[thurn]

One positive aspect of the status quo in the United States is that AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright. I think this is a great direction to go in, I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists. I'd love for us to lean into this -- you can make all the AI art you want, but it automatically gets a Creative Commons ShareAlike-style license!

[srackey]

Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)? Who would the burden of proof be on?

Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?

[kmeisthax]

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people who want to spam art platforms.

[rtpg]

"I claim this art was made by this person" "Who?" <gives name> "OK <name>. did you work on this?" "Where are related work products? Are there any? What about invoices? Simultaneous employment?"

The reality is that most legal things are determined by _convincing people of a truth_. Perhaps you can set up a whole scheme to "launder" AI art and attach names to them. And all the papertrail you generate doing this will show up in discovery in some lawsuit and the copyrights all disappear.

Laws are vibes, not code.

[geysersam]

Googled this because that was an astounding claim but Steam does in fact not have an anti ai art policy.

They don't allow ai art produced by models trained on material that the model makers don't have copyright to.

In practice that's a ban (currently) but in principle it isn't.

[bsder]

> Completely unenforceable.

Complete wrong. You just flip the defaults--something is AI unless you can prove otherwise.

This is done already and has precedent. Producing porn requires that you keep artifacts demonstrating that who the performers were, that they were of age, etc.

If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim.

In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records.

In the case of an individual doing digital only, that's a little harder. You probably have to keep some intermediate artifacts.

[thurn]

A company today has the burden of proof to demonstrate authorship of a claimed work when they sue for copyright infringement. This isn't a crazy expansion of that concept -- companies do not generally break the law just because there's a low chance of getting caught. Furthermore it's not hard to imagine, for example, a whistleblower calling out their employer for copyrighting AI works.

[colordrops]

Furthermore, what is the threshold for something to still legally be considered AI art once an artist's hand has modified it? What if they change the brightness? Fix a hand? completely replace a character in a scene? Illustrate most of the scene themselves but add an AI figure or background? Use AI to sharpen a hand drawn image?

[semiquaver]

  > AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright

It’s a bit more nuanced than that. Here is the relevant policy statement, which notes that some AI-assisted works are potentially eligible for registration and have indeed been registered, while works that are primarily the product of an AI are not.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

[teaearlgraycold]

Makes sense. Photoshop has had content-aware-fill for over a decade. That counts as AI as much as any diffuser does. I don't think those images should have their copyright invalidated.

[nwallin]

> I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists.

WotC's latest round of layoffs (within the past month or so) hit the art staff especially hard.

[Brybry]

The main source I've found for the December WotC layoffs is Christian Hoffer's Twitter[1] and only 3 of the ~20 people listed seem to be art staff.

Some of the lists, such as on Reddit, appear to (erroneously?) list a few artists who advertise themselves as still employed by WotC. [2]

[1] https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1734947730491932929

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/18ij198/list_of_kn...

[tbrownaw]

> status quo in the United States is that AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright.

Aren't they? I thought it was just that the copyright holder has to be a recognized legal entity (so, the copyright would have to belong to the human operator or their employer, not to the ai model itself).

[bjt]

From the article:

> Last September, the US Copyright Review Board decided that an image generated using Midjourney’s software could not be copyright due to how it was produced.

[nothercastle]

I do wonder if its a fruit of the poisoned tree argument and any AI derived work can’t be copyrighted because it used already dubious source material.

[kmeisthax]

No, it's a Butlerian Jihad[0] argument. The Copyright Office's argument holds even for a fully public domain training set. US copyright law is already speciesist[1] - you can't assign authorship to an animal - so computers are also forbidden from authorship.

[0] In the Dune universe, the "Butlerian Jihad" refers to a legal ban on thinking machines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

[corethree]

This is a horrible direction to start off. Especially given that we can't truly tell if an image is AI generated or not. What if I modify an AI generated image?

There's so many technicalities here that can be weaponized.

