Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted::Matthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.”
Allowing people to copyright A.I generated art could lead to huge issues where someone could just churn out generated images like no tomorrow and throw out copyright claims left and right. It could even lead to situation where you can’t really create any art because it’s probably something that’s already been generated by someone or close to it.
That’s what I have been saying. If the courts rule that AI generated art is copyright able. What stops some multi-billionaire from copywriters basically every logical arrangement of words or images or whatever. Heck they would probably even offer to fund employing the copyright office with contractors that they pay for to speed up the process and the government would say it’s a good thing because they are saving taxpayer money…
To file an infringement suit they’d need to have paid registration for each work which, even for the exorbitantly rich, wouldn’t be remotely feasible for all logical arrangements of words/images. There’s probably not even enough space in the Universe or time until its heat death to generate and store all such images.
Even if they did, copyright doesn’t protect against against independently created works that happen to be similar or even identical - so they wouldn’t be exhausting some limited set of possible works by doing so.
For my understanding artistic works get copyright from the moment of their creation. This would allow one to pick battles based on how lucrative they may potentially be.
You dont really need art museum of babel for this but you just tons of different works that may contain unique characters, structures or objects similar to what someone might be able to imagine or has already imagined.
You may draw fan art with disney characters but its actually illegal to sell said art work without Disneys aproval until copyright expires. Now if anyone can start churning out for example A.I generated web comics left and right the chances for almost identical designs increases by a lot.
So your main argument against it is “anyone could do it”?
What? Lol
This is more of an issue with copyright law than of A.I. content generation. All you really need to do is create an algorithm that creates images based on every combination of pixels. There were a couple of lawyers who did this with melodies by creating an algorithm to generate every combination of 12-note, 8-beat melodies. One of the lawyers has a TED Talk where he goes into more detail with the issues of copyright laws: https://youtu.be/sJtm0MoOgiU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/sJtm0MoOgiU
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The museum of babel already exists.
However with generative A.I you dont need artwork for every combination of pixels. Machine learning seems to be really good at finding patterns in everything we may do or think.
With generative A.I we can use this information to create increasingly more human like output. In terms of art mimic and blend art styles, create new designs based on existing ones etc.
Much more elegant and way cheaper than using brute force algorithms.
This is one reason why copyright/patent law is stupid to begin with. Nothing but a state-enforced monopoly on a slice of all possible information in a category. Imagine if people started copyrighting basic trinomials.
What’s stopping billionaires from hiring artists now and just having them slave away at 1632961190 images of whatever they could think of for the same purpose? The art doesn’t even need to be good, it just needs to be something you can copyright
You mean, like stock photo websites? That are owned by Koch brothers?
The real solution is to abolish copyright
Absolutely based af :)
How do artists pay for their food and rent then?
Depends on how radical we’re talking.
On the less radical side - UBI, donations, contracts for creation of art that people want even if it’s not copyrighted afterward, Convenience Factor (often used by FOSS projects), and also the fact that a lot of art is created and intended for free redistribution anyhow .
On the more radical side: re-examining our entire concept of work and labour and rent, decentralused gift economies, automation, the destruction of capitalist structures as a whole, etc.
That would be great in the fully automated space gay commune, until then though we don’t want artists to starve.
gay?
For some reason a lot of the Internet relates communism with homosexuality. I think maybe because heterosexual people established capitalism? Idfk
I guess just homophobic slander? To be fair I read it as a “space joyful commune”, which seemed to make most sense. Giving it the benefit of the doubt…
This is a very delicate and complicated matter, part of me thinks that making AI works non copyrightable would incentivize human art
Given the presence of stolen artwork in the training data I don’t see why it should be copyright able.
Also award winning? It honestly looks like the kind of liminal mindfuckery most models could output. There’s nothing particularly impressive with the piece.
iirc it was submitted to a small art contest without disclosing it’s AI generated and it won a prize… which made a lot of people very mad
If this is the one in thinking of, they disclosed it was made using midjourney, but the judges didn’t know what that meant and didn’t ask.
Eh. I’ve seen abstract art that people are in awe with throughout my life. And like the uneducated swine I am, I’ve never thought they were impressive either.
Art appraisers are weird.
Edit: I saw the piece in question. This one is a tricky one, because if a human painted it, it would be impressive. Very nice details. But since it was generated by a machine in minutes… eh.
But according to the article, it wasn’t generated in minutes. The artist went through over 600 iterations of tweaking the prompt to get what he wanted. Sounds like days or even weeks of work probably. And then made additional tweaks via Photoshop.
