Opinion: The Copyright Office is making a mistake on AI-generated art : technology

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm kind of mixed on this, because I think AI art is pretty cool, but I also hate our current copyright system. I kind of agree with the copyright office that images generated by a prompt should not be covered by copyright. What if I just type in "cat" and set the seed to 1, and try to copyright that? What if I copyright the image for EVERY seed with that prompt? Literally anyone else could easily generate the exact same image, and are they going to be in violation of my copyright now?

It gets really complicated though. What if I draw a sketch and then feed it into stable diffusion to flesh it out further? Then I do extensive inpainting across the whole thing, then I take it to Photoshop and do further edits. At this point, I think it's fair to say this is an original image of my own creation, which should be eligible for copyright protection.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your second example is the artist doing a significant portion of the work and would be copyrightable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What if we go back to example 1 but this time they design the AI themselves?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

If they can prove that all of the art used to train an AI model is their own art, and treated the output as derivative work, then they should be able to enforce copyright the output of that specific AI. Using public domain works might be possible, although there would need to be some kind of significant portion that is theirs so the AI isn't used to copyright public works that were simply fed through the AI.

Note that I didn't say who created the AI model, as the AI is a tool and not the creator of the work. The problem with the current implementations of AI and copyright are that the models are trained on a mix of copyrighted and public domain works so there is no way to know who to identify the derivative work that comes out of the AI.

Personal opinion as I see AI as something like Photoshop that outputs something with a change based on an algorithm, with the AI just being a far more complex algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I can understand partially your argument, and I'd agree the work you personally do is your own, but the art generated by the AI is not.

It's as much your art as the person who googles extensively to find images that they ten cut out and place into your art. It's as much your art as taking it to another person, asking them to make the edits, and revising.

Now, if the image you get from google is creative commons, and the revision artist agrees to signing off their rights, you'd be able to copywrite your work. I'd agree to the same situation with AI, if the people who's art makes up the model agree to that circumstance, you should be able to copywrite. Otherwise you're just taking credit for others work because you described it well enough while ingraining it into your own.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No specific person's art is being put into my generated image, unlike if I were to copy an image from Google. If a model is trained on 1 trillion images, then every single one of those images influenced the weights in the model which then resulted in the output.

But my argument there is that when the generation becomes very integrated into the workflow as a tool, then it can be nearly impossible to separate out what was actually created by me vs what the ai did.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I disagree, you can see signatures and figures drawn by individual artists in even the largest models of today. Also, only a fraction are what you specified

Though trillions may be used, only billions are of dragons, millions of clocks, and thousands of something more specific or in certain style. A picture of a cat has nothing to do with the prompt "rick and Morty inflation porn, big feet, (feet:1.3), cartoon, drawn, colourful"

I've worked in the AI field specializing in vectorization, a method of creating automated systems to catch failures, and it's clear to me what gets imprinted onto the nodes is just other peoples work. The line-work, colouration, composition, etc. on a particular output will be from a tiny fraction of the models training and will be, individually per addition or edit, directly taken from a handful of images.

This is why you can get text based or code based AI to word for word output some of their trained work. Same with image based, though only pieces again.

All the actual decision making, the colouration, the composition, line-work, perspective, base stylistic choice, etc. will be made by another person or people before being detected by the AI and output when the correct input (prompt) is given.

To be clear, If I had called Pokemon fish whenever you put in the word fish something stylistically Pokemon would be output with nothing to do with fish. It's not learning what our prompt actually means just what gets it a head pat from the dev.

It's not just learning what a word means and outputting a new image, it's finding a way to output the original data in a way that makes somebody like me, an AI dev, say "yeah that's about right". That's all

Once more, because each time I stare I hate AI I get misinterpreted, I hate that it's taking without permission. If that is granted then it's perfectly moral.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I like a particular element of a piece of art, like the way they painted a distinctive piece of clothing in a portrait, and I copy that element in my own work, am I stealing their work?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Did you trace the linework, did you copy near exactly the colouration and composition, could you place one over the other and see it's very close to the origional? if so, yes. Yes you did. If you think to yourself, I like these specific elements of this art and am going to take them into account while creating a new piece, with new ideas, then no. You did not. AI art does the first. It doesn't know what makes up the art. It can't. It just knows if I take this data from the origional data set and place it in this manner when this term is present I have done well. It's just pattern recognition, no critical thought

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

Literally anyone else could easily generate the exact same image, and are they going to be in violation of my copyright now?

It is already the case that if an AI generates an image that happens to be effectively identical to a copyrighted one the person who generated the image can be in violation of that copyright. It doesn't matter how the copyright originated.

In the case of your cat example, though, the solution is trivial. Use a random seed. There's far too many potential images any given model could generate to ever copyright all of them, or even a tiny sliver of them, and if that did miraculously happen just train the model a little more and you get a whole new set of outputs. It's unfeasible.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I agree that AI work should not have copyright protection. Even with human intervention it still collects data, without expressed permission, from numerous sources.

This will actually protect smaller artists. It will prevent giant companies from profiting from their work without credit or payment.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree that AI work should not have copyright protection. Even with human intervention it still collects data, without expressed permission, from numerous sources.

