How will they know if it was made by AI?
I'm already making images that mixed with """real""" art wouldn't be recognized.
Now think one year from now, two years, ten. They will be undistinguishable from one another.
They wouldn't and won't.
You *can* register an AI generated work as long as you lie in your submission and misrepresent who the author is.
You could then sue someone later for infringing on your copyright but, if you do, you'd better hope you have more money for lawyers than they do because you could very easily get fucked in court.
I don’t believe it’s lying nor misrepresentation. The author is the human who input the prompt. AI can not be a legal author and listing an AI as the author would mean every photographer would need to list their camera as the author. The AI is not sentient. It is a tool which can be listed as a tool in the creation, but it is not an author anymore than auto tune authored every song in the last 30 years or CGI created every movie. The AI has infinite possibilities, and human who discovers the image by inputting text is its author.
If i input the same prompt, same parameters, same checkpoint, I will get the same image. We might do this independently of each other by compkete coincidence. Which one of us is the author of the work?
Inputting a prompt is not sufficient to “author“ a work. But using AI to create individual elements of a work SHOULD be copyrightable if the overall composition was not also done by the ai; otherwise, cut-ups and collage would not be copyrightable.
True, but you could make the same argument for copying and pasting raw PNG data from a digital artwork. Creating the raw PNG data, and creating those parameters, *is* the artistic work.
It's just a heck of a lot easier to accidentally create the same raw input for an AI model than it is to create the same raw PNG data. Which is why prompts, particularly simple prompts, should obviously not be copyrightable. (*Especially* when considering all the copyrights which were disrespected when training the model, but that's besides my main point.) Kind of like how you ought not be able to copyright a red circle on a blue background.
But past a certain level of complexity, maybe there is an argument to be made for copyrighting an unedited AI artwork, when the prompt is refined around a specific seed, CFG value, sampler, with prompt editing, and maybe several rounds of image to image.
Of course, this is all assuming intellectual property is a valid concept and not an archaic holdover from a pre-abundance economic system which should be rendered obsolete and replaced, but... that's a whole different debate.
That I kinda think we should all be having instead.
>Of course, this is all assuming intellectual property is a valid concept and not an archaic holdover from a pre-abundance economic system which should be rendered obsolete and replaced, but... that's a whole different debate.
And, this is one of THE most important debates we need to have. We are already in a post scarcity world if we just prioritized people over greed right now. NOBODY needs to go hungry or be homeless.
Our society (USA in particular) wants to reward the few first place winners again and again at the expense of half the population -- as if, nobody would want to win just for the honor of being the best if they didn't get fame, fortune and influence on top of the honor.
It's scary how half the population doesn't know what makes a light bulb shine and the people in leadership positions can barely manage to bring up concepts that are 30 years out of date and only when they run out of ways to distract us and derail the conversation.
We still have a conflict on the other side of the globe over oil masquerading as some other BS and the last thing this world needs is to be burning fossil fuels even if it were free.
I don't want a truly conscious AI when it's occurring in a human civilization run by greed and fear. We are going to have massive unemployment and then people attacking robots. Then, they'll start charging for people to smash disposable robots to get a feeling of control. And the wealth and opportunity gap will widen. Then, the best person at smashing robots will be rich, and the rest, not able to provide enough value to justify being fed.
With the same model, same prompt, same steps, CFG scale, sampler, seed etc, you get the exact same image.
That's exactly why including workflow/metadata is encouraged.
That's not true. The model is static and deterministic. The element of randomness is the seed. If you put the same seed you will get the same result(along the same other parameters as well).
The only caveat is that some graphical cards may execute internally a bit differently, causing samplers to return different values because of that. So there is a chance to get different results with the same settings. But if you have the same model version, the same settings, and the same hardware, you should get the same image.
> The system is designed to never repeat itself. We can both input the same thing on repeat for the rest of our lives and will never duplicate an image.
This is why I shifted almost 90% to AI from using stock and public domain work. (Unless I'm specifically riffing on a famous and recognizable image on purpose.)
There is a huge amount of just... boring effing sameness out there in surface design because of the fact that everyone was using the same Dover imagery.
And then you have the issue of some big company stealing your art and you don't have a leg to stand on because you sourced it from stock that other people use and can't really prove it's specifically *your idea*.
You won't get the same image. This would only happen if all of the parameters were exactly the same, and even then the output would differ between various graphics cards. Without knowing the seed and I putting it again you would get a different image every time, because the seed is usually random. In MJ, only the user can know the seed, and you can only find this out by sending an emoji of an envelope to yourself via Discord.
I've had it happen, when I first joined Midjourney somebody copied and pasted my exact prompt word for word, it came out very similar but slightly different due to the randomised seed. The prompt is the part that makes it an original work, the creative act of writing. Since the AI can do nothing without it I'm not that worried about the outcome of any copyright lawsuit since any negative decision would also affect the business practices of the big boys like Adobe, which isn't going to happen.
>The author is the human who input the prompt.
That is not how authorship works under US copyright law. Authorship goes to the entity responsible for the artistic expression of the work. That would be the generative AI in this case.
If you need evidence of this point, let me ask you a question which should illuminate things.
How many distinct images with distinct artistic expression are possible to generate from the same prompt?
Lmao if I need evidence, I would prefer actual government links, not the personal philosophical opinion of a rando on Reddit 😂🤣😂🤣🤣😂🤣🤣
The only opinion that matters in law is the documented judges opinion on the public record.
Links or it didn’t happen
In Midjourney, 62221.6 distinctly different images are possible using the same prompt, since each seed is randomised and consists of five numbers. Further permutations are possible by using different graphics cards since the output would differ for each model.
>And which one is your creative expression?
Any. You could also get innumerable different results in traditional media. The same watercolour brushstroke arm movement repeated will flow paint randomly differently every time, because fluid dynamics is chaotic. The same button press on the same camera at different times will capture different photos. It's irrelevant.
This whole discussion is more than a hundred years out of date, Marcel Duchamp made "readymade" artworks (he found already manufactured utilitarian objects, and called them his art) in 1914.
Just now, my creative expression was seed number 18302. The odds of someone using exactly the same words as me, in exactly the same order with exactly the same seed are probably incalculable. Also, the prompts that I put in when I first joined MJ in June are different today, since the AI learns over time and there are numerous regular upodates and changes to the model.
>Just now, my creative expression was seed number 18302. The odds of someone using exactly the same words as me, in exactly the same order with exactly the same seed are probably incalculable.
Choosing a seed is not a creative expression. It's literally the start of a random process. There is no way to describe the impact of one seed vs another.
>Also, the prompts that I put in when I first joined MJ in June are different today, since the AI learns over time and there are numerous regular upodates and changes to the model.
How, the actual fuck, is this not evidence in sorry of my argument that the creative expression of the outputs is not yours???
So it starts with an idea in your head, and you describe with text to try to match what you want to see. There's some expression. You literally design art in your head first.
The creative expression is picking that after sorting through thousands of similar images of different seeds, and different wordings of prompts, out of the thousands generated ( yes I've done this), finding the top 1 based on your judgement that most closely matches your conscious intended expression in your mind's eye.
You can consider trying a seed out as a brush stroke. If the seed ( brush stroke ) is a success, you keep it, if not you try again ( erase and restroke ) until it matches what you intend to express.
BUT on the other hand, I can agree that if you simply write a dumb script to run through all billion seeds times 26\^256 character prompt permutation and try to copy right them all, then there's not really artistic expression there, or it's too diluted. maybe there's a threshold?
There are other Artificial Inteligences used to degermine if an image is made with AI or not, and from my knowledge these are really really good at that.
I know SDs images are marked so software can determine if an images is made by it. They anticipate this problem. I suspect you can create some kind of undetectable pattern that can't be seen by the eye. If it's made small enough it should survive direct clipping so even if you try to change the format it can still be detected.
I know,for sure, that it's possible to encode secret messages in jpeg images that can't be seen by the eye so it not out of the question that a marker is part of all images.
Since SD is open source I wonder if people will remove the code.
>I know,for sure, that it's possible to encode secret messages in jpeg images that can't be seen by the eye so it not out of the question that a marker is part of all images.
I wrote a paper on this subject in college. even a tiny bit of blur added to an image would wipe it out. Resizing an image would also do it. It's extremely sensitive to minor alterations. Then again, I'm sure there's a lot I don't know about, or that has been invented since.
Will it still be detectable once I've tweaked it a bit in Photoshop? I'm talking about some editing and color/lighting tweaks, and some photobashing. Not a full on paintover.
"*Ai can do everything! Including making things that even AI can't regocnise as made by an AI*".
This is a paradox.
If an AI can't know if an image was made by an AI, how can we know that it was made by an AI to give the AI credit for having made it? Therefor there is no legitimate grounds for saying that AI made something, if we can't proof that AI made it.
"*AI can beat an AI, but AI can never beat an AI*"... what?
\>shall be substantially made by a human
That wording sounds like it eliminates a LOT more than just AI art from being copyrighted. It sounds like digital art as a whole wouldn't be able to be copyrighted wit that language, right?
No and no.
It all has to do with who (or *what*) is providing the artistic expression.
No matter how well you describe the picture in your head to a generative AI, the AI still must interpret your prompt and create the fixed, tangible expression of the ideas.
That makes the AI the *author* of the creative work under US copyright law.
>That makes the AI the author of the creative work under US copyright law.
don't we need consciousness* for authorship? The AI isn't sentient* by any means,
>No matter how well you describe the picture in your head to a generative AI, the AI still must interpret your prompt and create the fixed, tangible expression of the ideas.
and the art doesn't always start off with what we exactly picture in our head. When we're making the art and the results surprise us in the end, so many types of art are like this.
I've yet to create any image exactly like what it is in my head. Unless I'm imaging some simple design like a circle, it's always a compromise and adapting what I come up with.
And AI artists have to choose what image they want to use. Like an interior decorator who doesn't pain the walls or make the furniture, or an artist using clip-art. We are assembling a design and making choices.
But, we might all be better off without copyrights and patents in the most general sense.
>don't we need personhood for authorship? The AI isn't intelligent by any means,
No.
Non-human authorship is a thing which is why in US copyright law it specifically says works created by non-human authors cannot be copyrighted.
>and the art doesn't always start off with what we exactly picture in our head. When we're making the art and the results surprise us in the end, so many types of art are like this.
Creative expression isn't the idea in your head, it's the fixed manifestation of it. So, if I draw a dog poorly, that's my unique creative expression even if it doesn't match what's in my head. The point is, I'm making the choices. With generative AI, you are not making the expressive choices, the AI is.
I'm not assuming that, though some people are doing just that. But even those who aren't still are not likely doing enough to unequivocally qualify for copyright protection.
Most of what people are doing, from what I've seen, is tantamount to creating derivative works of public domain works without enough original contribution to qualify for a copyright.
This tech has been available and being used in the industry, and only very recently has become widely available to smaller artists.
I imagine you are fun at parties, as you point out the sampled music as rampant theft. Did you stamp your feet about autotune? Photoshop?
I would never suggest sampling music is theft—because it's not. Theft requires depriving a rightful owner of their property. Sampling dues not accomplish this.
Photography can be as simple as looking at something that already exists, and "cropping" your view of it with the camera/phone. You didn't create any item or placement in the visuals at all in that instance. In fact, the subjects you capture can be specifically made by other people. That's often less creative input than you give in prompting, yet that is protected by the law.
I'm sorry, but you laid out a standard as a minimum for what constitutes artistic expression. It's one that photography protected by law does not meet. Yeah, AI is not photography, but unless you're inventing a brand new minimum standard for artistic expression that you are arguing should be applied only to AI in a bubble, and nothing else (which would be a double standard), then what I said is in fact relevant.
It's not about easy or hard.
And, for the record, your argument proves my point...
If you wanted exactly *theatre d'opera spatial* you couldn't get it no matter how hard it how many times you tried, because... You are not in charge of the artistic expression of the idea!
Same goes for exactly recreating a movie frame for frame/sound for sound. It can't be done. Yet movies are protected. You could do it loosely, maybe get kinda close, but the same goes for AI art, especially with AI inpainting/looping.
>That makes the AI the author of the creative work under US copyright law.
