AI-Created Comic Has Been Deemed Ineligible for Copyright Protection (cbr.com) 59
The United States Copyright Office (USCO) reversed an earlier decision to grant a copyright to a comic book that was created using "A.I. art," and announced that the copyright protection on the comic book will be revoked, stating that copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection. From a report: In September, Kris Kashtanova announced that they had received a U.S. copyright on his comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book inspired by their late grandmother that she created with the text-to-image engine Midjourney. Kashtanova referred to herself as a "prompt engineer" and explained at the time that she went to get the copyright so that she could "make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI."
Seems like.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe in copyrights at all that whomever typed the commands to the bot should get copyright. The bot is just a tool little different than a pen or typewriter in the sense of who came up with the original idea to create said comic.
Otoh, everything the bot has in its database was fed to it off the net so it could be said there's nothing original going on and deny copyright on that basis.
Reminds me of the line in hitchhiker's where someone entered a short plot summary into a bot and then changed his mind but a minute later the book was already popular across the galaxy so he had to make a sequel.
Re:Seems like.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you believe in copyrights at all that whomever typed the commands to the bot should get copyright.
Yes.. it Does. And Copyright is automatic, and provided by statute. The copyright office is not a court of law, and their finding to deny the registration is not an authoritative legal decision that there is no copyright. It would be interesting to see what happens if the creator of the work pursues this further - They can, potentially, pursue various legal recourse to dispute this rejection.
Re:Seems like.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Otoh, everything the bot has in its database was fed to it off the net so it could be said there's nothing original going on and deny copyright on that basis.
I would disagree with this point. That’s how humans do it, no one person invented the languages, styles, techniques, tropes, on and on. Each artist simply took in the millions of pieces of data as they grew and trained their natural neutral network. In fact, most all of them cite inspiration from one or more previous contributors as a major influence in their work. When it’s cherry picked, modified, and molded to the query, really, the reverse diffusion method from collective knowledge isn’t really that different functionally from the same task artists perform. Granted it’s not very good, and only works sometimes, can only do a specific task lacking general knowledge with no insight into what it’s doing, but it’s only in its infancy. When we do achieve generalized AI, even if it’s not for 100 years, it will undoubtedly rely on thousands of these base processes and only by utilizing such vast array in clever ways could it be implemented.
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"When we do achieve generalized AI, even if it’s not for 100 years, it will undoubtedly rely on thousands of these base processes and only by utilizing such vast array in clever ways could it be implemented."
Indeed and I have no doubt that we will achieve some sort of generalized AI without achieving self-aware or sentient AI. It isn't even easy to explain using human created languages the difference between sentient self-awareness and a car's self-diagnostic system and why the later is so obviously n
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If you believe in copyrights at all that whomever typed the commands to the bot should get copyright. The bot is just a tool little different than a pen or typewriter in the sense of who came up with the original idea to create said comic.
The fuck it is.
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Sorry, that's a legitimate argument. It's a legitimate argument, also, to say that because of that copyright shouldn't grant a monopoly.
The creator of a work did not create the entire work, they created a part of it. The part that wasn't already a part of their common culture. In the case of AI generated art, one can say that they didn't create as much as they would have if they'd used, e.g., pen and ink, but they still created the part that wasn't a part of the common culture. (And if they used pen and
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>AI-generated means new parts
You assume ingredient-shuffling equates to putting a new ingredient in the dish.
Which could possibly be argued, but it's the same kind of navel gazing around causality (lawyers like to call it Facilitation) and all that separate from the second layer of abstracted nonsense, imaginary property.
Re:Seems like.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Listen,
I've bene following the AI ML stuff since before people started losing their shit about it.
The ASR and TTS development people have been doing it correctly the entire time. They only use material released into the public domain (namely librivox, which in turn are user generated audio ebooks from the gutenberg PD library, which the audio books released are public domain as well.) This is mostly viable because the english language hasn't changed dramatically in the last 100 years, however racial, sexual, and ablist language HAS. So both ASR and TTS unfortunately has a lot of racist, sexist and ableist language as a consequence of trying not to stomp on the copyrights.
That is the consequence of trying to play it safe, is that you end up 100 (now de-facto 175) years behind on language. So you have to make a decision, "play it safe" with copyright, or get lambasted for your AI being racist and sexist, and not knowing what an airplane or world war 2 is.