Not too say that makes it any more impressive, but it wasn’t something that was without effort.
Point taken. In that case, I guess one can recognize the effort. Still, the impressive part of the piece is the style, which, if one were to assume was made with actual oil paint, it would be impressive.
With AI, I would explore styles that are inherently difficult to produce digitally. And yes, “oil paint” would be difficult to produce with digital tools alone outside of AI (maybe there are good plug-ins for it?) But you know what I mean. I don’t even know which styles those would be.
Read the article. He added details and the description fed into the prompt was 624 words long. He basically wrote a page describing the scene he wanted created.
Which I can also do. “Imagine a cave full of cats. The first cat is pink with yellow dots. The second cat glows in the dark. The third cat…”
I guess art involves expressing what you want to express it, sure. But also how you express it is part of it as well. If you make the strokes yourself, it’s more impressive. A machine? You gotta do better than making it look like someone painted it.
It’s like 3D printing. A 3D-printed statue? Neat. But not terribly impressive. A 3D figure that defies all optical illusion explanations? Now we’re talking.
I agree completely. I think this is the best solution to the AI replacing human artists problem. Big companies can’t use AI to replace humans because if they do, whatever they make will be ineligible for copyright and everyone will be free to rip them off.
Making AI art not copyrightable is probably the best reasonable alternative that we could hope for.
Companies are always looking to cut costs and getting some computer algorithm to churn out endless art without having to pay an artist would be a corporate holy grail. Except that if that artwork then can’t be copyrighted and thus monetized (or not as easily monetized), then it ruined or at least lessens their push to replace all their workers with AI.
They will just churn out pictures from midjourney and hire a cheap artist to touch them up and then copyright that.
That’s an interesting thought, that could potentially create corporate day jobs for artists.
Edit: I don’t believe in this idea, but thought it interesting. It’s better for artists to exercise creativity.
This will change the first time a big pharma pill designed by AI hits the market.
Or really anything that’s more practical than art.
Or someone figured out how to reliably tune AI to just happen to generate existing art and tries to use it to bipass/invalidate the copyright on that piece of art.
You can already do that with over fitting or getting lucky with duplicates in the dataset(<6*10^-5% chance for stable diffusion). The resulting work is still protected under the original creator’s copyright because it’s almost identical. Same way that if you photocopy an image it doesn’t remove the copyright even though slight details will be off due to inaccuracies.
They’ll just say this random scientist over here that signed away to the rights of anything he thinks of came up with it.
I would agree. Right up until the guy pulled it into Photoshop to male tweaks, adjustments, and corrections.
We give copyright for much less.
Tweaks adjustments and corrections need a reference material. The raw AI image needs to be published first for his tweaks to be copyrightable. Anyone wanting to claim copyright on edits should produce the initial uncopyrightable image too.
but then that makes it not his original work and he shouldn’t be putting it in competitions.
The first half isn’t relevant under copyright law, you can publish edits to old public domain works without publishing the original, this is extremely common even by museums.
The second point is however completely fair
I just want to point out that the description beneath the image in the article is hilarious.
The artwork, Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, was created by Matthew Allen and came first in last year’s Colorado State Fair.
No. No he didn’t create it. He put words into a black box.
“He didn’t create it. He moved a mouse.”
“He didn’t create it. He put commands into a keyboard.”
“He didn’t create it. He pressed the camera trigger.”
“He didn’t create it. He threw store-bought paint at a canvas.”
“He didn’t create it. He cleaned some dirt off the wall.”
“He didn’t create it. He was inspired by gods.”
Where you see a categorical difference, I see a qualitative one. AI-generated art can be nothing more than putting words into a blackbox, but it can also be a day-long process of tweaking dozens of parameters to get what you want from the words you put into the box. A child can slather paint onto a canvas without much thought - but that doesn’t mean great artists drawing complex, intricate paintings isn’t art, does it?
Generative AI is a tool. It can do more than most tools, but still, it is something wielded by an artist.
As I’d just written in another reply here, there is a world of difference in describing an illustration and creating an illustration.
I have to say that when I focused on computer-aided graphic design, my instructors who had done that kind of work with material supplies totally felt my work was invalid.
And when I was writing essays in high-school English and getting downgraded for poor penmanship, my teacher refused to let me word-process my work, lest I write a whole essay with the touch of a button.
So yes, creators have had their efforts minimized from the dawn of time, especially as new technology makes output better or easier.