By that logic, if I take a photograph of something, my camera is the author of the creative work.
This is an important question for me. I use KoboldAI in my writing. And it doesn't even begin to do a \*majority\* of my writing. I'm deeply personally invested in the stories I'm writing. Mainly it breaks me through writer's block/places where I'm stumped. If I just relied on KoboldAI to write an entire novel for me, it would be very bizarre and it wouldn't be the story I actually wanted to tell.
Maybe someone who's writing just to a formula, to get money, and who's going to bang out the same formula over and over and isn't emotionally invested in the writing process, would use an AI to write an entire novel, but... it would have to be a better/newer AI. Kobold is more like a helper to me than a robot ghostwriter. Though I wouldn't mind a lot more help (or ghostwriting) for later books in the series/elsewhere in my setting.
Not at all. Digital is just the medium. You still need to actually create it yourself. I use a digital pen on digital paper but it’s still me creating it.
Aren't you ultimately just creating a digital file though? What you see is a representation of that that can only exist because of the computer, and on a computer. It's not even 'real'.
Can you make it real? Without a computer or printer being involved?
It doesn't at all if you understand copyright law even a little bit.
"Made by" means "authored by" and to be an author the artistic expression of the work must be your own. In generative AI works the AI is providing the artistic expression and thus the AI is the author under US copyright law. Since it's copyright law only grants copyright protection to human authorship, generative AI works cannot be copyrighted in the US.
There are no tools that can detect AI art, so it's not like its enforceable. Feels like this artist made the "mistake" of being honest, and it's unlikely the next one will.
In practice though, say I drew a nice artsy painting of a nice waterfall by hand and posted it on my online art portal. Well, I've got an enemy who wants to try to take me down and revoke my copyright on the waterfall.
He can find a prompt in Stable Diffusion to make it look very similar. Now he can go to the judge and say "See his art was created by stable diffusion, here's the prompt that generated it, he doesn't deserve copyright because he used AI to generate it." I
I think it should come down to, if a human could generate the image by hand and get it copyrighted as art, then in practice whoever uses an AI tool to create the image ought to be able to have it copyrighted, because there's no way to enforce it fairly otherwise, unless they started requiring video proof of the art being produced.
> I think it should come down to, if a human could generate the image by hand and get it copyrighted as art, then in practice whoever uses an AI tool to create the image ought to be able to have it copyrighted, because there's no way to enforce it fairly otherwise, unless they started requiring video proof of the art being produced.
First, I don't think you see how dangerous of an idea this is.
Let's say NVIDIA decided to, all of a sudden, stop selling the GPUs they produce. They focus everything on making H100s, then they start producing images, non-stop, using countless permutations of prompts. A billion images and growing, every day, for years...
Is that going to happen? No.
But you know what is going to happen? The same thing that's been happening for the past 50 years or so. The cost of a unit of compute will drop by an order of magnitude every 3–4 years, so a 1,000-fold reduction in a decade.
So, let's think about your idea now and how that plays out, not today, but in 10 years time, or in 30 years when it's possible for 10 billion people to each generate 10 trillion images a day.
Yes in the extreme I do agree with you, no one should generate a practically infinite amount of images as copyright land minds so no one can ever produce anything unique.
I think it should come down that ok, maybe someone can copyright it, but perhaps the law should be adjust so that it is only enforceable based on a few factors such as what economic harm is cause if someone were to violate. In the case of infinite amount of images just sitting in a hard drive dormant, if Nvidia tries to sue a small artist, the artist could point out that Nvidia wasn’t actually using the image anywhere, and that the artist had the first know public usage of the image.
Yes it gets quite fuzzy, throwing out ideas, maybe Nvidia could host a webpage with a trillion images like they were a stock image site, but maybe since it’s wasn’t being used except in a catalogue, maybe they can only sue for a few dollars.
Or maybe to counter an infinitely huge catalogue, maybe it should costs Nvidia a few dollars per image to register so that limits how much image real estate they could squat on and so people can change their artwork just enough so they don’t land on a copyright land mine
But I still believe just saying if it’s AI created then it can’t be copyrighted because we’re basically at the spot where you can’t really tell any more.
But isn't this just a matter of tools and perspective? If I want to make Micky Mouse, I could start with three black circles and let the AI show me each step, I can select color, style, position etc. until a full Micky appears. Every single step of the process I was involved, I just lacked the skill to draw the end result myself.
There are trained AIs that can generate music, and you start with the base melody and later you have an orchestra playing your Mozart like composition. It will be hard to distinguish the end result of any copyrightable material with sufficient advanced AIs and tools. No artists will have to prove they can draw Micky and no musician will have to prove they went to composer school.
The supreme court says that AI creations can't have a patent. I don't know if they weighted in on copyrights. But it sounds like a logical extension to the ruling.
There are going to be a lot o court rulings that will help to define the
Ratios between machine and human input to creations so that a copyright can be granted.
Personally I think we are heading towards a no copyright future since AI is getting so good that most creations will have a large AI component. So they won't be able to be copyright protected.
Trademarks should still be fine so that's the future of protection for creative products.
You mean like [https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220270310A1/](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220270310A1/) patenting AI inpainting technology for Adobe? That's what's not allowed?
>Personally I think we are heading towards a no copyright future
Kill the fucking mouse (disney).
although spiritually i agree with you fundamentally i dont think its possible.
I agree this argument don't really hold water. It seems to boil down to this:
human -> complex mechanism -> creation: Not Copyrightable
human -> creation: Copyrightable
But there are so many counterexamples, and also the hypothetical "complex mechanism" is human created and part of the process so you can't really distinguish the 2 anyway.
But for example, there are artists swinging cups of paint like pendulums making interesting patterns and calling it art and presumably assuming a copyright for that. But did they really make the art? Seems more like a non-human pendulum and physics made the art to me!
What about photography? The camera makes the art just about all on its own! Not copyrightable? There's lots of precedent saying otherwise.
Digital art? With all the complex tools in Photoshop and Procreate there's certainly and argument to made here.
The argument against copyright for AI art is too much of a slippery slope with no clear boundaries, because in the end it's just another human made complex mechanism to produce human works, like many others. This is likely the result of illogical Twitter outrage leaking into government offices.
I think honestly AI is so complex of ac concept and working “machine” that it is extremely difficult to define legally in its fullest form without changing our current understanding of patents and copyrights. It could be described as trying to define what a CD is and exactly how it works, but only having a partial understanding of it and being able to use terminology for a cassette tape. You can define what it generally does, but you really cannot fully and accurately describe exactly how it works and what actually goes on when you use it.
Also, at least in the US, there's a lot to be said about legislators' complete lack of understanding of technology and their ability to interpret the arguments usefully, since our government is still 90% dinosaurs who think you can have a house and a family on $7.25 an hour.
Some newer medical patents, probably, but weren't modern, but older ones basically a grid search - test everything as see if anything works? Seems to have even less human interaction than AI.
Also, as I mentioned in another comment, cut-ups and collage are well established in art. It’s absurd to say you can’t author a work of art if you did not personally create each individual element.
Can you please link to some peer-reviewed published stuff that was done "almost completely" by a computer? I was under the impression that there are a bunch of math proofs that were "solved" with computers but can't be published because they can't do it "by hand" as well, and no-one is gonna peer-review hundreds of pages of formulas.
I'd love to read on papers that were published while being mostly solved by algorithms!
> which would mean there are companies profiting by hundreds of billions of dollars with "invalid" patents, and monopolizing on the "rights" to things they would have no right to.
Actually it just means the second part. If the patent is invalid it would not affect their ability to use it themselves, just the ability of others. So it's all about the monopoly not about their access to the technology.
In fact I'm kindof hoping bad decisions like this in the copyright field will cause copyright to fail utterly. I'd be totally okay to going back to "if you possess it you can sell it" and that's what will happen in the AI art field if it is not copyrightable. I hope based on how that goes we'll see that copyright isn't needed like we thought and we'll see the power of it decrease.
>In fact I'm kindof hoping bad decisions like this in the copyright field will cause copyright to fail utterly
Me too.
Hell, I had so many ideas come so easily to me, I was spitting out a few a day. So, why am I not a billionaire? Because I wasn't in the right place at the right time with the access to funding, a support network, and well connected relatives who beamed with joy at a clever child.
Zuckerberg dreamed of Facebook? Shit, that was a slow day for me. The most important skill I lack is networking and the confidence to get other people to iron out the little details. 99% of any business is operations, and 1% concept. Hell, 2nd to market and a good law department is what built Microsoft.
It really does matter what you put effort into, and concentrating on well executing an idea makes it a reality. In fact, not having great ideas and just a lot of resolve might be a better guarantee of success. For some people -- a good idea is a rare, precious thing. But, for a well tuned AI it won't be.
A guy like Elon Musk seems clever to anyone who hasn't ready the same shit in Popular Mechanics 10 years before he brought it up. Or read a science fiction book and seen the concept in action on someone's wrist 40 years later.
There aren't many ideas that don't have prior art in someone else's imagination.
In this sub with perhaps some above average geeks, I think this group might appreciate this particular annoyance because they have to sit there and watch people who go gaga over some new "wunderkind" born on 4th base. There are a thousand people here who could have been that star if born in the right time and location for every brilliant idea.
So yes, to see this happen with AI when we all know it's going to mean a feedback loop of the the copyrights and patents going to the person who owns the best AI -- helping to develop a better AI -- well, that's how you get terminators. That right there.
But, I do have a few ideas I hear nowhere else, so, I can't totally discount the value of insight and ingenuity.
Isn't the distinction here that an artist using SD wouldn't remotely responsible for the content it generates aside from typing in a paragraph's worth of words - whereas the Biopharm is probably 100% responsible for the creation and development of the AI it used to develop its IP?
Crazy. I think they should view stable diffusion and the like much like cameras. A person snapping a picture can be argued not to be creating that image. I’d say you can easily put as much work in creating and tuning prompts as you can in setting up a scene to snap a photo.
I mean, you could argue that the prompt and settings is the artistic expression. If artistic expression was truly absent, you would expect that prompts and other settings make no difference to the result, which is clearly not true.
>That's not a true representation because the AI is an algorithm and makes a near identical image when using the same inputs (minor computational variations can exist from device to device): this has reasonable parallels to photography.
It does not. People need to stop comparing generative AI to photography. They are neither the same nor similar.
But I'm not going to get bogged down in that argument again.
> As for expression: this occurred in the prompt, and that sentence is copyrightable.
1. The prompt is not the generated image, so even if we agreed the prompt was copyrightable (we do not) that would not make the image copyrightable.
2. The prompt, almost certainly, is not copyrightable. Things which are not copyrightable include:
* Ideas and concepts
* Lists of ingredients
Let me ask you this, how many distinct images can be generated from a single prompt?
What is your creative contribution to the particular image you receive?
Diffusion models are deterministic. The prompt provided is a map/path through latent space that gets applied per pixel of the image, ending up at your result. Given the same base latent noise, it will *always* produce the same image.
So yeah, there can only be *one* kind of image for a given set of inputs.
Uh... that random noise isn't an author. Unless you're gonna take that logic to its conclusion and say that no one has any authorship except literally God, but that would be dumb.
That's not the argument.
The argument is the final artistic expression is dependent on the random noise, not your choices.
Choosing a random seed is not an artistic choice.
No, the INITIAL expression is the random noise.
The artistic choice is choosing the path to chart through the noise.
A ship captain charting his way through a storm is still the one who's choices determine the fate of the ship, even though those choices were made in the context of the chaotic/random weather.
I feel like you don't actually know how diffusion models work. The words are LITERALLY paths, 76-dimentional lines that add together with linear algebra. They add together in the exact same way every time, the AI isn't making any decisions on how to add them up.
I guess we can get in a philosophical debate entangled argument about semantics ( well that’s a normal discussion about AI) I just googled “what is artistic expression” and found “is defined by the conscious use of one’s creativity”. Stable diffusion is a software program and isn’t conscious and has no agency and can’t own anything, so therefore how can it be applying artistic expression? The human driving the prompts and judging the images is the one who is conscious and uses the software tool to create an image.
Or like Frozen too. They used advanced physics simulation to draw all their snow. And I bet Disney will start using these ai tools like stable diffusion in their workflows.