The AI Art generation and AI text generation, can not reply only on public domain works, because very little "public domain" exists for artwork and written works. The Printing press only came out in the 15th century, so there's only 300 years of written works to parse. Paintings? Most paintings of dead artists are in museums or collecting dust in some asshole's attic.
The only positive outcome for AI ML on copyright would be de-facto creation of fair use that permits "learning and research" , that permits AI training corpus to use any material, copyrighted or not, licensed or not, to train a model provided that the model is released to the public. Screw these companies that want to create private models to "rent" the models to other companies.
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The only positive outcome for AI ML on copyright would be de-facto creation of fair use that permits "learning and research" , that permits AI training corpus to use any material, copyrighted or not, licensed or not, to train a model provided that the model is released to the public. Screw these companies that want to create private models to "rent" the models to other companies.
Let's wait for the results of the first class-action case in the US challenging the training and output of AI systems [githubcopi...gation.com].
there is no direct legal precedent in the US that upholds publicly available training data as fair use,
https://www.theverge.com/2021/... [theverge.com]
It seems that it will also apply on the images:
Do you think this lawsuit could set precedence in other media of generative AI? We see similar complaints in text-to-image AI, that companies, including OpenAI, are using copyright-protected images without proper permission, for example.
CZ: The simpler answer is yes.
TM: The DMCA applies equally to all forms of copyrightable material, and images often include attribution; artists, when they post their work online, typically include a copyright notice or a creative commons license, and those are also being ignored by [companies creating] image generators.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/... [theverge.com]
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Did you have some sort of argument to go there? It is hard to address where your thinking is wrong without more of your wrong thinking to analyze.
But... If I had only this amazing argument to go on I'd have to guess you probably think these AI's are doing something more than a chess bot who looks at say, the first three moves of a game, then generates a complete game by making a sequence of guesses, at each step picking the most probable move of each player all the way to the conclusion.
No matter how miracu
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If you believe in copyrights at all that whomever typed the commands to the bot should get copyright. The bot is just a tool little different than a pen or typewriter in the sense of who came up with the original idea to create said comic.
The fuck it is.
I hear you. I only buy art from artists who make their own pigments, craft their own brushes from wood and animal hair, and make their own paper from sawdust. That is a real artist. Anything less is just relying on the work of others.
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If you believe in copyrights at all that whomever typed the commands to the bot should get copyright. The bot is just a tool little different than a pen or typewriter in the sense of who came up with the original idea to create said comic.
The fuck it is.
I hear you. I only buy art from artists who make their own pigments, craft their own brushes from wood and animal hair, and make their own paper from sawdust. That is a real artist. Anything less is just relying on the work of others.
"Real" artists raise their own animals and grow their own trees.
Re:Seems like.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe in copyrights at all that whomever typed the commands to the bot should get copyright. The bot is just a tool little different than a pen or typewriter in the sense of who came up with the original idea to create said comic.
The fuck it is.
I hear you. I only buy art from artists who make their own pigments, craft their own brushes from wood and animal hair, and make their own paper from sawdust. That is a real artist. Anything less is just relying on the work of others.
False dichotomy is false. You're asserting that one either insists that true art must be pristine, completely original with absolutely no relationship to any other act of creation, OR one must accept that that all acts of purported creation are equally derivative and so should be given the same respect and prominence.
Tools can be viewed as devices which accept input and produce output. The output of a pen or a typewriter are highly dependent up specific and controllable details of the input. The output of an AI drawbot is largely dependent on things other than the user input. The user of a pen or typewriter knows what the output is going to be. The user of a drawbot has only a very general idea. The output of a pen or typewriter is very tightly coupled to the input. The output of a drawbot is so loosely coupled as to barely meet the meaning of the phrase.
So you can insist that using a pen is the same action as using a drawbot if you want. And I'll repeat. The fuck it is.
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The output of a pen or a typewriter are highly dependent up specific and controllable details of the input. The output of an AI drawbot is largely dependent on things other than the user input.