Still, this isn’t about the art, it’s about the capitalism. If we had a society where no-one had to toil for a meager existence, then artists could do their thing for the sake of creating beauty and not to earn a buck. I believe post-war social programs in the UK drove the Rock-&-Roll revolution in the 1960s (advancements in electric guitars also did some heavy lifting).
So… feed our artists?
But you are creating the image as it’s often never what you intended on the first try. If anything they are editors, and last I checked we aren’t taking any rights away from editors. Someone else made the material and “you” manipulated it into a better product or into what your vision actually was.
Editors also don’t have copyright protections on what they edit
Even if I were to grant you that generative AI is just “describing an illustration”: other people say there is a world of difference between painting something with your hands and using a mouse, yet I think digital illustration is as real as physical illustration. Yet other people say there is a world of difference between creating something from the ground up and using store-bought materials and tools, yet I don’t discount artists who do just that.
But I don’t grant you that, because if I simply describe an illustration, the generative AI will not give me anything close to what I want. I have to learn the prompting language of the model (what words and phrases result in what?), I have to learn the influence the many different parameters have on the output, and I have to learn how to use things like prompt weighting, negative prompts and the like to get what I want. It’s something completely different from describing an illustration.
And that’s ignoring things like variant generation, inpainting, outpainting and the many different things that are completely removed from just “describing an illustration”.
Same goes for lightning a fire without and with a lighter.
🤓
He did some touch up in photoshop before submitting it.
Touching up your photograph or painting does not make it mine.
So…he did something and then by a process something beautiful was created. How is that different from pour painting?
He put words into a box == he just tipped over a can of paintNow I’m just hoping some idiot out there is trying to copyright melting crayons down a blank canvas.
This seems to follow a similar line of thought ( On Art In Context )
Yea, we’re well into DADA-ist territory to find interesting reference points for the timeless question of “what is art” in this discussion.
I’m curious: how do you feel this relates? Does the banana feel like it should or should not be art and/or copyrighted? Is it an energy/effort quality being compared to the end result? Or just the concept vs physical manifestation of the concept?
Yes, US copyright law requires human involvement to grant authorship. AI generated works are not eligible for copyright and it’s unlikely to change unless copyright legislation goes through to yet further restrict copyright.
Did you read the article? In this case he put in quite a bit of work to generate and alter the image:
He sent a written explanation to the Copyright Office detailing how much he’d done to manipulate what Midjourney conjured, as well as how much he fiddled with the raw image, using Adobe Photoshop to fix flaws and Gigapixel AI to increase the size and resolution. He specified that creating the painting had required at least 624 text prompts and input revisions.
And he is essentially claiming that the work should be transformative enough to be copyrightable. Even if the original image is not.
That all makes this case more interesting then a lot of others in the past as it is about AI generation with some human input. Not just someone generating vast amounts of work to find something they like (which likely will never be copyrightable). When this goes to the courts will will help to define the line of how much and what type of alterations are required to claim copyright over the works.
Not all AI work is the same, but I am glad that the copyright office is pushing back on these claims. Putting the burden of proof onto the author that they did have enough input into the work. The big open question ATM is how much input is needed and what that input can look like.
He’s lying though. He’s pretending the original (wierdly blurry) output was the only AI output, but the details and basically everything else is also AI generated. Nothing is his own skill, brushstroke or even artistic effort/craft, other than prompting the machine-image-generator that he sources the work from.
I only have this article to go on, and it does not suggest that at all. What sources do you have that show he is lying about his input to the artwork?
I follow artists on twitter. And they pointed out that he was trying to imply that the details were his own work.
Who is they? Do you have links?
I’m not trying to be critical or skeptical, just want to be as informed as possible.
The solution would be to cancel copyright and make everything free for everyone
Nothing that judicial, legislative, and regulatory capture can’t turn around. Just need enough money and time.
I give it 5 years at most
Funny situation indeed. Thoughts:
- Copyright is particularly artificial and openly amenable to change to suit the needs of the economy and creators it applies to. So treating this as open ended is probably necessary.
- Copyright has for a long time happily provided varying degrees of protection by recognising that one may hold copyright over a work but only over a “thin” or relatively minor aspect of the work.
- While there seems to be broader factors involved here regarding the power and market dynamics afforded artists and corporations should AI copyright be protected, there also seems to be plenty of scope to recognise that actual original work can be behind an AI work, however “thin” and distinct from the ordinary categories (eg Music, Literature etc) it may be. Indeed I would question how much the judges involved actually understand this enough.