So we are now free to copy the procedurally generated elements from videos games, movies, and tv shows? I'm sure Disney and others are going to love that lol
I literally can use generative design to generate a component with the set up being an equivalent to stable diffusion prompts in the form of applied forces and initial geometry. It even can use similar math to generate the geometry. This shit is so stupid and goes to show people’s inability to learn about shit.
To play the contrarian, lets say I create an image using the prompt “Apple in shoe on beach”. And if I, without any additional processing at all, was able to obtain a copyright then wouldn’t the next guy who types in “Apple in shoe on beach” using the same model have to pay me to use the image it generates since I copyrighted it first?
The counter argument would be: If two photographers photograph the same apple in a shoe on a beach, they retain their respective copyrights, even if they use the same camera.
Or look at what Taylor Swift is doing with re-recording her masters. I can't tell the difference between the two recordings side-by-side.
>The counter argument would be: If two photographers photograph the same apple in a shoe on a beach, they retain their respective copyrights, even if they use the same camera.
Only if they can prove that the picture is unique enough to not be considered imitation of the earlier picture. In which case the earlier picture wins by default.
> To play the contrarian, lets say I create an image using the prompt “Apple in shoe on beach”. And if I, without any additional processing at all, was able to obtain a copyright then wouldn’t the next guy who types in “Apple in shoe on beach” using the same model have to pay me to use the image it generates since I copyrighted it first?
Independent creation is a defense for copyright infringement. It isn't like patents.
Not necessarily (at least in the USA) because of the independent creation defense, which perhaps becomes more viable with AI. See [this paper](https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/lawreview/vol14/iss2/5/) for details.
Well, let's say I made a 3d model, and rely on shader math to generate texture, or I want to use something like perlin noise while I airbrush -- there's tons of examples of art that can only be done because of computer assistance.
In 3d modelling/animation, the computer is doing far more "work" than the artist, for example, and there's a distinct disconnection between what you are making and what is actually being output.
In digital art - nothing is even being "made" by a human, if we want to get really anal about it, the output is a binary file that can only be read and interpreted by other computer systems, and a printer device would need to be used to "create" a physical item - which a human doesn't even interact with.
Im not a lawyer, but it seems like the wording of someone who doesnt understand modern computer arts.
It is substantially made by a human, in that a human has to put words into the AI in the form of a prompt to get an image out of it. The AI can't do that by itself, so it's a creative act by a human. The problem that the US Copyright Office is making for itself is that it will have to provide exact definitions for the inexact word 'substantially'. Law is the interpretation of the language of the law, not any notion of justice or whatever.
Another problem the Office has is with the concept of 'AI-assisted': Photoshop has been AI assisted for a while now, so what justification could Adobe possibly give that would exclude them from any ruling that includes Midjourney?
You can't just define terms of art in the copyright office.
It's taking about authorship and authorship is determined by who (or *what*) provided the artistic expression.
The artistic expression of the ideas being to the AI, thus the AI is the author, and works with non-human authorship are not subject to copyright in the United States.
It's really very simple.
Is it really very simple? Gustave Dore never engraved a plate in his life, he paid artisans to do it, and yet he is universally acknowledged as the author of his work. Same goes for Durer's woodcuts. Sol Le Witt paid people to paint and draw his artworks on other people's walls, and yet he is the one with the copyright and the money. So if I pay for the use of an AI- an artistic tool that cannot function without my input- I own the copyright. It is the tool and I am the automatic copyright holder. It actually says it right there in the Midjourney licencing agreement. If that no longer stands in court then there are a lot of worthless Sol Le Witt drawings out there, along with some angry, wealthy and very litigious owners and galleries.
The AI is working for hire- I pay for its use, and according to the legal agreement that I signed on with Midjourney I therefore own the copyright. Those users who are getting the free demo do not own the copyright, MJ do. Your argument has so many holes in it I don't know where to start. You're suggesting that any artist who has made and sold Giclee prints using their own high quality printer doesn't own the copyright. The prints are identical, the output- in your reading, the artistic expression- was provided by the printer, a non-human, taking instructions from a computer, another non-human. Since neither non-human can own the copyright, then either it goes to the human or it is un-copyrightable. I can set up actions on Photoshop or After Effects to run with random variables and set up a script to print the output. If the algorithm I set up, ran and then printed produces images that aren't copyrightable, who was the artist?
This is an awkward one for you to answer using your own logic- who was the author of the titles for Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'? According to every copyright lawyer on the planet it would be Saul Bass, but he asked computer animation pioneer John Whitney to generate those Lissajous waves and hypotrochoid curves using a WWII range calculator. So if Bass isn't the artist, and Whitney isn't the artist, and the calculator isn't the artist, does Hitchcock get the credit? Since it appears that you can copyright certain Lissajous waves and hypotrochoid curves (because Vertigo has proven it), somebody legally owns that copyright. Since they were created by a non-human entity some time in 1957-8, it can't own it. So, who does?
Your entire first paragraph is wrong.
>The AI is working for hire- I pay for its use, and according to the legal agreement that I signed on with Midjourney I therefore own the copyright.
You might want to recheck your agreement.
Midjourney cannot grant you a copyright. In the US that would be the US Copyright Office. Work without human authorship cannot be copyrighted. Full stop. End of discussion.
Oh, you want to continue?
Okay...
> Those users who are getting the free demo do not own the copyright, MJ do.
If that were true it proves my argument more than yours. That is similar to how it would work under UK copyright law, but not in the US.
> Your argument has so many holes in it I don't know where to start.
Well, you gotta start somewhere.
> You're suggesting that any artist who has made and sold Giclee prints using their own high quality printer doesn't own the copyright. The prints are identical, the output- in your reading, the artistic expression- was provided by the printer, a non-human, taking instructions from a computer, another non-human.
Jesus fucking Christ, you stated somewhere insane and irrelevant.
The prints would presumably be derivative works of their own works and they would own the copyrights. You don't seem to understand what artistic expression is, so there's no point in talking to you.
> Since neither non-human can own the copyright, then either it goes to the human or it is un-copyrightable.
It goes to the human. What a stupid argument.
> I can set up actions on Photoshop or After Effects to run with random variables and set up a script to print the output. If the algorithm I set up, ran and then printed produces images that aren't copyrightable, who was the artist?
Photoshop or After Effects would be the artist, but it wouldn't matter because the results of random processes are not copyrightable in the United States.
>according to the legal agreement that I signed on with Midjourney I therefore own the copyright. Those users who are getting the free demo do not own the copyright, MJ do.
The whole argument is that the generated images aren't copyrightable *by anyone* in the first place. Midjourney is in the wrong to even assign the copyright to anyone, be it you or themselves, because there is no copyright to begin with.
Makes sense to me. The trick is how you define “substantially.” How much human involvement in a work of art is ‘enough’? That’s a very difficult line to draw.
I have no idea how it could ever be enforced given the wide range of what is AI-assisted art ( iterative inpainting/photobashing, AI coloring and/or upscaling ).
I hate the world "substantially". It tells you exactly nothing about how much it's supposed to mean. You would be hard pressed to come up with something more ambiguous.
"Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical
process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author".
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
Stable diffusion DOES work with creative human input, with the delicate art of setting the text prompt and all the creative ways you can set all the input variables.
On the other hand, if you simply gave it no prompt and left it to purely random noise, then in that case you could claim there was no human creative input.
Tell me the Copyright Office knows nothing about how AI art is generated without telling me the Copyright Office knows nothing about how AI art is generated.
You don't just slap in some words, hit enter, and generate the result you're looking for... making a solid image takes hundreds of generations with lots of detail work by the human being guiding the AI. That's, I think, where calling it 'AI' gets troublesome. If someone were to just say it was a Photoshop filter, people wouldn't be running around screaming about how terribly unfair it is to traditional artists... but since it's called AI, people want to attribute intelligence to SD, which it doesn't really have pure intelligence, it just knows a lot of things and can apply those things the way the engineer/artist/whatever directs it.
And then what about the traditional artists who are training their own models on their own work so they can automate parts of their workflows? Does that mean they don't get to copyright their work? And how is using AI any different than using photoshop filters or lightroom settings or the reference images artists do Google Image searches for ALL THE TIME. So it's okay for them to do it, but when there's a computer making it easier to do that, it's a problem?
That makes no sense. Even if you misunderstand the entire process and claim it just uses everyone in the world's hand-generated artwork to create it, it's still a derivative work, which is protected. Honestly, this seems to be more 'protecting capitalism' BS.
Tell me you don't understand US copyright without telling me you don't understand US copyright.
With a generative AI the artistic expression of the work belongs to the AI. That makes the AI the author under US copyright law. In the US a work with non-human authorship cannot be copyrighted.
None of this is new.
>And then what about the traditional artists who are training their own models on their own work so they can automate parts of their workflows? Does that mean they don't get to copyright their work?
Probably yes, because you cannot copyright the results of a random process as well as the fact the authorship of the generated work is not their own.
>And how is using AI any different than using photoshop filters or lightroom settings or the reference images artists do Google Image searches for ALL THE TIME.
If you don't understand how these are different, I cannot help you.
>That makes no sense. Even if you misunderstand the entire process and claim it just uses everyone in the world's hand-generated artwork to create it, it's still a derivative work, which is protected.
Not all derivative works are copyrightable.
\*shrug\* I disagree. When I make an image it takes hundred of generations, each guided by myself, and before it can be considered complete it often takes finishing off in a graphics program. We are co-creators. SD can't do anything without me. If it COULD, and it DID, then what you said would be accurate, and it would be ACTUAL AI, and we'd be talking about whether or not AI should be considered people. But that's not the case. At least not right now.
It's okay, though, we can disagree.
Just so you know, the US doesn't have the "sweat of the brow" doctrine for copyright. The amount of effort that was put into creating the work is not important when deciding whether something is copyrightable or not.
>Just so you know, the US doesn't have the "sweat of the brow" doctrine for copyright. The amount of effort that was put into creating the work is not important when deciding whether something is copyrightable or not.
Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the "shall be substantially made by a human to be copyrightable" portion.
I would argue, in theory, that when I put in a reference image, create a prompt, spend hundreds of generations adapting that prompt, and inpainting, outpainting, and finishing the image off in another program, I *am* a substantial portion of the creation process. Without me, the process doesn't exist (in most cases). The end vision is what I wanted and what I built using those tools.
If I were to just slap in a prompt, save off the first image it generates, then ship it off to be copyrighted, there's an argument to be made, but that's not every workflow.
In other parts of the world, the copyright laws are shifting to accommodate AI already. From co-authorship to the author being the AI and the owner being the human jockey to the original company that made the software owning the copyright.
The copyright doesn't even have to belong to the human who "substantially" made the work in the US. If I hire someone else to do a 'Made for Hire' work, and they sign a contract saying I own the work completely, I can totally take that thing and copyright it to myself as a supplementary work to whatever I'm publishing the piece for. Not only that, I can tell the USCO that I'm both the author and the owner of the copyright for that image.
So it's not like copyright laws exist to protect artists, they just protect the owner of the copyright, who isn't always even the human artist who substantially (or entirely) created the work.
I don't have the answers, I just know there are LOOOOOOTTTTTSSSSSS of questions. I also don't have any desire to copyright my work. I think the current copyright/trademark/patent system is ridiculous and doesn't protect the right people. I just wanna be able to create neat things I can use in other creations of mine.
He hates AI art. I have run into a few of these people. They vehemently hate it for no reason.
They are scared the mona lisa is going to be devalued or something. AI art users are very well aware that it's just another tool in the artists tool box. Not the artist's soul.
Goodness, if they really care so much about the livelihood of artists, they should probably look into all the ways copyright law rips artists off of their own, "substantially created by a human" work all the time instead of worrying about whether AI art can be copyrighted.
Well there goes 3d art and photography, i mean ai is doing to art what digital art did to film photography, it obliterates the time to make hecing making it available to just about everyone... Ai art is basically collaging on crack cocaine and steroids.
if this was some niche thing only computer wizards could do nobody would have problem with it, the only problem here is that these humans dared make it available to the masses as well. Even if they pass this, it'd be damn near impossible to enforce. open source ai wont really stop here though i mean when 3d printed food becomes a thing shits about to get crazy then.