The output of a pen is highly dependent on things other than the user input, such as the color of the ink and the thickness of the pen tip. And the output of the AI drawbot is largely dependent on the user input, since it only draws a whale if you ask it to draw a whale or something aquatic in nature. Whether you "ask" a pen to move with your hand or "ask" an AI to draw a whale, you are still in control. You didn't really ask either inanimate object to do anything, since neither are a person, you just used
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A talented artist does have more control of the output with a pen than you do with an AI drawbot. But then again you have more control with a pen than you do with a cup of paint, and we still call it art when an artist pours paint on a canvas and moves it around. And arguably a novice artist has more control over art with a drawbot than with a pen. I know I do.
I don't think it's arguable at all. Certainly, the output is much more aesthetically pleasing if I use a drawbot than if I use a pencil, as I have no drawing talent at all. But that pleasing appearance is not a result of any skill or control on my part. If I draw a square with a pencil, it may be lopsided and uneven but it will be roughly squarish. I have direct control, even if I suck at it. If I give a drawbot a prompt of "square:, it may be a perfect square with 90 degree corners, or it may be a picture
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If you believe in copyrights at all that whomever typed the commands to the bot should get copyright. The bot is just a tool little different than a pen or typewriter in the sense of who came up with the original idea to create said comic.
The fuck it is.
If I copy the comic pixel by pixel, and then take copyright - then I own the copyright.
And that is the problem - a human can steal AI created content and claim it legally under this situation.
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"The bot is just a tool little different than a pen or typewriter in the sense of who came up with the original idea to create said comic."
Exactly. This is no different than a photographer applying an image filter... in fact some of those filters are built on AI. This great myth that AI as we know it is in any way related to a self-aware human type intelligence needs to end.
AI is not capable of being an aware observer. Not as we build it now anyway. If we set up a complete circular network of AI tools that
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A pen -> computer program parsing B's of data = "little different".
Riiiight. Not in any sense of "little".
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I worked in the entertainment business for well over 20 years and many "creative director" types couldn't pull off typing in the prompt to get the AI to generate what they're looking for. I think the copyright office erred on this one.
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I have one question (Score:2)
How are they going to know? If they build a detector, then AI will be trained to bypass such a detector.
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They don't know. It seems that the Copyright Office's finding is hasty, And they may be incompetent, or they may have examined improperly for political reasons.
Considering the work is described as "AI Assisted", meaning it is not 100% machine-generated and in fact DOES contain some material created by humans. First of all the selection of images.
Second of All, when something is produced by a machine - we attribute the production to the person who gave creative direction to the machine to get the final r
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It has to be some element of ignorant humans confusing AI with a creative intelligence. AI simulates the output of creative intelligence but obviously it all comes from the input, either in training or operation.
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That does not seem like a good example for talking about AI-generated art.
The photographer does all the creative work: choosing the subject, viewpoint, lighting, shutter speed, f-stop, framing, etc. The camera simply records what the photographer set it up to record. (not to mention the processing done by th
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That does not seem like a good example for talking about AI-generated art.
Photography an example the Author's lawyer in this case has cited in their response, And contrary to what this article implies - the copyright office has not yet concluded the process nor revoked anything, They also gave an excellent response - it's very they will win and keep their registration, which will also set a precedent for similar projects.
The photographer does all the creative work: choosing the subject, viewpoint, ligh
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They don't need to catch every AI generated work of art, but by setting guidelines it can assist whenever a copyright claim is taken to court. If the holder of copyrighted AI generated art sues someone for infringement, it is more likely to come out during the lawsuit's discovery than during the initial copyright process. Then they could be charged with a crime for deceiving the copyright office.
AI lyrics (Score:5, Interesting)
But that's the art side of things. Copyright...hmm. So interestingly then if I produced such a track, the recording would have copyright (because I created the music - remember we're talking about the lyrical component here), but the actual lyrics wouldn't and could be reused, completely legally, in a completely different track? Seems like it.
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but the actual lyrics wouldn't and could be reused, completely legally, in a completely different track?
It sounds like the copyright office might refuse to give you a registration for either, and you might have to separate the two and request to register only the music not paired with the track (which is kind of bullshit). The comic book they denied registration to was Not 100% created by AI. They described it as AI-Assisted generation of the contained images, But a human still chose which images to
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Yes, I thought the author should be able to get a copyright on the story, though not the AI-generated images.
