Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain

This ruling seems to be really badly misinterpreted. The case wasn't for people using ai tools to create works but from a computer scientist who created a completely autonomous tool and was trying to co-copyright the works with the tool. Copyright needs human involvement, how much human involvement is still not hard law, but if you integrate the output of an AI and integrate it into a larger work that is very much covered.

In my opinion, the copyright should be based on the training data. Scraped the internet for data? Public domain. Handpicked your own dataset created completely by you? The output should still belong to you. Seems weird otherwise.

Thats not really what that ruling was, in the case the AI created, and if i remember correctly also published, the work with no human intervention, making it hard to apply to pretty much any normal ai generated content.

This is good. I don't agree with copyrightable works by AI because I don't agree with copyright at all, at least not as it currently exists. Patents, too.

It has always felt like a contrived game to me, but that game has far too much impact on peoples lives.

I too believe that AI work should be public domain by default.

If there were a machine on the street corner where pushed a button and a macguffin popped out, you don't deserve credit for the macguffin.

If you entered parameters into the machine on the street corner and pushed a button to pop out a custom macguffin, you may be able to argue that you deserve credit for the parameters, but not the macguffin itself AND FURTHERMORE if anyone else wrote custom parameters that happened to produce an identical macguffin without ever having read your parameters, they have exactly as much right to gatekeep it. which is to say basically none.

This is going to get dicey.

If I ask ChatGPT for a chord progression, and it says "Use the ii V I resolution in C"

And I now play ||: Dm Dm G7 C :||

Then I sing some heartfelt lyrics and add a drum beat and a bass line...

Did an AI write the song?

Well what if I asked it for the lyrics?

Lyrics but not the chords?

What if an AI is doing my mastering in my DAW?

Congratulations, you no longer have any ownership of AI generated deep fakes of yourself, these are now public domain.

The thing is, all the inputs to the LLMs and Stable Diffusion/DALL-E models are scraped from internet stuff anyway.

I sincerely hope that somebody who released material under GPL is able to prove that they incorporated it into their model. You know it happened.

This is going to quickly put the kibosh on companies trying to leverage AI for all their creative work. Not that I think AI can do a good job at it, but still. Companies won't use AI if what it creates can't be monetized and I think if it enters the Public Domain it can't be, if I am not mistaken.

Is that why we are being told to "fear" AI? Because it can't be easily monitised by those who worry about such things.

Interesting, so what happens when an AI creates art that would infringe on a human's copyright? Would AI art of Mickey Mouse be public domain, meaning AI could be the end of Disney's insane licensing fee?

Edit: Nevermind, turns out this article is just editorialized. It isn't public domain, it just isn't eligible for the AI's creator to copyright it if it's fully autonomous.

is excellent news! But, to be fair, why shouldn't everything be in the public domain? AI makes objects 'inspired' by everything it has 'ingested', but so do human creators on a smaller scale. Copyright almost always only benefits big profits and corporations. I think people should be able to make a decent living from their work and their ideas, but I'm not convinced that copyright really helps to achieve that.

Cool. Now someone needs to invent an application that can listen/watch/look at some media (movies, songs, books) and create something nearly similar.

Wow this is huge. Let’s hope it holds up to years and years of legal threats from lobbyists

Does this mean we can, indeed, train AI on ChatGPT/other AI outputs?

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Ehhhh. This isn't as exciting as you might think for, say, graphics. It's predicated on the fact that in the case, there's no human involvement.

Howell found that “courts have uniformly declined to recognize copyright in works created absent any human involvement,” citing cases where copyright protection was denied for celestial beings, a cultivated garden, and a monkey who took a selfie.

“Undoubtedly, we are approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put AI in their toolbox to be used in the generation of new visual and other artistic works,” the judge wrote.

The rise of generative AI will “prompt challenging questions” about how much human input into an AI program is necessary to qualify for copyright protection, Howell said, as well as how to assess the originality of AI-generated art that comes from systems trained on existing copyrighted works.

But this case “is not nearly so complex” because Thaler admitted in his application that he played no role in creating the work, Howell said.

They're just gonna nail down the line judicially on how much human involvement is required and then they'll have a human do that much.

I mean, AI tools are gonna be just increasingly incorporated into tools for humans to use.

It might be significant for something like chatbot output, though.

Copyright is outrageously long, anyway. Seriously, who benefits from works after the creator is long dead? AI works won't ever replace a human's level of ingenuity, creativity and imagination, let alone at the spur of the moment. That being said, what it does interrupt based on what we ask from it can be fresh and aid in the development or adoption of ideas we may not have thought of before. Being in the public domain is the best outcome.

Doesn't matter if Open AI has a license agreement that says you can't use the product without a license.

oh sure fill the public domain with your garbage thanks

AI is a tool. People use tools to create. This is like saying that everything that uses ink is public domain.

I get that there is an issue with people using AI to create highly derivative product and profit off of the original "inspiration's" notariety and skill - but this isn't the solution.