A rule against copyrighting AI art will be unworkable.

I’ve generally been against giving AI works copyright, but this article presented what I felt were compelling arguments for why I might be wrong. What do you think?

  • Lvxferre
    1·
    1 year ago

    But it does matter whether your input is a brush or a prompt. // If you physically paint something with a paintbrush, you have a copyright over your work.

    By “thus you have copyright over it”, I’m saying that it should apply equally to both (paintbrush vs. image generator), not that it currently does.

    • FlowVoid@midwest.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      So if someone asks you to paint something and gives you detailed instructions about what they want to see in your painting, do you think they should have copyright over your work?

      • Lvxferre
        1·
        1 year ago

        Under the spirit of copyright law (that, again, I criticise), and depending on how detailed those instructions are, that wouldn’t be “my work”. It would be “our work”, because the person in question is actively creating the work alongside me.

        Transposing this reasoning to images generated by Stable Diffusion etc., you’d get co-authorship between the person inputting the prompt and the people who made the works used to feed the model with. You could even theoretically argue a third author - the person/people coding the model. (It’s a legal nightmare.)

        • FlowVoid@midwest.socialEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          No, under copyright law it would be your work and your work alone.

          Someone who is providing suggestions or prompts to you is not eligible to share the copyright, no matter how detailed they are. They must actually create part of the work themselves.

          So for instance if you are in a recording studio then you will have the full copyright over music that you record. No matter how much advice or suggestions you get from other people in the studio with you. Your instruments/voice/lyrics, your copyright.

          Otherwise copyright law would be a constant legal quagmire with those who gave you suggestions/prompts/feedback! Remember, an idea cannot be copyrighted, and prompts are ideas.

          In the case of Stable Diffusion, the copyright would go to Stable Diffusion alone if it were a human. But Stable Diffusion is not a human, so there is no copyright at all.