From their response [reddit.com], they applied for a copyright in the work as a whole without exclusion. .. As described below, Kashtanova engaged in a creative, iterative process which she
describes as “working with the computer to get closer and closer to what I wanted to
express.” This process included multiple rounds of composition, selection, arrangement,
cropping, and editing for each image in the
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I think the issue is quantity. Here and there, an AI generated creative work can be "interesting". But where do we end up? Are we going to have AI mills churning out creative works by the millions/billions/trillions? How satisfying will that be? Probably no more so that when humans create a derivative work now...but the rate at which it will happen, will be so much quicker.
Every time I've gone down the AI Art rabbit hole...it starts off interesting...but, after looking at dozens of different-but-simila
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Are we going to have AI mills churning out creative works by the millions/billions/trillions? How satisfying will that be? Probably no more so that when humans create a derivative work now...
So, really damned satisfying, since every single piece of art is derivative in some way, to a greater or lesser degree? I'm not saying all stories are the same or anything (no, not everything is a hero's journey, or what not), and I'm also not saying that something can't be "more or less a copy, but with a tweak, and isn't satisfying" because that's also a real thing. It's just that being derivative by its very nature says very little about the quality of the output, and says very little about how enjoyab
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This won't ultimately stand. Whoever used the AI to generate the lyrics and then acted as a filter to pick out a "good" set of lyrics from the various sets generated they'll end up getting the copyright on the lyrics in the end.
Imagine something just strings notes together in different patterns, quasi randomly with a few programmed common patterns found in songs... but 99% of it is garbage. The person who picks the 1% and says what is good, they are the creative element not the random riff generator. The sa
Two things (Score:2)
1. This will only encourage people to lie about the use of AI in helping them create something
2. The nature of his work was transformative, as there currently isn't an AI extant that produces comics. It produces art/images, which the human then merged together into a serial format, put together in a book, etc. It's as copyrightable as commissioning 1 artist per page who doesn't know the rest of the story. It's not like those artists would expect copyright.
Re:Two things (Score:4, Informative)
This will only encourage people to lie about the use of AI in helping them create something
They might not want to do that, because it's a 506(E) criminal offense under federal law. 17 USC 506 [cornell.edu]:
(e)False Representation.—
Any person who knowingly makes a false representation of a material fact in the application for copyright registration provided for by section 409, or in any written statement filed in connection with the application, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
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There's no law requiring you to say what tools you used to create a work. I don't have to disclose I used Photoshop. People who create books don't have to disclose they used Stable Diffusion. "I made it" is 100% accurate. No one else did, especially not a machine, as they cannot copyright anything.
They'll just say "this is my book with illustrations" rather than "part of this book was created with the assistance of AI art."
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1) Yes, people will lie to get what they want. I don't see that as a reason to let every jackoff with a GPU create terabytes of garbage (some of which would be infringed from time to time). We should allow human artists and authors the opportunity to defend themselves against copyright trolls by proving that the infringed work is not created by a human being (as required by the current laws).
The point of contention will be over the word "created." I think that the US Copyright office was correct to deny th
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> I don't see that as a reason to let every jackoff with a GPU create terabytes of garbage (some of which would be infringed from time to time).
What law or power do you imagine exists that could prevent people from executing the code they want to execute? You're not in a position to dictate that.
>by proving that the infringed work is not created by a human being (as required by the current laws).
That's currently impossible. Perhaps an AI-detecting AI will exist, but merely running the output through s
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> I don't see that as a reason to let every jackoff with a GPU create terabytes of garbage (some of which would be infringed from time to time).
What law or power do you imagine exists that could prevent people from executing the code they want to execute? You're not in a position to dictate that.
I meant that the resulting works should not be given a copyright; it would indeed be impossible to entirely prevent the creation.
I think where this analogy fails is that even the most egregious examples of AI-copied styles still don't show any identifiable areas of the original works. It's synthesized into something novel, even though it can look uncannily similar to the original. The worst I've seen is a mostly reproduced signature, but it's always applied to a novel image that definitely didn't come directly from the author, but rather is a synthesis of innumerable prior works.
My point was that old paintings in the public domain are uncopyrightable-as AI created paintings should be. Nonetheless, I could get a copyright on the compilation of the uncopyrightable elements, just like the human author in your example. But I may have missed your point, since i didn't actually read the story.