Generative AI models could be trained using only on public domain and royalty free images. Should the output of those be eligible for copyright, but not if they also had unlicensed training data?

It seems there two separate arguments being conflated in this debate. One is whether using copyrighted works as AI training data is fair use. The other is whether creative workers should be protected from displacement by AI.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

"Royalty free" is not the same as public domain, most "royalty free" images still need to be licensed for particular uses and come with other restrictions. The only thing royalty free means is that the copyright owner doesn't demand a cut of each sale you make of whatever you used it in.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

But that won’t happen. Companies have money, and by extension, lobbyists. It doesn’t matter what the general consensus is, they will get their way.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So we kill open source models, and proprietary data models like adobe are fine, so they can be the only resource and continue rent seeking while independent artists can eat dirt.

Whether or not the model learned from my art is probably not going to affect me in any way shape or form, unless I'm worried about being used as a prompt so people could use me as a compass while directing their new image aesthetic. Disney/warner could already hire someone to do that 100% legally, so it's just the other peasants im worried about. I don't think the peasants are the problem when it comes to the wellbeing and support of artists

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe a person can still sell or market art that is AI created. I just believe they shouldn't have total ownership of the work.

Already most creators don't fret over fanart or fanfiction so there is wiggle room for fair-use. It's a lot like the game modding scene. Usually modders use pre-existing assets or code to create something new.

Let people play but not own AI work for now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I take a copy of the Mona Lisa and draw a luxurious moustache on it, I now own the copyright to that moustache-bedecked Italian's image. Sure, the original image is still public domain, and if someone was to crop the moustache out of my version the bit they'd be left over with would be free and clear of my copyright. But if I use an AI to generate an image and then do the same thing to it how would you even know which bit to crop? And what value would there be in the "leftovers"? Might as well just use your own AI to generate what you need.

I think a lot of AI-hating artists feel that if AI-generated art is declared uncopyrightable they'd "win" somehow. I don't think they'll see the results they're expecting, if that comes to pass.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It seems we need to just let this all run longer and see what happens. Currently we have no real way to detect AI in media beside disclosures and the silly mistakes like 20 fingers. This all relies on the creator (Not hard to edit a photo to clean up those hands etc)

I think a lot of creatives are struggling so they just feel shut out of the conversation. Copyright is probably the one thing most people can understand as a talking point.

I think we still have some time before we see which way will work. Ideally we could always augment the laws... but yeah, America and stuff.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ok that's entirely disingenuous. You can make an AI model open source where you get real permission from artists instead of taking their work without permission and using it to replace them.

It's entirely possible. Will the large orgs have more resources to collect art? No shit, yeah, and they'll have better PCs to train on too. No matter what, allowed to take from hard working small artists while attempting to make them irrelevant or not, the big corps will always have a heads up here.

Unless, like so many other projects, an extremely complicated system benefits from collaborative work inside an open environment. Shocking, I know, working on merit over money.

You don't want a conversation though you just want "epic dunks"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The amount of training data needed for a model is so huge that you'd have to use only artwork that was preemptively licensed for that purpose. Individually asking artists for permission to use their work would be far too expensive even if they all agreed to let you use their work for free.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

And why is that a problem?

Artists should have control over their work. It’s not my problem that a big company vs a small company is stealing my work, I don’t want either of them to.

I no longer post anything online that I create cause I’d rather nobody see it than it be stolen for AI training.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is correct, though there could be campaigns to collect art otherwise. There are plenty of artists in the open source world who could do it, and asking individuals to signal boost these calls to action can get more push. Once more, no matter what, big corps will always have more monitary resources. The power of open source is volunteer manpower and passion. Even if these weren't the case, the moral argument still stands in using a persons work to replace them without permission.

Regardless of that even, what this will do is cause stagnation in the art field if not protected. Nobodies going to share their art, their method, or their ideas freely in a world where doing so allows a massive corp to take it freely without permission, thus replacing them. This kills ideas of open distribution of art and art information. It will become hidden, and new ideas, new art, will not be available to view.

Allowing people to take without permission will only ever hurt the small artists. Disney will always be able to just "take" any art they make.

Also, you're not entirely correct on that. Models made for specific purposes don't actually need the absurd amount generalist models need. However in the context of current expectations yeah, you're right on quantity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Massive corps don't need to use the output of "little artists", they have their own massive repositories of works they own or license that they can train AIs on.

The small artists won't be able to use those AIs, though. Those AIs will belong to Disney or Getty Images, and if they deign to allow others to use them it'll be through paywalls and filters and onerous licensing terms. The small artists would only be able to use open models freely.

This insistence on AIs being prohibited from learning from otherwise public images is going to be a phyrric victory if it ever comes to pass.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why do they do it now then? They do need this. They need absurd amounts of tagged images of varying quality and style. No, their own repositories are nowhere near enough for general models. They require the small artists. Many artists, small or large, will simply refuse to license to disney too.