[542458]

I think (hypothetically, they may choose not to do this for a number of reasons) WoTC could still dramatically cut back on how much they pay artists by “outsourcing” things like backgrounds, extended art, etc to AI so long as the focal point of the piece is human-created and therefore copyrightable.

[AndyNemmity]

Ironically, there's a massive scandal with WoTC right now for doing this. They say they aren't using AI, the majority doesn't believe them due to artifacts only AI would produce for backgrounds.

[keiferski]

One question that is unclear to me is how this works if images are packaged with text or other content. For example; let’s say I write a book and then use AI images to illustrate it. It doesn’t seem logical to me that somehow the book would be copyrighted but the images inside the book wouldn’t be…? At some level, the “package” of images + text would supersede the two things separately. Otherwise you would have a situation where sharing the book is a copyright violation but sharing the images inside of it isn’t.

[rcxdude]

There's nothing particularly contradictory about that: there's already situations where that is the case. For example when a book contains images which are public domain, or where elements of the book like the facts within it are not copyrightable. Another interesting one is tabletop game manuals: the layout and presentation of the rules are copyrightable, but the game mechanics generally aren't. So you can make a book which just contains the rules and not be infringing copyright. Using AI-generated images would be exactly the same situation.

[two_in_one]

> AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright.

There is another bright side of it. This images can be used for AI training without copyright violation. Does this apply to texts as well?

[makeitdouble]

Won't they move to trademark protection instead, as it's a lot more flexible with less restrictions ?

Basically the same way Disney let copyright go but will fight for trademark to the bitter end ?

[galdosdi]

That won't work. Trademarks are a lot harder to establish -- it's not just automatic from the moment you publish it as with copyright. You have to first start using it, then always mention it's a trademark when using it (with the TM or R symbols for example), then wait for it to catch on, then file with the government some paperwork. (Iirc, exact process is probably similar but different, but the point is it's a lot more involved)

Trademark is intended to protect the holder from being impersonated, not from losing revenue from selling content.... So it's a lot easier to redistribute copies of trademarked work as long as you make it clear you are not affiliated with the trademark holder, in a manner which a reasonable person would heed.

So for example, if a piece of art is trademarked by Disney, and it is well known by the public, and I print a copy and put it in front of my shop, a reasonable observer might this my shop is owned, operated, or endorsed by Fisney. So that's not OK.

If instead I sell copies of that art in my shop, and make it clear to everyone I sell it to that I am in no way affiliated with Disney and this is totally unauthorized by Disney, I'm probably fine.

Trademarks are also industry specific. That's why Apple Records and Apple Computer both exist -- as long as a reasonable person could not confuse them, it's OK.

In short, trademarks are very very different from copyrights. They protect different activities.

In fact I should not have used the phrase trademarked work. A work (like an image or movie or novel or software program) does not get trademarked. The character, slogan, logo, product name, company name, brand name, color scheme, etc used therein to identify the brand, is what is trademarked. Very different.

I will add more examples, this time to illustrate copyright, which works basically the opposite : Suppose mickey mouse were not trademarked. Then while it would be illegal to redistribute verbatim copies of a recent Mickey mouse picture authored by Disney, as well as any modified remixed versions based on that verbatim picture, it would be perfectly legal to draw totally new art involving the same character as long as it was completely new without referring to the copyrighted work, because coypright protects the right of Disney to make money off distributing that picture they made, and they did not make or contribute to making your mickey drawing, and while you are using a character they came up with, in the absence of trademark, copyright isn't intended to protect the public from being confused as to who they are dealing with as trademark is.

IANAL this is based on decades of amateur interest in IP law.

[foota]

I don't think you can broadly use trademark protection though, can you?

[freedomben]

Wow, this is incredibly insightful! I'm completely on board, for whatever that's worth (which is pretty much nothing).

That would really be a great way to structure things.

[GaggiX]

Does this mean that if, for example, a court rules that I cannot train an image generation model on copyrighted material, I can train it on AI-generated images?