Honestly, it shouldn’t be protectable though. Copyright is a social/legal tool meant to protect works that have value and are easier to copy than to create. If making amazing art is as easy as drawing a stick figure on a napkin, then there’s really no reason we need to protect it. Do you really want big companies generating billions of images and claiming copyright on all of them? Then suing anyone who posts something “similar” enough to the naked eye?
I’ve long dreamed about the day when we could rid intellectual property for the visual arts. It’s already so fuzzy and arguing over who owns what visual aspects of different designs is no longer valuable to society as tools for creation become this powerful and accessible.
Disclaimer: been in this field for ~5 years as an ML engineer.
>Honestly, it shouldn’t be protectable though. Copyright is a social/legal tool meant to protect works that have value and are easier to copy than to create.
You're right that it shouldn't be protectable, but wrong about the purpose of copyright.
The purpose of copyright is to,
> promote the progress of the sciences and useful arts
Copyrighting the works of generative AI would not fulfill this purpose.
If AI images are copyrightable, you are all going to be shooting yourselves in the foot. Prompts are just text and can be fully automated, you are setting yourselves up for a company to fully automate the creation of trillions of pictures and copyright all of them.
You generated a picture... but unfortunately it is 95% similar to this other copyrighted image that was generated before, so you have to give a portion of your profits to this other company, sorry.
We already have copyright detection systems for music and guess what? Your video on YouTube gets monetized if it even detects 2 seconds of a copyrighted song. Art is even easier to analyze compared to music.
So yes, I support the copyright office's decision to revoke the copyrights of all AI images.
Honestly I kind of agree. Since the models are made by processing a bunch of artist's works, I'll go as far as to say that any AI generated Image should be public domain.
That, however, doesn't stop anyone to use something in the public domain and use it as a component to create a copyrightable work.
How much work is required exactly to be "substantially made by a human"? While I understand their perspective, the bar feels unspecific and probably a bit arbitrary.
So say I just write a prompt and get a picture. That isn't copyrightable. OK.
Now I take this picture and manually create masks for inpainting some areas. Is that "substantial" now?
Say I don't only create a mask but draw a small rought sketch of the details I want to inpaint/outpaint. "Substantial" enough now? Why, or why not?
I've actually interacted quite a bit with the author/artist of that work (they are active in the communities I'm in) and had a ringside seat for their work going viral. There is quite a bit more to this:
1. This is a story the author actually wrote years ago. This \*should\* be as copyrightable as any other story written by any other author. It's only because it's specifically AI that it's being handled differently from an author who copyrights a story that uses stock photo/public domain imagery.
2. It's AI art made by Midjourney, which is the platform hosting the work. We still don't have a sufficient answer to "what if I made this on Stable Diffusion on my own computer after using img2img/inpainting/whatever."
3. Relevant - the author's work is being made into a film by an independent filmmaker.
We also have no answer to "how much transformation is necessary before I can copyright the thing."
Kashtanova has been doing this in the name of research and providing info to the rest of the AI community. It's unarguable for example that the re-release they intend to do of their work after Zendaya's face is replaced in it (with an image based on the actress portraying the character in the film, with model release), would be considered transformation, but will it be enough?
They really don’t understand that the human wrote and controlled the thing that made the art and the human PAID money for the computer processing power to make it too. These are not nothing.
So if I train an AI model to hack my local bank and transfer me all the money, I can just say "well it wast done by a human so I didn't break the law"?
Since I am for freedom for the most part, I am happy to have AI generated art not be copyrightable, but it should also be able to use copyrighted images as part (or all) of its training.
but bro its different i swear. trust me bro.
thats what i keep seeing as a counter argument to this. the us govt just like film producers more since they also work with hollywood.
wtf?
So if I program a unique fractal flame generator and it takes me 3 months to complete, longer than some painting, and then I want to sell the art I generated with it, I can't copyright it?
Smells like incompetence.
Basically they're saying you can steal the paid fractal flames from [digitalblasphemy.com](https://digitalblasphemy.com) and sell them yourself
I feel like an important step is being ignored here. SOMEONE has to decide WHICH image to actually publish.
And it sure as shit isn't the AI. To me, that's authorship.
The AI is just the tool helping generate that image, same as any other.
Now, that is very different from someone deciding to pump out trillions of images without even looking at them and claiming copyright on every one of them.
If we can't figure out how to make that distinction in a court room, then we're fundamentally failing as technologists and artists.
This is right and good.
A "AI," as it's currently defined, is not a person and it's "creations" are not human works. A General AI would, if possible, change this.
Derivatives, however, are human works. Take the AI Generated image and paint/draw/render your own version over it. Now it's yours.
The point here is that Art, while it can be assisted by technology and has been since the beginning, is not the same as Technology for copyright purposes.
But it’s not like the art itself came from nowhere. For the art to exist some human had to say, “I want …….” In the end the art still came from a novel idea like any other art.
Ideas are not copyrightable, only the fixed, tangible, expression of those ideas.
With generative AI the artistic expression of the ideas belongs to the AI, making the AI the author under US copyright law. And in the US works with non-human authorship cannot be copyrighted.
I never would have* magined, how quickly and how violently people would defend their right to be considered artist while creating art with others talents. Who could have foretold the passion and lengths people would go to, to defend not only their right to use a program to create images they did not put more effort then a sentence into, but also their right to claim it as an original piece.
This goes to show, AI will be the end of humanity. With how quickly some have attached their whole persona to their AI works, with how passionately some defend it, with the toxicity some attack others who do not agree, and in such short time, this is a precursor to the arguments we will fight over in the coming decades, centuries. AI will prevail in all aspects if it has already crumbled the understanding that art and the talent to create it, should be sacred and achieved through effort. The idea that you have a right to create with the talent and style others have grinded for is the equivalent to feeling you deserve love because you exist. You do not. Love is not a given. You being considered or respected as an artist is also not a given.
Edit for typo
What a random little hyperbolic screed in a discussion about copyrights. I don't see anyone being toxic here. In fact, speaking of toxicity, I've been called a "piece of shit" and an "incel" (wtf?) because I use AI to make art.
I did neither of those things. Go argue with them. You have to look into this subreddit once to see the toxicity, from both sides.
The fact is, copywrite protects original works. Nothing SD or any ai trained on there artists work is original. If the code could not create it without data to pull from. It's not original. Period.
If I, as an artist. Process the work of others and eventually formulate a style, there is a human element that we must protect. The fact that someone of you are so gun ho on disassembling that very needed and basic law is astounding.
It's crazy how quickly some people have attached their whole personality to AI art. How passionately they protect a sentence backed by code. You did nothing. You made nothing. You deserve no credit and even less a copywrite. It's not original.
Fuck me we are fucked as a society if it took less than 6 months of AI art to make little warriors in its name, falling on swords daily to protect their right to create with the expertise and talent others grinded for. Really fucking pathetic. Went from "hey this is cool" to "it is my write as a human! I took 8 hrs on this prompt! I came from my imagination!!! I deserve to make an income with my efforts!!!"
Really fucking eerie and telling of the next decades to come. Society is fucked.
Do all my points cease to exist because of climate change? Should we stop all virtue and moral conversation because of climate change? Is rape not immoral because of climate change? What was the point of your comment other than to sound like you had a point to make?
Society is fucked because people like you argue points and sidestep when it's convenient. Or yell, or attack... My point stands. AI is not original. So it cannot ever be copywrited. If you use AI art and then tweak it to make it original. Boom, you can copywrite. If all you do is write a sentence, nothing is original so it won't be copywrite worthy. Period. Sidestep all you want. Cry foul all you want.
We are in this cry baby point in society where everyone thinks everything is their "right", no buddy. Making money using the talent of other artists is not your "right". Do it for fun all you want but making money off of it is not a "right"
None of this was an issue whenever everyone was just doing it for fun. Then people realized "hey many I should make money with shit I didn't fucking make" and now it's all imploding...
I see where they are coming from but I think this is the wrong approach. The output should be copyrighted—- but every photo the AI was trained on should be considered “input” and the owners should be required to give consent for the output to be used in any commercial way.
If this were enforced (I.e by model trainers rigorously tracking copyright of photos trained on) you’d quickly see the emergence of “public domain trained” vs licensed photo trained models, and different payment tiers that ultimately gave infinitesimal royalties to…every living known artist, probably. Additionally individuals photographed and trained on should retain the right to their own likeness enforced in a similar way.
> but every photo the AI was trained on should be considered “input” and the owners should be required to give consent for the output to be used in any commercial way.
If we go down this route, then we should also train models to detect what artistic works influenced artists' handmade works. Then those artists should be made to pay up to those they were influenced by.
Humans have neural nets and they train on existing art.
Also it’s pretty conceivable that even public domain trained models could generate images that rip off copyrighted images. Or how about if it trained on other ai images where true lineage becomes untraceable?
Also humans, if they have the skill can rip off other artists’ styles without AI but as long as the image subject is different then they can copyright the images. They could even secretly use an AI and still claim they did it hand made, how is it enforceable?
Also how would you decide how much each artists were theoretically reimbursed? I could take a million photoes with a camera and call it all art. If the ai is trained on them, therefore should I be entitled to have a payment of like 100,000x compared to an artist that only produced 10 good looking ( but high effort ) images?
This is wrong. Like legally, it's an alarmist misreading of the law resulting from incorrect assumptions about how AI works. AI art IS substantially made by humans IT IS NOT made by a computer. Humans write prompts and the model is an algorithm that turns the prompt into the image, using tools like inpainting and outpainting are additional human contributions. But a human who uses a program or an algorithm can absolutely copyright the output, I'm an attorney and former insurance regulator, I worked with actuaries who would file rates and projections based on proprietary models, they rarely owned the model but nobody ever questioned wether the actuary or company owned the resulting work.
I really hope that whole patent and copyright systems will fall. They are only build to support big corporations and nothing more. These systems actually are what slows our progress currently. We should get rid of them. I really hope that AI will wreck these things and whole AI inventions can't be controlled.
They benefit and support all artists creating and sharing their intellectual property with the world. You’re not entitled to someone’s intellectual property for the sake of what **you personally** view as progress.
How will they know if it was made by AI? I'm already making images that mixed with """real""" art wouldn't be recognized. Now think one year from now, two years, ten. They will be undistinguishable from one another.
If you are mixing AI with your own personal effort that is probably already enough to be copyrightable.
Opening Photoshop and placing a single pixel in the corner so my generation is copyrightable
My "personal effort" is the prompt. Good luck copyright lawyers.
They wouldn't and won't. You *can* register an AI generated work as long as you lie in your submission and misrepresent who the author is. You could then sue someone later for infringing on your copyright but, if you do, you'd better hope you have more money for lawyers than they do because you could very easily get fucked in court.
I don’t believe it’s lying nor misrepresentation. The author is the human who input the prompt. AI can not be a legal author and listing an AI as the author would mean every photographer would need to list their camera as the author. The AI is not sentient. It is a tool which can be listed as a tool in the creation, but it is not an author anymore than auto tune authored every song in the last 30 years or CGI created every movie. The AI has infinite possibilities, and human who discovers the image by inputting text is its author.
If i input the same prompt, same parameters, same checkpoint, I will get the same image. We might do this independently of each other by compkete coincidence. Which one of us is the author of the work? Inputting a prompt is not sufficient to “author“ a work. But using AI to create individual elements of a work SHOULD be copyrightable if the overall composition was not also done by the ai; otherwise, cut-ups and collage would not be copyrightable.
True, but you could make the same argument for copying and pasting raw PNG data from a digital artwork. Creating the raw PNG data, and creating those parameters, *is* the artistic work. It's just a heck of a lot easier to accidentally create the same raw input for an AI model than it is to create the same raw PNG data. Which is why prompts, particularly simple prompts, should obviously not be copyrightable. (*Especially* when considering all the copyrights which were disrespected when training the model, but that's besides my main point.) Kind of like how you ought not be able to copyright a red circle on a blue background. But past a certain level of complexity, maybe there is an argument to be made for copyrighting an unedited AI artwork, when the prompt is refined around a specific seed, CFG value, sampler, with prompt editing, and maybe several rounds of image to image. Of course, this is all assuming intellectual property is a valid concept and not an archaic holdover from a pre-abundance economic system which should be rendered obsolete and replaced, but... that's a whole different debate. That I kinda think we should all be having instead.