Paradigm shift, everyone loses their minds. (Score:5, Interesting)
This image has been edited with Photoshop, it isn't art
Color Photography is garish, it isn't art
Photography isn't painting, it isn't art
painting isn't scratching rocks on cave walls, it isn't art.
rocks scratched on cave walls aren't sticks in the dirt, it isn't art.
AI is just another tool, useless without a brain, just like the tools at the copyright/patent office.
Filing for copyright served its purpose here (Score:2)
The purpose being - the person who filed managed to get his name in the news for a few minutes.
What percentage of AI tool usage is allowed then? (Score:5, Interesting)
Since AI will be used as a tools in art, tools are allowed and copyright is retained. But whats the agreed amount to retain copyright under USCO?
AI generation will be filling in gaps, offering suggestions, fine tuning, filling in effects, etc. Media will handily adopt it to speed up processes.
Maybe it's the amount of prompts given vs the ai generation. If you describe the scene, the characters, the look and feel, and the dialog, but AI generates the images? Thats just giving a book a visual to your story.
I have favorite sci-fi authors, in the future I could see AI generating movies based off the books, maybe starting as Anime until the technology can generate a full movie, or at least a graphic novel to start. That should probably retain copyright.
I'm also expecting AI to be implemented in music, offer suggestions, make modifications, until it can fully generate music. The cross over from tool usage to humanless music generation is where copyright most likely should end.
Great point, AI is used all the time now... (Score:2)
AI generation will be filling in gaps, offering suggestions, fine tuning, filling in effects, etc
It's already used pretty heavily for photos, photoshop these days is chock full of AI tools that do things like content aware filling or cutting...
To me if someone is directing all of that AI action, that means the work is worthy of copyright. It doesn't matter if that is using dozens of AI tools, or customizing image generation prompts.
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I'm not sure how this is any different (Score:2)
How can you possibly test for this? (Score:2)
If I publish something and I don't say anything about how my "creative process" works, how does anyone else know whether or not it's copyrightable? There's no objective test, unless you put me under oath and demand an explanation.
Your competing expression looks too similar to mine, so I'm sending a DMCA notice to your host to get it taken down. What's your defensive move? Sue me, in order to put me under oath and determine whether or not mine is actually copyrighted? People might have to do this for every D
Lol. (Score:1)
Who do these assholes think made it if not a human, a fucking Martian? God, people are so fucking stupid and this asinine decision will be reversed because it has absolutely no consistency with any sort of reason. Furthermore, AI is already fucking used in boatloads of copyrighted material, tons of authoring tools use some sort of "AI".
Probably some clueless old bureaucrat fart that doesn't understand AI is just a tool and thinks a fucking robot sat down and made the comic of its own volition.
AI Art Probably uses Copyrighted Art (Score:1)
Damn (Score:2)
That's a blow to all the photo-based doctors/authors out there.
Incentive to stop using the "AI" word (Score:2)
If companies can't get copyright protection for things generated by "AI" they'll have a reason to stop colling their technology "AI." Maybe this is a good thing!
Who is filing for copyright? (Score:1)
If the bot takes its own initiative to file, then what? What if the bot files its own lawsuits against violators? Is it then at least as intelligent as a shark?
When you think about it (Score:2)
This is a "betamax" moment (radio for older folks) (Score:2)
AI in art is a fundamental change in how people produce stuff. Previously computerized tools, like drawing tablets, photoshop, or even simple autocorrect, and grammar fixes were acceptable. But the boundary is being pushed again today.
Two scenarios:
So, if you write a terrible essay, have Microsoft Word fix the vocabulary and grammar for you, do you still retain ownership?
If we ask this question today, I expect majority would say "yes", but there would still be some objections.
And, if you write what is essen
Judge better watch out... (Score:2)
The judge better watch out when the Singularity arrives and our AI overlords assume power. He just declared them non-people, and they might decide to make him a non-person, too.
But what about (Score:2)
This is great news (Score:2)
This is great news, because now at this point nothing at all can be copyrighted as everything is a derivative of ether myself or AI, I own the copyright for the human genome in source code form, as my birthday is January 2nd, 1979, this is the first day that automatic protection kicks in under the Berne Convention, and I have license this source code under the Apache License 2.0, which also expressly includes a patient license as well. The link below is the source code repository.
https://drive.google.com/dr [google.com]