Allowing them to take from the smaller artists does not help the situation either. They now simply have more data, which they can run through their better equiped systems, quicker than anyone else can do. This helps the big corps while doing little for us small devs.

On the matter of these being "otherwise public images" being what they are trained on, can you not see this destroying this large public repository of information? No new work made by people who have unique ideas will be made public. Why would they? if they do, disney and getty images can now out compete them. This will cause the currently massive resource of images, information, and general art to become hidden. To become no-longer public. This stagnates art where it is now. Only that which people are OK with AI taking will be shared, becouse it will be. We get the same outcome either way, save for that already shared, the only difference is that nobody is able to enjoy the art being made which the artists don't want training AI.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's convenient to be able to use whatever publicly available images you want for training, but it's not necessary. Adobe proved this with their Firefly AI.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Their text to image is nowhere near the abilities of other tools, and the rest are specialized tools.

It's convenient, yes, but without it these models are much more limited.

Even of it was, my other points which you've ignored still stand

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’ll be a massive victory for artists and a failure for all the sham AI prompt generators.

There’s not a single downside to requiring all material used in training to be licensed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There’s not a single downside to requiring all material used in training to be licensed.

It destroys the open source/hobbyist sector. The only AIs that would be available for artists to use would be corporate-controlled, paywalled, and filtered. That's a pretty huge downside.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s not my problem

Art is not generated by machines. Nothing of value is lost.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah, so you meant "there's not a single downside to me."

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nothing of value is lost. Generative AI does not create anything new.

It’s exclusively a benefit to artists

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nothing of value to you is lost. We already know you don't care about other people, no need to keep repeating that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AI does not generate anything of value

I care about artists and the protection of their work. Not the AI models or their creators.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are artists who use AI tools as part of their workflow. You don't care about them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

And they can allow their art to be used to train AI. It just shouldn’t come at the expense of everyone else who wants to do things the traditional way.

Why should my work be open for anyone to use to train AI? I don’t care if it’s a hobbyist or an open model or google. I don’t want them using my work for training their models. Artists currently have rights over their work being used commercially, and I expect AI arguments to go that way as well. If it is to be used then it must be with the permission of the creator and a licensing contract written out. Art can be shared license free or AI permissive licenses, but would not be required to be.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree. With their example im not sure photos should. The exact photo. Ok, but someone making another thing based on it was sued? Thats bs. the photo was an event that happened. Im ok with them having rights on the photo but not what the photo shows.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Big companies like Adobe and Google can get the rights to use material to train their models. If stricter laws get passed it will only slightly inconvenience the larger companies, but might completely destroy any of the smaller companies or open-source versions available.

The anti-ai lawsuits aren't going to stop ai art/etc, just determine whether it's completely controlled by the current tech giants or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sadly no matter what, the big media companies are going to have a huge advantage in everything because of decades of lobbying etc.

I think people should still be able to profit from selling the image themselves, however, I don't think we have enough knowledge on how AI will truly impact things. If it becomes a minor fad and is just a tool to help speed a process I think the law doesn't need to change much.

If AI becomes the majority creator on projects then we have to have this conversation about who owns what.

Close models will probably be the future, much like stock photos, and people will have to pay to access the models.

In the end big business will always fuck us over, copyright or not.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I do not think that you can shoehorn existing copyright laws to AI-generated art. It's not an apples to apples issue.

While there might be certain creativity and effort that is worth protecting in some gen-AI art cases, it does not require the same kind of skill, materials, time, effort, cost, and dedication that copyrights were envisioned to protect with more traditional works.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The photography example is a good one imo. There's a big difference between pointing your camera at something and snapping a quick photo, vs carefully setting a scene, lighting, and adjusting a lot of camera settings before finishing in Photoshop.

In comparison, you have an image generation where someone types cat into midjourney, vs someone in stable diffusion blending 3 models, using latent coupling to compose the layout of the whole image, using control nets to position all the individual people, and finally touching the image up in Photoshop.

I have no doubt that higher effort photography or high effort ai art should be covered by copyright, each can take hours of work to produce the desired result. It's just not feasible to verify how high effort the production of something is for general copyright.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The ruling raised an important question: Was the issue just that Thaler should have listed himself, rather than his AI system, as the image's creator?

Then on September 5, the office rejected the copyright for Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, holding that it “was not the product of human authorship” because it had been created by the AI software Midjourney.

The nation’s highest court acknowledged that “ordinary” photographs may not merit copyright protection because they may be a “mere mechanical reproduction” of some scene.

So even though a mechanical process captured the image, it nevertheless reflected creative choices by the photographer, and therefore deserved copyright protection.

Or consider the time an Associated Press photographer, Mannie Garcia, snapped a photo of then-Sen. Barack Obama listening to George Clooney during a 2006 panel discussion.

Two years later, artist Shepard Fairey used Garcia’s photo as the basis for an illustration called “Obama Hope” that was ubiquitous during the 2008 presidential campaign.

The original article contains 827 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I’m glad I read this article. I started out thinking that AI generated work didn’t deserve a copyright, but the comparison with early photography changed my mind. Artists have much more influence on AI generated images than I gave them credit for.

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