stands, arrangements and lighting, among other choices.
In another case, the a federal appeals court said that a photo captured by a monkey can’t be granted a copyright since animals don’t qualify for protection, though the suit was decided on other grounds.
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