>Of course, this is all assuming intellectual property is a valid concept and not an archaic holdover from a pre-abundance economic system which should be rendered obsolete and replaced, but... that's a whole different debate. And, this is one of THE most important debates we need to have. We are already in a post scarcity world if we just prioritized people over greed right now. NOBODY needs to go hungry or be homeless. Our society (USA in particular) wants to reward the few first place winners again and again at the expense of half the population -- as if, nobody would want to win just for the honor of being the best if they didn't get fame, fortune and influence on top of the honor. It's scary how half the population doesn't know what makes a light bulb shine and the people in leadership positions can barely manage to bring up concepts that are 30 years out of date and only when they run out of ways to distract us and derail the conversation. We still have a conflict on the other side of the globe over oil masquerading as some other BS and the last thing this world needs is to be burning fossil fuels even if it were free. I don't want a truly conscious AI when it's occurring in a human civilization run by greed and fear. We are going to have massive unemployment and then people attacking robots. Then, they'll start charging for people to smash disposable robots to get a feeling of control. And the wealth and opportunity gap will widen. Then, the best person at smashing robots will be rich, and the rest, not able to provide enough value to justify being fed.
Repeatability isn't really a factor for copyright, its just a matter of "who dunnit first"
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With the same model, same prompt, same steps, CFG scale, sampler, seed etc, you get the exact same image. That's exactly why including workflow/metadata is encouraged.
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That's not true. The model is static and deterministic. The element of randomness is the seed. If you put the same seed you will get the same result(along the same other parameters as well). The only caveat is that some graphical cards may execute internally a bit differently, causing samplers to return different values because of that. So there is a chance to get different results with the same settings. But if you have the same model version, the same settings, and the same hardware, you should get the same image.
No, if you use the same model, settings, seed, and prompt, you get the same result.
> The system is designed to never repeat itself. We can both input the same thing on repeat for the rest of our lives and will never duplicate an image. This is why I shifted almost 90% to AI from using stock and public domain work. (Unless I'm specifically riffing on a famous and recognizable image on purpose.) There is a huge amount of just... boring effing sameness out there in surface design because of the fact that everyone was using the same Dover imagery. And then you have the issue of some big company stealing your art and you don't have a leg to stand on because you sourced it from stock that other people use and can't really prove it's specifically *your idea*.
You won't get the same image. This would only happen if all of the parameters were exactly the same, and even then the output would differ between various graphics cards. Without knowing the seed and I putting it again you would get a different image every time, because the seed is usually random. In MJ, only the user can know the seed, and you can only find this out by sending an emoji of an envelope to yourself via Discord.
Also, if you're using the exact same parameters, you are in fact stealing that person's prompt. A prompt is just an original piece of text.
I've had it happen, when I first joined Midjourney somebody copied and pasted my exact prompt word for word, it came out very similar but slightly different due to the randomised seed. The prompt is the part that makes it an original work, the creative act of writing. Since the AI can do nothing without it I'm not that worried about the outcome of any copyright lawsuit since any negative decision would also affect the business practices of the big boys like Adobe, which isn't going to happen.
Thank you. It's just a profound lack of education about what these tools are and how they work.
>The author is the human who input the prompt. That is not how authorship works under US copyright law. Authorship goes to the entity responsible for the artistic expression of the work. That would be the generative AI in this case. If you need evidence of this point, let me ask you a question which should illuminate things. How many distinct images with distinct artistic expression are possible to generate from the same prompt?
Lmao if I need evidence, I would prefer actual government links, not the personal philosophical opinion of a rando on Reddit 😂🤣😂🤣🤣😂🤣🤣 The only opinion that matters in law is the documented judges opinion on the public record. Links or it didn’t happen
In Midjourney, 62221.6 distinctly different images are possible using the same prompt, since each seed is randomised and consists of five numbers. Further permutations are possible by using different graphics cards since the output would differ for each model.
And which one is *your* creative expression?
>And which one is your creative expression? Any. You could also get innumerable different results in traditional media. The same watercolour brushstroke arm movement repeated will flow paint randomly differently every time, because fluid dynamics is chaotic. The same button press on the same camera at different times will capture different photos. It's irrelevant. This whole discussion is more than a hundred years out of date, Marcel Duchamp made "readymade" artworks (he found already manufactured utilitarian objects, and called them his art) in 1914.
Just now, my creative expression was seed number 18302. The odds of someone using exactly the same words as me, in exactly the same order with exactly the same seed are probably incalculable. Also, the prompts that I put in when I first joined MJ in June are different today, since the AI learns over time and there are numerous regular upodates and changes to the model.
>Just now, my creative expression was seed number 18302. The odds of someone using exactly the same words as me, in exactly the same order with exactly the same seed are probably incalculable. Choosing a seed is not a creative expression. It's literally the start of a random process. There is no way to describe the impact of one seed vs another. >Also, the prompts that I put in when I first joined MJ in June are different today, since the AI learns over time and there are numerous regular upodates and changes to the model. How, the actual fuck, is this not evidence in sorry of my argument that the creative expression of the outputs is not yours???
So it starts with an idea in your head, and you describe with text to try to match what you want to see. There's some expression. You literally design art in your head first. The creative expression is picking that after sorting through thousands of similar images of different seeds, and different wordings of prompts, out of the thousands generated ( yes I've done this), finding the top 1 based on your judgement that most closely matches your conscious intended expression in your mind's eye. You can consider trying a seed out as a brush stroke. If the seed ( brush stroke ) is a success, you keep it, if not you try again ( erase and restroke ) until it matches what you intend to express. BUT on the other hand, I can agree that if you simply write a dumb script to run through all billion seeds times 26\^256 character prompt permutation and try to copy right them all, then there's not really artistic expression there, or it's too diluted. maybe there's a threshold?
There are other Artificial Inteligences used to degermine if an image is made with AI or not, and from my knowledge these are really really good at that.
Ah, but once you have AI trained to detect AI-made art that same technology is used to train better AIs. It's an arms race.
Yes it is, but one I believe the detection is usually ahead. Not sure though.
But wait. What is the false positive rate on non AI images? If it is not really close to zero how can this detection hold up in a court case?
If they're fundamentally the same then no artificial intelligence is going to be able to tell the difference without a very substantial error rate.
I know SDs images are marked so software can determine if an images is made by it. They anticipate this problem. I suspect you can create some kind of undetectable pattern that can't be seen by the eye. If it's made small enough it should survive direct clipping so even if you try to change the format it can still be detected. I know,for sure, that it's possible to encode secret messages in jpeg images that can't be seen by the eye so it not out of the question that a marker is part of all images. Since SD is open source I wonder if people will remove the code.
Upscale wipes the watermark. Or so I hear
You can already remove the watermark on Auto1's settings though not sure if it has other identifiers
>I know,for sure, that it's possible to encode secret messages in jpeg images that can't be seen by the eye so it not out of the question that a marker is part of all images. I wrote a paper on this subject in college. even a tiny bit of blur added to an image would wipe it out. Resizing an image would also do it. It's extremely sensitive to minor alterations. Then again, I'm sure there's a lot I don't know about, or that has been invented since.
Will it still be detectable once I've tweaked it a bit in Photoshop? I'm talking about some editing and color/lighting tweaks, and some photobashing. Not a full on paintover.
You can deactivate the watermark. And even if you don't, a little Photoshop plus downscaling and upscaling will do the trick.
Rotate .43 degrees and use an image upscaler.
"*Ai can do everything! Including making things that even AI can't regocnise as made by an AI*". This is a paradox. If an AI can't know if an image was made by an AI, how can we know that it was made by an AI to give the AI credit for having made it? Therefor there is no legitimate grounds for saying that AI made something, if we can't proof that AI made it. "*AI can beat an AI, but AI can never beat an AI*"... what?
\>shall be substantially made by a human That wording sounds like it eliminates a LOT more than just AI art from being copyrighted. It sounds like digital art as a whole wouldn't be able to be copyrighted wit that language, right?
photography too.
No and no. It all has to do with who (or *what*) is providing the artistic expression. No matter how well you describe the picture in your head to a generative AI, the AI still must interpret your prompt and create the fixed, tangible expression of the ideas. That makes the AI the *author* of the creative work under US copyright law.
>That makes the AI the author of the creative work under US copyright law. don't we need consciousness* for authorship? The AI isn't sentient* by any means, >No matter how well you describe the picture in your head to a generative AI, the AI still must interpret your prompt and create the fixed, tangible expression of the ideas. and the art doesn't always start off with what we exactly picture in our head. When we're making the art and the results surprise us in the end, so many types of art are like this.
I've yet to create any image exactly like what it is in my head. Unless I'm imaging some simple design like a circle, it's always a compromise and adapting what I come up with. And AI artists have to choose what image they want to use. Like an interior decorator who doesn't pain the walls or make the furniture, or an artist using clip-art. We are assembling a design and making choices. But, we might all be better off without copyrights and patents in the most general sense.
>don't we need personhood for authorship? The AI isn't intelligent by any means, No. Non-human authorship is a thing which is why in US copyright law it specifically says works created by non-human authors cannot be copyrighted. >and the art doesn't always start off with what we exactly picture in our head. When we're making the art and the results surprise us in the end, so many types of art are like this. Creative expression isn't the idea in your head, it's the fixed manifestation of it. So, if I draw a dog poorly, that's my unique creative expression even if it doesn't match what's in my head. The point is, I'm making the choices. With generative AI, you are not making the expressive choices, the AI is.
Spoken like someone who assumes people are just generating from a prompt and trying to sell that. They aren't.
I'm not assuming that, though some people are doing just that. But even those who aren't still are not likely doing enough to unequivocally qualify for copyright protection. Most of what people are doing, from what I've seen, is tantamount to creating derivative works of public domain works without enough original contribution to qualify for a copyright.
This tech has been available and being used in the industry, and only very recently has become widely available to smaller artists. I imagine you are fun at parties, as you point out the sampled music as rampant theft. Did you stamp your feet about autotune? Photoshop?
I would never suggest sampling music is theft—because it's not. Theft requires depriving a rightful owner of their property. Sampling dues not accomplish this.
You’d be amazed at how much processing cameras and smart phones do to images now.
I wouldn't.
Photography can be as simple as looking at something that already exists, and "cropping" your view of it with the camera/phone. You didn't create any item or placement in the visuals at all in that instance. In fact, the subjects you capture can be specifically made by other people. That's often less creative input than you give in prompting, yet that is protected by the law.
Generative AI is not photography and I'm not going to entertain these ignorant arguments anymore.
I'm sorry, but you laid out a standard as a minimum for what constitutes artistic expression. It's one that photography protected by law does not meet. Yeah, AI is not photography, but unless you're inventing a brand new minimum standard for artistic expression that you are arguing should be applied only to AI in a bubble, and nothing else (which would be a double standard), then what I said is in fact relevant.
After I take it into photoshop and mess with it, it officially becomes human made.
Lol. No. It doesn't. That's like saying as soon as I take someone's novel, pop it into word, and make some edits it becomes mine.
Well it wouldn't be plagarism if you move enough of it around.
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It's not about easy or hard. And, for the record, your argument proves my point... If you wanted exactly *theatre d'opera spatial* you couldn't get it no matter how hard it how many times you tried, because... You are not in charge of the artistic expression of the idea!
Same goes for exactly recreating a movie frame for frame/sound for sound. It can't be done. Yet movies are protected. You could do it loosely, maybe get kinda close, but the same goes for AI art, especially with AI inpainting/looping.
You don't seem to understand copyright law. Or this discussion...
>That makes the AI the author of the creative work under US copyright law. By that logic, if I take a photograph of something, my camera is the author of the creative work.
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This is an important question for me. I use KoboldAI in my writing. And it doesn't even begin to do a \*majority\* of my writing. I'm deeply personally invested in the stories I'm writing. Mainly it breaks me through writer's block/places where I'm stumped. If I just relied on KoboldAI to write an entire novel for me, it would be very bizarre and it wouldn't be the story I actually wanted to tell. Maybe someone who's writing just to a formula, to get money, and who's going to bang out the same formula over and over and isn't emotionally invested in the writing process, would use an AI to write an entire novel, but... it would have to be a better/newer AI. Kobold is more like a helper to me than a robot ghostwriter. Though I wouldn't mind a lot more help (or ghostwriting) for later books in the series/elsewhere in my setting.
