I’m kind of mixed on this, because I think AI art is pretty cool, but I also hate our current copyright system. I kind of agree with the copyright office that images generated by a prompt should not be covered by copyright. What if I just type in “cat” and set the seed to 1, and try to copyright that? What if I copyright the image for EVERY seed with that prompt? Literally anyone else could easily generate the exact same image, and are they going to be in violation of my copyright now?
It gets really complicated though. What if I draw a sketch and then feed it into stable diffusion to flesh it out further? Then I do extensive inpainting across the whole thing, then I take it to Photoshop and do further edits. At this point, I think it’s fair to say this is an original image of my own creation, which should be eligible for copyright protection.
If they can prove that all of the art used to train an AI model is their own art, and treated the output as derivative work, then they should be able to enforce copyright the output of that specific AI. Using public domain works might be possible, although there would need to be some kind of significant portion that is theirs so the AI isn’t used to copyright public works that were simply fed through the AI.
Note that I didn’t say who created the AI model, as the AI is a tool and not the creator of the work. The problem with the current implementations of AI and copyright are that the models are trained on a mix of copyrighted and public domain works so there is no way to know who to identify the derivative work that comes out of the AI.
Personal opinion as I see AI as something like Photoshop that outputs something with a change based on an algorithm, with the AI just being a far more complex algorithm.
Literally anyone else could easily generate the exact same image, and are they going to be in violation of my copyright now?
It is already the case that if an AI generates an image that happens to be effectively identical to a copyrighted one the person who generated the image can be in violation of that copyright. It doesn’t matter how the copyright originated.
In the case of your cat example, though, the solution is trivial. Use a random seed. There’s far too many potential images any given model could generate to ever copyright all of them, or even a tiny sliver of them, and if that did miraculously happen just train the model a little more and you get a whole new set of outputs. It’s unfeasible.
I’m kind of mixed on this, because I think AI art is pretty cool, but I also hate our current copyright system. I kind of agree with the copyright office that images generated by a prompt should not be covered by copyright. What if I just type in “cat” and set the seed to 1, and try to copyright that? What if I copyright the image for EVERY seed with that prompt? Literally anyone else could easily generate the exact same image, and are they going to be in violation of my copyright now?
It gets really complicated though. What if I draw a sketch and then feed it into stable diffusion to flesh it out further? Then I do extensive inpainting across the whole thing, then I take it to Photoshop and do further edits. At this point, I think it’s fair to say this is an original image of my own creation, which should be eligible for copyright protection.
Your second example is the artist doing a significant portion of the work and would be copyrightable.
What if we go back to example 1 but this time they design the AI themselves?
If they can prove that all of the art used to train an AI model is their own art, and treated the output as derivative work, then they should be able to enforce copyright the output of that specific AI. Using public domain works might be possible, although there would need to be some kind of significant portion that is theirs so the AI isn’t used to copyright public works that were simply fed through the AI.
Note that I didn’t say who created the AI model, as the AI is a tool and not the creator of the work. The problem with the current implementations of AI and copyright are that the models are trained on a mix of copyrighted and public domain works so there is no way to know who to identify the derivative work that comes out of the AI.
Personal opinion as I see AI as something like Photoshop that outputs something with a change based on an algorithm, with the AI just being a far more complex algorithm.
It is already the case that if an AI generates an image that happens to be effectively identical to a copyrighted one the person who generated the image can be in violation of that copyright. It doesn’t matter how the copyright originated.
In the case of your cat example, though, the solution is trivial. Use a random seed. There’s far too many potential images any given model could generate to ever copyright all of them, or even a tiny sliver of them, and if that did miraculously happen just train the model a little more and you get a whole new set of outputs. It’s unfeasible.