- Does anyone know how this policy is tracking with or affected by policies in whether the AI engines themselves are infringing copyright?
While my thinking is in line with what @[email protected] and @[email protected] have already said, why can’t “AI artists” just do what everybody in a profit-seeking situation does and just lie about it? “No your honor, our studies have shown cigarette smoking is not hazardous to your health,” “yes, your honor, OxyContin is completely safe,” or in this case “yes, your honor, I created this illustration.” If your conscience is really bothering you, you could claim it was AI-assisted. I wouldn’t think there’d be a “Big Eyes” prove-you-painted-that courtroom case. Am I wrong?
It detectable by actual artists, trained eyes, and probably other ai algos. Prompters have no true artistic skill 80 percent of the time, so they rely on AI to even do the finer details.
There are a few actual artists who use AI in the way scammers do (rather than as a tool to enhance their workflow), but they are rare.
Our thinking is not that different. There is a world of difference of describing an image and creating it.
But I have to strongly disagree with the rest of your assessment. Beyond the flood of six-fingered waifu, I’ve seen some beautiful, legitimate works created by this new tool. If you have to use an “ai algo” you’ve already defeated the purpose. It’s illustrations we’re discussing here, not banknotes.
BTW, do you consider Photoshop/Krita/GIMP artists “scammers”? Blender/Maya/Cinema4D artists? Who are these “actual artists” of which you speak?
In any case, we’re still in uncharted territory. And personally I’m not crazy about the work in question. It LOOKS (by my “actual artist trained eyes”) AI generated, regardless of the human Photoshop retouching involved.
BTW, do you consider Photoshop/Krita/GIMP artists “scammers”? Blender/Maya/Cinema4D artists? Who are these “actual artists” of which you speak?
This comparison automatically invalidates any point you may have made.
You say our thinking is not so different, and then defend machine-generated art as legitimate creation?
To be clear, when I say AI tools, I mean for collecting references, making poses and future enhanced basic transform/select/etc tools. I don’t mean generating entire complete peices of art.
Selling AI art on platforms that actual artists sell their work on, is a scam. Since illegitimate work is flooding human creations. NFTs are often scams too.
I still think we are more or less on the same page. I also agree with your position on NFTs. Nevertheless, “machine-generated art” as you’ve called it IS legitimate creation, just like canned baked beans is legitimate creation, just like the act of making scrambled eggs is creation. Notice that I never mentioned anything QUALITATIVE about the process. I’ve never referred to these works as “art” (however you’d like to define that) but “illustrations” which is all they are and again, for the most part, they are visibly AI…but there are exceptions, rarely without human intervention (retouching). If someone wants to sell their AI-generated illustrations, what’s the problem? Same with NFTs. What do I or you care? It’s your moral obligation to part a fool from their money.
That said, since we’ve veered way off course of the original question, MY PERSONAL OPINION is there is next to no expression of the human condition (define that as you will) in StableDiffusion/Midjourney/whatever-engine “art” and is merely (“merely,” he says!) putting the “infinite monkeys theorem” into practice. While chance and chaos is good (and not only in art), a foundation is always necessary. If “you”, untrained in composition, art history and materials, you think describing images using a certain language/method is “art”, become a writer. We’re all waiting for your bestseller.
Have a wonderfull day and thanks for the chat!
Cool so ai art created from copyright input has no copyright cuz the input isn’t considered part of the copyright.
It goes from the same idea that if you saw someone else’s art and made your own art, the copyright of the new art would be yours, and not the one who inspired you.
We’ve seen edge cases in the music industry (Ray Parker Jr.‘s Ghostbusters vs. Huey Lewis and the News’ Hip To Be Square ) though in most cases in music, artists routinely borrow each other’s elements.
The problem is that AI generative art still requires effort from the programmer (the one who prompted the AI) and went through process of telling it what to do, curating the output, running it back through the AI again to add new elements. If that process is sufficiently long, then it warrants copyright. If that process is insufficiently long, then it challenges the copyrightable merits of artists who make quick art.
In my opinion (removed from the whole AI controversy) is that intellectual property law has been long abused, not by artists and creators but by publishers and studio owners who have used their landlord-esque positions to take control of most art, and then extend their IP rights while denying the public a robust public domain.
And they are the ones that are going to ultimately be hurt by the death of IP laws. Artists will still do art, but for the sake of expression, and then it’s a matter of the rest of society making sure they’re not exhausted by their day-job (which, according to the strikers in Hollywood, they totally are).
Off topic but anyone know if you can download this art in high-res from somewhere?
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