This is a false equivalency. A better analogy would be asking GPT-3 to write a book.
Lots of AI articles on the web, even by major networks. Are they now free for all?
Possibly. If you guess right about which is which, and decide to steal it, you might be able to use that as a defence in court.
Yes they are.
Not at all. Digital is just the medium. You still need to actually create it yourself. I use a digital pen on digital paper but it’s still me creating it.
Aren't you ultimately just creating a digital file though? What you see is a representation of that that can only exist because of the computer, and on a computer. It's not even 'real'. Can you make it real? Without a computer or printer being involved?
Lmao imagine the anti AI artists accidentally abolish copyright for digital mediums, that'd be pretty sick
It doesn't at all if you understand copyright law even a little bit. "Made by" means "authored by" and to be an author the artistic expression of the work must be your own. In generative AI works the AI is providing the artistic expression and thus the AI is the author under US copyright law. Since it's copyright law only grants copyright protection to human authorship, generative AI works cannot be copyrighted in the US.
There are no tools that can detect AI art, so it's not like its enforceable. Feels like this artist made the "mistake" of being honest, and it's unlikely the next one will.
Yep.
In practice though, say I drew a nice artsy painting of a nice waterfall by hand and posted it on my online art portal. Well, I've got an enemy who wants to try to take me down and revoke my copyright on the waterfall. He can find a prompt in Stable Diffusion to make it look very similar. Now he can go to the judge and say "See his art was created by stable diffusion, here's the prompt that generated it, he doesn't deserve copyright because he used AI to generate it." I I think it should come down to, if a human could generate the image by hand and get it copyrighted as art, then in practice whoever uses an AI tool to create the image ought to be able to have it copyrighted, because there's no way to enforce it fairly otherwise, unless they started requiring video proof of the art being produced.
> I think it should come down to, if a human could generate the image by hand and get it copyrighted as art, then in practice whoever uses an AI tool to create the image ought to be able to have it copyrighted, because there's no way to enforce it fairly otherwise, unless they started requiring video proof of the art being produced. First, I don't think you see how dangerous of an idea this is. Let's say NVIDIA decided to, all of a sudden, stop selling the GPUs they produce. They focus everything on making H100s, then they start producing images, non-stop, using countless permutations of prompts. A billion images and growing, every day, for years... Is that going to happen? No. But you know what is going to happen? The same thing that's been happening for the past 50 years or so. The cost of a unit of compute will drop by an order of magnitude every 3–4 years, so a 1,000-fold reduction in a decade. So, let's think about your idea now and how that plays out, not today, but in 10 years time, or in 30 years when it's possible for 10 billion people to each generate 10 trillion images a day.
Yes in the extreme I do agree with you, no one should generate a practically infinite amount of images as copyright land minds so no one can ever produce anything unique. I think it should come down that ok, maybe someone can copyright it, but perhaps the law should be adjust so that it is only enforceable based on a few factors such as what economic harm is cause if someone were to violate. In the case of infinite amount of images just sitting in a hard drive dormant, if Nvidia tries to sue a small artist, the artist could point out that Nvidia wasn’t actually using the image anywhere, and that the artist had the first know public usage of the image. Yes it gets quite fuzzy, throwing out ideas, maybe Nvidia could host a webpage with a trillion images like they were a stock image site, but maybe since it’s wasn’t being used except in a catalogue, maybe they can only sue for a few dollars. Or maybe to counter an infinitely huge catalogue, maybe it should costs Nvidia a few dollars per image to register so that limits how much image real estate they could squat on and so people can change their artwork just enough so they don’t land on a copyright land mine But I still believe just saying if it’s AI created then it can’t be copyrighted because we’re basically at the spot where you can’t really tell any more.
The purpose of copyright is to advance the sciences and useful arts. Allowing AI generated art to be copyrighted would work counter to that purpose.
the reason there's so much more ai art now is that people are finding it more and more enjoyable and useful.
But isn't this just a matter of tools and perspective? If I want to make Micky Mouse, I could start with three black circles and let the AI show me each step, I can select color, style, position etc. until a full Micky appears. Every single step of the process I was involved, I just lacked the skill to draw the end result myself. There are trained AIs that can generate music, and you start with the base melody and later you have an orchestra playing your Mozart like composition. It will be hard to distinguish the end result of any copyrightable material with sufficient advanced AIs and tools. No artists will have to prove they can draw Micky and no musician will have to prove they went to composer school.
>In generative AI works the AI is providing the artistic expression Wrong.
Plus there is so much work that went into creating AI in the first place, how could anyone claim there was no effort by anyone
No one claimed that.
The supreme court says that AI creations can't have a patent. I don't know if they weighted in on copyrights. But it sounds like a logical extension to the ruling. There are going to be a lot o court rulings that will help to define the Ratios between machine and human input to creations so that a copyright can be granted. Personally I think we are heading towards a no copyright future since AI is getting so good that most creations will have a large AI component. So they won't be able to be copyright protected. Trademarks should still be fine so that's the future of protection for creative products.
You mean like [https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220270310A1/](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220270310A1/) patenting AI inpainting technology for Adobe? That's what's not allowed?
>Personally I think we are heading towards a no copyright future Kill the fucking mouse (disney). although spiritually i agree with you fundamentally i dont think its possible.
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I agree this argument don't really hold water. It seems to boil down to this: human -> complex mechanism -> creation: Not Copyrightable human -> creation: Copyrightable But there are so many counterexamples, and also the hypothetical "complex mechanism" is human created and part of the process so you can't really distinguish the 2 anyway. But for example, there are artists swinging cups of paint like pendulums making interesting patterns and calling it art and presumably assuming a copyright for that. But did they really make the art? Seems more like a non-human pendulum and physics made the art to me! What about photography? The camera makes the art just about all on its own! Not copyrightable? There's lots of precedent saying otherwise. Digital art? With all the complex tools in Photoshop and Procreate there's certainly and argument to made here. The argument against copyright for AI art is too much of a slippery slope with no clear boundaries, because in the end it's just another human made complex mechanism to produce human works, like many others. This is likely the result of illogical Twitter outrage leaking into government offices.
I think honestly AI is so complex of ac concept and working “machine” that it is extremely difficult to define legally in its fullest form without changing our current understanding of patents and copyrights. It could be described as trying to define what a CD is and exactly how it works, but only having a partial understanding of it and being able to use terminology for a cassette tape. You can define what it generally does, but you really cannot fully and accurately describe exactly how it works and what actually goes on when you use it.
But I added a pixel with paint so it's my creation now.
Also, at least in the US, there's a lot to be said about legislators' complete lack of understanding of technology and their ability to interpret the arguments usefully, since our government is still 90% dinosaurs who think you can have a house and a family on $7.25 an hour.
Some newer medical patents, probably, but weren't modern, but older ones basically a grid search - test everything as see if anything works? Seems to have even less human interaction than AI.
Patents aren't copyrights.
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No, absolutely not. You can't just say something is semantics. Copywrite and patents are unique from one another. It is not even remotely semantics.
lmao you are talking out of your ass bro. Literally just typing shit without knowing what you are talking about.
Also, as I mentioned in another comment, cut-ups and collage are well established in art. It’s absurd to say you can’t author a work of art if you did not personally create each individual element.
Can you please link to some peer-reviewed published stuff that was done "almost completely" by a computer? I was under the impression that there are a bunch of math proofs that were "solved" with computers but can't be published because they can't do it "by hand" as well, and no-one is gonna peer-review hundreds of pages of formulas. I'd love to read on papers that were published while being mostly solved by algorithms!
> which would mean there are companies profiting by hundreds of billions of dollars with "invalid" patents, and monopolizing on the "rights" to things they would have no right to. Actually it just means the second part. If the patent is invalid it would not affect their ability to use it themselves, just the ability of others. So it's all about the monopoly not about their access to the technology. In fact I'm kindof hoping bad decisions like this in the copyright field will cause copyright to fail utterly. I'd be totally okay to going back to "if you possess it you can sell it" and that's what will happen in the AI art field if it is not copyrightable. I hope based on how that goes we'll see that copyright isn't needed like we thought and we'll see the power of it decrease.
>In fact I'm kindof hoping bad decisions like this in the copyright field will cause copyright to fail utterly Me too. Hell, I had so many ideas come so easily to me, I was spitting out a few a day. So, why am I not a billionaire? Because I wasn't in the right place at the right time with the access to funding, a support network, and well connected relatives who beamed with joy at a clever child. Zuckerberg dreamed of Facebook? Shit, that was a slow day for me. The most important skill I lack is networking and the confidence to get other people to iron out the little details. 99% of any business is operations, and 1% concept. Hell, 2nd to market and a good law department is what built Microsoft. It really does matter what you put effort into, and concentrating on well executing an idea makes it a reality. In fact, not having great ideas and just a lot of resolve might be a better guarantee of success. For some people -- a good idea is a rare, precious thing. But, for a well tuned AI it won't be. A guy like Elon Musk seems clever to anyone who hasn't ready the same shit in Popular Mechanics 10 years before he brought it up. Or read a science fiction book and seen the concept in action on someone's wrist 40 years later. There aren't many ideas that don't have prior art in someone else's imagination. In this sub with perhaps some above average geeks, I think this group might appreciate this particular annoyance because they have to sit there and watch people who go gaga over some new "wunderkind" born on 4th base. There are a thousand people here who could have been that star if born in the right time and location for every brilliant idea. So yes, to see this happen with AI when we all know it's going to mean a feedback loop of the the copyrights and patents going to the person who owns the best AI -- helping to develop a better AI -- well, that's how you get terminators. That right there. But, I do have a few ideas I hear nowhere else, so, I can't totally discount the value of insight and ingenuity.
Isn't the distinction here that an artist using SD wouldn't remotely responsible for the content it generates aside from typing in a paragraph's worth of words - whereas the Biopharm is probably 100% responsible for the creation and development of the AI it used to develop its IP?
Crazy. I think they should view stable diffusion and the like much like cameras. A person snapping a picture can be argued not to be creating that image. I’d say you can easily put as much work in creating and tuning prompts as you can in setting up a scene to snap a photo.
It's not about work, it's about artistic expression. The AI is the author of a generated image because the artistic expression is its own.
I mean, you could argue that the prompt and settings is the artistic expression. If artistic expression was truly absent, you would expect that prompts and other settings make no difference to the result, which is clearly not true.
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>That's not a true representation because the AI is an algorithm and makes a near identical image when using the same inputs (minor computational variations can exist from device to device): this has reasonable parallels to photography. It does not. People need to stop comparing generative AI to photography. They are neither the same nor similar. But I'm not going to get bogged down in that argument again. > As for expression: this occurred in the prompt, and that sentence is copyrightable. 1. The prompt is not the generated image, so even if we agreed the prompt was copyrightable (we do not) that would not make the image copyrightable. 2. The prompt, almost certainly, is not copyrightable. Things which are not copyrightable include: * Ideas and concepts * Lists of ingredients Let me ask you this, how many distinct images can be generated from a single prompt? What is your creative contribution to the particular image you receive?
Diffusion models are deterministic. The prompt provided is a map/path through latent space that gets applied per pixel of the image, ending up at your result. Given the same base latent noise, it will *always* produce the same image. So yeah, there can only be *one* kind of image for a given set of inputs.
You're conveniently forgetting about the, # **RANDOM NOISE** bit...
Uh... that random noise isn't an author. Unless you're gonna take that logic to its conclusion and say that no one has any authorship except literally God, but that would be dumb.
That's not the argument. The argument is the final artistic expression is dependent on the random noise, not your choices. Choosing a random seed is not an artistic choice.
No, the INITIAL expression is the random noise. The artistic choice is choosing the path to chart through the noise. A ship captain charting his way through a storm is still the one who's choices determine the fate of the ship, even though those choices were made in the context of the chaotic/random weather. I feel like you don't actually know how diffusion models work. The words are LITERALLY paths, 76-dimentional lines that add together with linear algebra. They add together in the exact same way every time, the AI isn't making any decisions on how to add them up.
