An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
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If anyone deserves copyright over a photo, it’s the people that had their work photographed without permission. Then, the most deserving of the copyright are the camera and film manufacturers that made photography possible.
I think this is an angle that isn’t pften taken. The advent of photography was a very similar situation to the current advent of AI.
However, there are some crucial differences. For example, a photo can realistically be taken for personal use, which is either protected by law, or at least tolerated. AI, on the other hand, doesn’t have this going for it (you wouldn’t really go to the trouble of training an AI model for personal use). Even if the model and everything else is fully transparent and open source, it’s still gobbling up copyrighted data for commercial purposes - the model’s authors or the users’. Luckily, there is no AI fair use carveout (and I hope there won’t ever be one).
Another thing I’d like to point out: in the vast majority of european legal systems copyright isn’t called “Copyright”, but “Authors’ rights”, i.e. its primary purpose isn’t to restrict copying as much as it’s protect the interests of the author (not publisher/corporation, although this unfortunately got bastardised a while ago).
I can only hope the EU takes a reasonable approach to AI (that is, ban it from gobbling copyrighted work, require current “tainted” models be purged along with corporations paying reparations to the authors, as well as banning EULA clauses along the lines of “by signing up we get to feed all your information into the AI”).
By my first comment I was trying to point out the fact that the “time invested” argument isn’t that strong. That doesn’t mean there aren’t better arguments or that I don’t agree with the general idea, just that we need better arguments if we want to win this fight.
This is the least coherent argument I keep seeing against AI art… Every art student in the world trains on the works of other artists. They explicitly study the works of great masters to learn their techniques. But when an “evil corporation™” does it it’s now theft.
It’s literally wanting the laws to reflect who is doing something rather than wanting them to be applied fairly.
Right, learning their techniques, not cutting out pieces of said master art and pasting it onto someone else’s work. There’s already predecent for this when that one monkey took a photo and the guy that provided the: camera, scene and direction was denied the copyright because he didn’t do the work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Tell me you know nothing of art without telling me…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Mona_Lisa
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/yasumasa-morimura-sen-cun-tai-chang-portrait-futago
And AI doesn’t just “copy paste”. Have you not seen anything created by AI? People act like it’s just re-creating existing works for some reason.
There is a difference between studying techniques, ideology, history, and mediums to be able to use a style created by another artist in your own creative works, and putting all the creative end products into the ideas blender and churning out a product with no creativity and no intentionality to the application of the process. What’s the end game? At what point does human creativity become redundant and AI starts eating its own slop? Do human artists need to keep creating depictions of meaning or value or whatever else they find important to endlessly feed into the machine so it can duplicate them, missing any of the metaphor, subtext, and soul present in the original? At what point is it obvious that workers are having their labor stolen by the tech bro Soylent Green idea machine to enrich them at the expense of whoever’s life work they seemed to be slop worthy of regurgitation.
AI can be an excellent shortcut or a great tool, and help us make our work easier and products better, but it is not a creator of original creative works, and cannot be validated at the same level as human artists. I, for one, would like to see a future where artists don’t just exist to feed into their machine betters.
An AI image doesn’t just pop into the universe apropos of nothing. I don’t think you can say there is zero creativity in the process. A human sat down, conceived of an idea, and used a tool to create it. What is at the core of debate is whether the result is a creative work made by the human or not.
I agree that the AI is not the creator of the work. But I’m not so quick to say that the person wasn’t either… Cameras have a lot of stuff they do for the human. You can’t credibly say that you create any photo you take with your phone. The billions of transistors and image processing algorithms do that. You chose what to point it at and when. And maybe some technical parameters. And when you prompt an AI you have full creative control over what goes into it as well. Hell - you could probably even copyright the prompt if it’s sufficiently creative! But not the resulting artwork?
We may not value AI art as much as we do traditional arts. But I’m very hesitant to say that it is not art at all.
Photography has far more depth, complexity, and creativity as an artform and comparing it to AI both misunderstands the process and does it a huge disservice. Even before lining up the shot, the photographer must choose the right focus length, exposure, and a number of other technical settings, then must choose a subject, perhaps modify the composition, and have the right timing.
Photography can be as simple as pointing a phone camera for a well timed moment or snapping a once in a lifetime shot with an expensive lens. AI art takes orders of magnitude less creativity or training to do well, because it’s stealing the work of people that have already learned the composition techniques and have done the legwork, which is just being shoddily regurgitated by the plagiarism machine.
I love it when my interlocutor immediately refutes their own argument.
Way to entirely miss the point. Are you suggesting that the simplest form of an artform isn’t part of it? Apply that to literally every other artform. By your logic, jamming on basic chords on a ukulele in my living room isn’t music, and a kids stick figure drawing of their family isn’t art. You’re so concerned about being “correct” that you missed being right. Go back and actually read my comment for its meaning, not the pedantry. If this is how you engage with media, I understand why you would compare AI art and photography.
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