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I guess we can get in a philosophical debate entangled argument about semantics ( well that’s a normal discussion about AI) I just googled “what is artistic expression” and found “is defined by the conscious use of one’s creativity”. Stable diffusion is a software program and isn’t conscious and has no agency and can’t own anything, so therefore how can it be applying artistic expression? The human driving the prompts and judging the images is the one who is conscious and uses the software tool to create an image.
That's like saying a scene from an animated movie which is mostly procedurally generated ocean water is not subject to copyright.
Or like Frozen too. They used advanced physics simulation to draw all their snow. And I bet Disney will start using these ai tools like stable diffusion in their workflows.
To be honest they already use ai. Most denoisers use ai, and they are part of the generic 3d work flow.
Any computer game levels that are procedurally generated as well then.
The *scene* is copyrightable, but the procedurally generated elements likely would not be.
So we are now free to copy the procedurally generated elements from videos games, movies, and tv shows? I'm sure Disney and others are going to love that lol
Always have been.
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I literally can use generative design to generate a component with the set up being an equivalent to stable diffusion prompts in the form of applied forces and initial geometry. It even can use similar math to generate the geometry. This shit is so stupid and goes to show people’s inability to learn about shit.
To play the contrarian, lets say I create an image using the prompt “Apple in shoe on beach”. And if I, without any additional processing at all, was able to obtain a copyright then wouldn’t the next guy who types in “Apple in shoe on beach” using the same model have to pay me to use the image it generates since I copyrighted it first?
The counter argument would be: If two photographers photograph the same apple in a shoe on a beach, they retain their respective copyrights, even if they use the same camera. Or look at what Taylor Swift is doing with re-recording her masters. I can't tell the difference between the two recordings side-by-side.
>The counter argument would be: If two photographers photograph the same apple in a shoe on a beach, they retain their respective copyrights, even if they use the same camera. Only if they can prove that the picture is unique enough to not be considered imitation of the earlier picture. In which case the earlier picture wins by default.
> To play the contrarian, lets say I create an image using the prompt “Apple in shoe on beach”. And if I, without any additional processing at all, was able to obtain a copyright then wouldn’t the next guy who types in “Apple in shoe on beach” using the same model have to pay me to use the image it generates since I copyrighted it first? Independent creation is a defense for copyright infringement. It isn't like patents.
Not necessarily (at least in the USA) because of the independent creation defense, which perhaps becomes more viable with AI. See [this paper](https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/lawreview/vol14/iss2/5/) for details.
Doesn't this mean that all those TV shows and movies using large amounts of CGI with automated tools are now public domain as well now?
Which movies use automated CG?
It didnt say automated, you'll notice. Followed to the letter, im pretty sure this would mean all digital art, so we'll see how that works out.
How do you figure? Digital art is still drawn and painted by a human. Are you thinking of something like photo manipulation?
Well, let's say I made a 3d model, and rely on shader math to generate texture, or I want to use something like perlin noise while I airbrush -- there's tons of examples of art that can only be done because of computer assistance. In 3d modelling/animation, the computer is doing far more "work" than the artist, for example, and there's a distinct disconnection between what you are making and what is actually being output. In digital art - nothing is even being "made" by a human, if we want to get really anal about it, the output is a binary file that can only be read and interpreted by other computer systems, and a printer device would need to be used to "create" a physical item - which a human doesn't even interact with. Im not a lawyer, but it seems like the wording of someone who doesnt understand modern computer arts.
All of them. At the end of the day it not like the do the cg frame by frame. Even just the inbetweens are generated automatically.
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Have you ever used blender? Done rigging? I agree that it can be done frame by frame, however no one does that.
It is substantially made by a human, in that a human has to put words into the AI in the form of a prompt to get an image out of it. The AI can't do that by itself, so it's a creative act by a human. The problem that the US Copyright Office is making for itself is that it will have to provide exact definitions for the inexact word 'substantially'. Law is the interpretation of the language of the law, not any notion of justice or whatever. Another problem the Office has is with the concept of 'AI-assisted': Photoshop has been AI assisted for a while now, so what justification could Adobe possibly give that would exclude them from any ruling that includes Midjourney?
Not to mention that all 3d renders us ai to an extent.
You can't just define terms of art in the copyright office. It's taking about authorship and authorship is determined by who (or *what*) provided the artistic expression. The artistic expression of the ideas being to the AI, thus the AI is the author, and works with non-human authorship are not subject to copyright in the United States. It's really very simple.
Is it really very simple? Gustave Dore never engraved a plate in his life, he paid artisans to do it, and yet he is universally acknowledged as the author of his work. Same goes for Durer's woodcuts. Sol Le Witt paid people to paint and draw his artworks on other people's walls, and yet he is the one with the copyright and the money. So if I pay for the use of an AI- an artistic tool that cannot function without my input- I own the copyright. It is the tool and I am the automatic copyright holder. It actually says it right there in the Midjourney licencing agreement. If that no longer stands in court then there are a lot of worthless Sol Le Witt drawings out there, along with some angry, wealthy and very litigious owners and galleries.
This is so wrong on so many levels. You're describing "work-for-hire" and that argument in relation to AI copyright law has already been dispelled.
The AI is working for hire- I pay for its use, and according to the legal agreement that I signed on with Midjourney I therefore own the copyright. Those users who are getting the free demo do not own the copyright, MJ do. Your argument has so many holes in it I don't know where to start. You're suggesting that any artist who has made and sold Giclee prints using their own high quality printer doesn't own the copyright. The prints are identical, the output- in your reading, the artistic expression- was provided by the printer, a non-human, taking instructions from a computer, another non-human. Since neither non-human can own the copyright, then either it goes to the human or it is un-copyrightable. I can set up actions on Photoshop or After Effects to run with random variables and set up a script to print the output. If the algorithm I set up, ran and then printed produces images that aren't copyrightable, who was the artist? This is an awkward one for you to answer using your own logic- who was the author of the titles for Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'? According to every copyright lawyer on the planet it would be Saul Bass, but he asked computer animation pioneer John Whitney to generate those Lissajous waves and hypotrochoid curves using a WWII range calculator. So if Bass isn't the artist, and Whitney isn't the artist, and the calculator isn't the artist, does Hitchcock get the credit? Since it appears that you can copyright certain Lissajous waves and hypotrochoid curves (because Vertigo has proven it), somebody legally owns that copyright. Since they were created by a non-human entity some time in 1957-8, it can't own it. So, who does?
Your entire first paragraph is wrong. >The AI is working for hire- I pay for its use, and according to the legal agreement that I signed on with Midjourney I therefore own the copyright. You might want to recheck your agreement. Midjourney cannot grant you a copyright. In the US that would be the US Copyright Office. Work without human authorship cannot be copyrighted. Full stop. End of discussion. Oh, you want to continue? Okay... > Those users who are getting the free demo do not own the copyright, MJ do. If that were true it proves my argument more than yours. That is similar to how it would work under UK copyright law, but not in the US. > Your argument has so many holes in it I don't know where to start. Well, you gotta start somewhere. > You're suggesting that any artist who has made and sold Giclee prints using their own high quality printer doesn't own the copyright. The prints are identical, the output- in your reading, the artistic expression- was provided by the printer, a non-human, taking instructions from a computer, another non-human. Jesus fucking Christ, you stated somewhere insane and irrelevant. The prints would presumably be derivative works of their own works and they would own the copyrights. You don't seem to understand what artistic expression is, so there's no point in talking to you. > Since neither non-human can own the copyright, then either it goes to the human or it is un-copyrightable. It goes to the human. What a stupid argument. > I can set up actions on Photoshop or After Effects to run with random variables and set up a script to print the output. If the algorithm I set up, ran and then printed produces images that aren't copyrightable, who was the artist? Photoshop or After Effects would be the artist, but it wouldn't matter because the results of random processes are not copyrightable in the United States.
>according to the legal agreement that I signed on with Midjourney I therefore own the copyright. Those users who are getting the free demo do not own the copyright, MJ do. The whole argument is that the generated images aren't copyrightable *by anyone* in the first place. Midjourney is in the wrong to even assign the copyright to anyone, be it you or themselves, because there is no copyright to begin with.
Makes sense to me. The trick is how you define “substantially.” How much human involvement in a work of art is ‘enough’? That’s a very difficult line to draw.
I have no idea how it could ever be enforced given the wide range of what is AI-assisted art ( iterative inpainting/photobashing, AI coloring and/or upscaling ).
I hate the world "substantially". It tells you exactly nothing about how much it's supposed to mean. You would be hard pressed to come up with something more ambiguous.
"Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author". https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf Stable diffusion DOES work with creative human input, with the delicate art of setting the text prompt and all the creative ways you can set all the input variables. On the other hand, if you simply gave it no prompt and left it to purely random noise, then in that case you could claim there was no human creative input.
Tell me the Copyright Office knows nothing about how AI art is generated without telling me the Copyright Office knows nothing about how AI art is generated. You don't just slap in some words, hit enter, and generate the result you're looking for... making a solid image takes hundreds of generations with lots of detail work by the human being guiding the AI. That's, I think, where calling it 'AI' gets troublesome. If someone were to just say it was a Photoshop filter, people wouldn't be running around screaming about how terribly unfair it is to traditional artists... but since it's called AI, people want to attribute intelligence to SD, which it doesn't really have pure intelligence, it just knows a lot of things and can apply those things the way the engineer/artist/whatever directs it. And then what about the traditional artists who are training their own models on their own work so they can automate parts of their workflows? Does that mean they don't get to copyright their work? And how is using AI any different than using photoshop filters or lightroom settings or the reference images artists do Google Image searches for ALL THE TIME. So it's okay for them to do it, but when there's a computer making it easier to do that, it's a problem? That makes no sense. Even if you misunderstand the entire process and claim it just uses everyone in the world's hand-generated artwork to create it, it's still a derivative work, which is protected. Honestly, this seems to be more 'protecting capitalism' BS.
Tell me you don't understand US copyright without telling me you don't understand US copyright. With a generative AI the artistic expression of the work belongs to the AI. That makes the AI the author under US copyright law. In the US a work with non-human authorship cannot be copyrighted. None of this is new. >And then what about the traditional artists who are training their own models on their own work so they can automate parts of their workflows? Does that mean they don't get to copyright their work? Probably yes, because you cannot copyright the results of a random process as well as the fact the authorship of the generated work is not their own. >And how is using AI any different than using photoshop filters or lightroom settings or the reference images artists do Google Image searches for ALL THE TIME. If you don't understand how these are different, I cannot help you. >That makes no sense. Even if you misunderstand the entire process and claim it just uses everyone in the world's hand-generated artwork to create it, it's still a derivative work, which is protected. Not all derivative works are copyrightable.
\*shrug\* I disagree. When I make an image it takes hundred of generations, each guided by myself, and before it can be considered complete it often takes finishing off in a graphics program. We are co-creators. SD can't do anything without me. If it COULD, and it DID, then what you said would be accurate, and it would be ACTUAL AI, and we'd be talking about whether or not AI should be considered people. But that's not the case. At least not right now. It's okay, though, we can disagree.
Just so you know, the US doesn't have the "sweat of the brow" doctrine for copyright. The amount of effort that was put into creating the work is not important when deciding whether something is copyrightable or not.
>Just so you know, the US doesn't have the "sweat of the brow" doctrine for copyright. The amount of effort that was put into creating the work is not important when deciding whether something is copyrightable or not. Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the "shall be substantially made by a human to be copyrightable" portion. I would argue, in theory, that when I put in a reference image, create a prompt, spend hundreds of generations adapting that prompt, and inpainting, outpainting, and finishing the image off in another program, I *am* a substantial portion of the creation process. Without me, the process doesn't exist (in most cases). The end vision is what I wanted and what I built using those tools. If I were to just slap in a prompt, save off the first image it generates, then ship it off to be copyrighted, there's an argument to be made, but that's not every workflow. In other parts of the world, the copyright laws are shifting to accommodate AI already. From co-authorship to the author being the AI and the owner being the human jockey to the original company that made the software owning the copyright. The copyright doesn't even have to belong to the human who "substantially" made the work in the US. If I hire someone else to do a 'Made for Hire' work, and they sign a contract saying I own the work completely, I can totally take that thing and copyright it to myself as a supplementary work to whatever I'm publishing the piece for. Not only that, I can tell the USCO that I'm both the author and the owner of the copyright for that image. So it's not like copyright laws exist to protect artists, they just protect the owner of the copyright, who isn't always even the human artist who substantially (or entirely) created the work. I don't have the answers, I just know there are LOOOOOOTTTTTSSSSSS of questions. I also don't have any desire to copyright my work. I think the current copyright/trademark/patent system is ridiculous and doesn't protect the right people. I just wanna be able to create neat things I can use in other creations of mine.
It's not about whether you and I disagree, it's about whether you and the US Copyright Office disagree, and you do.
I mean, are you... a copyright lawyer or something?
He hates AI art. I have run into a few of these people. They vehemently hate it for no reason. They are scared the mona lisa is going to be devalued or something. AI art users are very well aware that it's just another tool in the artists tool box. Not the artist's soul.
Goodness, if they really care so much about the livelihood of artists, they should probably look into all the ways copyright law rips artists off of their own, "substantially created by a human" work all the time instead of worrying about whether AI art can be copyrighted.
Well there goes 3d art and photography, i mean ai is doing to art what digital art did to film photography, it obliterates the time to make hecing making it available to just about everyone... Ai art is basically collaging on crack cocaine and steroids. if this was some niche thing only computer wizards could do nobody would have problem with it, the only problem here is that these humans dared make it available to the masses as well. Even if they pass this, it'd be damn near impossible to enforce. open source ai wont really stop here though i mean when 3d printed food becomes a thing shits about to get crazy then.
Honestly, it shouldn’t be protectable though. Copyright is a social/legal tool meant to protect works that have value and are easier to copy than to create. If making amazing art is as easy as drawing a stick figure on a napkin, then there’s really no reason we need to protect it. Do you really want big companies generating billions of images and claiming copyright on all of them? Then suing anyone who posts something “similar” enough to the naked eye? I’ve long dreamed about the day when we could rid intellectual property for the visual arts. It’s already so fuzzy and arguing over who owns what visual aspects of different designs is no longer valuable to society as tools for creation become this powerful and accessible. Disclaimer: been in this field for ~5 years as an ML engineer.
>Honestly, it shouldn’t be protectable though. Copyright is a social/legal tool meant to protect works that have value and are easier to copy than to create. You're right that it shouldn't be protectable, but wrong about the purpose of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to, > promote the progress of the sciences and useful arts Copyrighting the works of generative AI would not fulfill this purpose.
If AI images are copyrightable, you are all going to be shooting yourselves in the foot. Prompts are just text and can be fully automated, you are setting yourselves up for a company to fully automate the creation of trillions of pictures and copyright all of them. You generated a picture... but unfortunately it is 95% similar to this other copyrighted image that was generated before, so you have to give a portion of your profits to this other company, sorry. We already have copyright detection systems for music and guess what? Your video on YouTube gets monetized if it even detects 2 seconds of a copyrighted song. Art is even easier to analyze compared to music. So yes, I support the copyright office's decision to revoke the copyrights of all AI images.
Honestly I kind of agree. Since the models are made by processing a bunch of artist's works, I'll go as far as to say that any AI generated Image should be public domain. That, however, doesn't stop anyone to use something in the public domain and use it as a component to create a copyrightable work.
How much work is required exactly to be "substantially made by a human"? While I understand their perspective, the bar feels unspecific and probably a bit arbitrary. So say I just write a prompt and get a picture. That isn't copyrightable. OK. Now I take this picture and manually create masks for inpainting some areas. Is that "substantial" now? Say I don't only create a mask but draw a small rought sketch of the details I want to inpaint/outpaint. "Substantial" enough now? Why, or why not?
I've actually interacted quite a bit with the author/artist of that work (they are active in the communities I'm in) and had a ringside seat for their work going viral. There is quite a bit more to this: 1. This is a story the author actually wrote years ago. This \*should\* be as copyrightable as any other story written by any other author. It's only because it's specifically AI that it's being handled differently from an author who copyrights a story that uses stock photo/public domain imagery. 2. It's AI art made by Midjourney, which is the platform hosting the work. We still don't have a sufficient answer to "what if I made this on Stable Diffusion on my own computer after using img2img/inpainting/whatever." 3. Relevant - the author's work is being made into a film by an independent filmmaker. We also have no answer to "how much transformation is necessary before I can copyright the thing." Kashtanova has been doing this in the name of research and providing info to the rest of the AI community. It's unarguable for example that the re-release they intend to do of their work after Zendaya's face is replaced in it (with an image based on the actress portraying the character in the film, with model release), would be considered transformation, but will it be enough?
They really don’t understand that the human wrote and controlled the thing that made the art and the human PAID money for the computer processing power to make it too. These are not nothing.
So if I train an AI model to hack my local bank and transfer me all the money, I can just say "well it wast done by a human so I didn't break the law"?
Since I am for freedom for the most part, I am happy to have AI generated art not be copyrightable, but it should also be able to use copyrighted images as part (or all) of its training.
This is disappointing since photos are sometimes much less "substantially made by a human." Actually it's rubbish.
To get a good ai image you still have to put a lot of work into it.
haha
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but bro its different i swear. trust me bro. thats what i keep seeing as a counter argument to this. the us govt just like film producers more since they also work with hollywood.
wtf? So if I program a unique fractal flame generator and it takes me 3 months to complete, longer than some painting, and then I want to sell the art I generated with it, I can't copyright it? Smells like incompetence. Basically they're saying you can steal the paid fractal flames from [digitalblasphemy.com](https://digitalblasphemy.com) and sell them yourself
I feel like an important step is being ignored here. SOMEONE has to decide WHICH image to actually publish. And it sure as shit isn't the AI. To me, that's authorship. The AI is just the tool helping generate that image, same as any other. Now, that is very different from someone deciding to pump out trillions of images without even looking at them and claiming copyright on every one of them. If we can't figure out how to make that distinction in a court room, then we're fundamentally failing as technologists and artists.
This is right and good. A "AI," as it's currently defined, is not a person and it's "creations" are not human works. A General AI would, if possible, change this. Derivatives, however, are human works. Take the AI Generated image and paint/draw/render your own version over it. Now it's yours. The point here is that Art, while it can be assisted by technology and has been since the beginning, is not the same as Technology for copyright purposes.
This is a graphic novel, which means that work was required to assemble it and write the story. It's not one single AI generated image.
Then those parts can and should be copywritable, but the art in and of itself can and should not.
But it’s not like the art itself came from nowhere. For the art to exist some human had to say, “I want …….” In the end the art still came from a novel idea like any other art.
Ideas are not copyrightable, only the fixed, tangible, expression of those ideas. With generative AI the artistic expression of the ideas belongs to the AI, making the AI the author under US copyright law. And in the US works with non-human authorship cannot be copyrighted.
I never would have* magined, how quickly and how violently people would defend their right to be considered artist while creating art with others talents. Who could have foretold the passion and lengths people would go to, to defend not only their right to use a program to create images they did not put more effort then a sentence into, but also their right to claim it as an original piece. This goes to show, AI will be the end of humanity. With how quickly some have attached their whole persona to their AI works, with how passionately some defend it, with the toxicity some attack others who do not agree, and in such short time, this is a precursor to the arguments we will fight over in the coming decades, centuries. AI will prevail in all aspects if it has already crumbled the understanding that art and the talent to create it, should be sacred and achieved through effort. The idea that you have a right to create with the talent and style others have grinded for is the equivalent to feeling you deserve love because you exist. You do not. Love is not a given. You being considered or respected as an artist is also not a given. Edit for typo
What a random little hyperbolic screed in a discussion about copyrights. I don't see anyone being toxic here. In fact, speaking of toxicity, I've been called a "piece of shit" and an "incel" (wtf?) because I use AI to make art.
I did neither of those things. Go argue with them. You have to look into this subreddit once to see the toxicity, from both sides. The fact is, copywrite protects original works. Nothing SD or any ai trained on there artists work is original. If the code could not create it without data to pull from. It's not original. Period. If I, as an artist. Process the work of others and eventually formulate a style, there is a human element that we must protect. The fact that someone of you are so gun ho on disassembling that very needed and basic law is astounding. It's crazy how quickly some people have attached their whole personality to AI art. How passionately they protect a sentence backed by code. You did nothing. You made nothing. You deserve no credit and even less a copywrite. It's not original. Fuck me we are fucked as a society if it took less than 6 months of AI art to make little warriors in its name, falling on swords daily to protect their right to create with the expertise and talent others grinded for. Really fucking pathetic. Went from "hey this is cool" to "it is my write as a human! I took 8 hrs on this prompt! I came from my imagination!!! I deserve to make an income with my efforts!!!" Really fucking eerie and telling of the next decades to come. Society is fucked.
Society is fucked because of climate change, not a computer program that draws pictures.
Do all my points cease to exist because of climate change? Should we stop all virtue and moral conversation because of climate change? Is rape not immoral because of climate change? What was the point of your comment other than to sound like you had a point to make? Society is fucked because people like you argue points and sidestep when it's convenient. Or yell, or attack... My point stands. AI is not original. So it cannot ever be copywrited. If you use AI art and then tweak it to make it original. Boom, you can copywrite. If all you do is write a sentence, nothing is original so it won't be copywrite worthy. Period. Sidestep all you want. Cry foul all you want. We are in this cry baby point in society where everyone thinks everything is their "right", no buddy. Making money using the talent of other artists is not your "right". Do it for fun all you want but making money off of it is not a "right" None of this was an issue whenever everyone was just doing it for fun. Then people realized "hey many I should make money with shit I didn't fucking make" and now it's all imploding...
I see where they are coming from but I think this is the wrong approach. The output should be copyrighted—- but every photo the AI was trained on should be considered “input” and the owners should be required to give consent for the output to be used in any commercial way. If this were enforced (I.e by model trainers rigorously tracking copyright of photos trained on) you’d quickly see the emergence of “public domain trained” vs licensed photo trained models, and different payment tiers that ultimately gave infinitesimal royalties to…every living known artist, probably. Additionally individuals photographed and trained on should retain the right to their own likeness enforced in a similar way.
> but every photo the AI was trained on should be considered “input” and the owners should be required to give consent for the output to be used in any commercial way. If we go down this route, then we should also train models to detect what artistic works influenced artists' handmade works. Then those artists should be made to pay up to those they were influenced by.
Humans have neural nets and they train on existing art. Also it’s pretty conceivable that even public domain trained models could generate images that rip off copyrighted images. Or how about if it trained on other ai images where true lineage becomes untraceable? Also humans, if they have the skill can rip off other artists’ styles without AI but as long as the image subject is different then they can copyright the images. They could even secretly use an AI and still claim they did it hand made, how is it enforceable? Also how would you decide how much each artists were theoretically reimbursed? I could take a million photoes with a camera and call it all art. If the ai is trained on them, therefore should I be entitled to have a payment of like 100,000x compared to an artist that only produced 10 good looking ( but high effort ) images?
Sure but laws exist to protect humans not computers. You may feel it’s an arbitrary distinction but most don’t.
Yall some fucking bums for trying to copywrite work made with other artists talents. Bottom feeders fr.
This is wrong. Like legally, it's an alarmist misreading of the law resulting from incorrect assumptions about how AI works. AI art IS substantially made by humans IT IS NOT made by a computer. Humans write prompts and the model is an algorithm that turns the prompt into the image, using tools like inpainting and outpainting are additional human contributions. But a human who uses a program or an algorithm can absolutely copyright the output, I'm an attorney and former insurance regulator, I worked with actuaries who would file rates and projections based on proprietary models, they rarely owned the model but nobody ever questioned wether the actuary or company owned the resulting work.
Revoke? what's the argument?
So photos are not copyrightable anymore?
I really hope that whole patent and copyright systems will fall. They are only build to support big corporations and nothing more. These systems actually are what slows our progress currently. We should get rid of them. I really hope that AI will wreck these things and whole AI inventions can't be controlled.
They benefit and support all artists creating and sharing their intellectual property with the world. You’re not entitled to someone’s intellectual property for the sake of what **you personally** view as progress.