This may not be the reason he's "losing" money here, but I was struck by how much less... impressive that piece is to me now compared to when I first saw it. (Visually impressive; I've always known it was from Midjourney.)
When the news first broke about it winning an award, I was like "well damn, I can see why—it's visually striking!" But the longer I look at it, and the more LLM-generated images I see in general, the less this one stands out to me. It's still pleasing, but seems less unique in both its strengths and flaws: the soft glowing lights, the tasteful muted palette, the random greebled details.
And it bothers me that the glowing orb/archway in the center has a distinct border around most of its circumference, but the part from 4 to 6 o'clock is fuzzier and blends into the nearby wall(?) :P
AI-generated images are interesting in that, in general, the more you look at them, and in particular the more you look at the detail, the worse they look. This is, arguably, one simple way to distinguish them from actual art.
Pretty images are worthless, there's no point staring at images that have were made without intention or effort. Making a prompt is hardly any effort and more of a lucky hit.
Based on his argument, the human component should and rightfully be copyrightable. In this case, it's the prompt or conversation he had with the AI. That should definitely be able to be copyrightable, but I agree that the image itself should not.
This is the fundamental problem with AI -- if the government isn't willing to protect it, there is fundamentally no market for it. What does that say about the value of the actual AI tools? If the content and images you produce with them can no longer be protected, what value are the tools used to create them?
>in this case, it's the prompt or conversation he had with the AI. That should definitely be able to be copyrightable, but I agree that the image itself should not.
If you accept that, does that mean source code is copyrightable but compiled code is not?
I'm kind-of ok with the raw output of diffusion models being public domain. It gets more complicated when The process is more than just Text->Image. Artists spending large amounts of time iterating, compositing, inpainting etc. are applying their knowledge of style, design, colour, and lighting.
Dear journalists/others: for the love of all that is good, please for f's sake stop calling these people "artists". It reinforces the lie they tell themselves.
They are nothing of the sort.
They are, at most, and even this is overly generous, someone commissioning a "fake artist" (AI) to make something for them
I always wondered why there was an immediate rush to call them AI artists despite the first and predominant use being writing. Even a prompt is just writing text. Even with all the fancy visual tools, you still need to write a prompt somewhere along the lines.
Yet “AI writers” isn’t really a thing journalists/bloggers refer to them as. It’s interesting from the outside, as neither a writer or an artist.
As a photographer you did not create the universe you are walking around in, you prompt your camera to look at a certain location and you push a button.
This ^^^. So many cannot see the blatant parallel with photography here -- there is a rich art historic debate regarding the value of photography that went through very similar stages of rejection (and ultimate acceptance). This is a fantastic example of George Santayana's famous aphorism.
This artist won a $300 prize at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition 2022. I'm a bit confused what millions he's talking about but in my opinion the best bet for him would've been to commission some artists to create a real painting of his work and strike the iron while hot. Did anybody think that gen AI artwork would be a hot market for long?
I assume he added up the number of times people have used the image and multiply it by some fee.
But he's wrong. If there were a fee to use this image, basically zero people would use it. They'd all go to midjourney and make their own better images for free.
According to my communications with the US copyright office, you never get a global copyright by editing. At best you get a copyright on your changes - and that only if they are copywritable on their own. Minor changes to wording or tweaking an image would generally not pass that threshold. It is a case by case judgment as to the status of any individual change.
Also the other way - if you use an AI tool to edit an original image, is the output copyrightable? Is the answer different if the AI thing is doing a generative fill vs a bigger change? I guess this is the more financially important version of when Facebook was tagging any use of AI-powered tools in eg Photoshop as an AI generated image.
It's fun to ponder how modern society will evolve if this same mindset is applied to other domains that generative AI is eventually used for, specifically sciences. If AI (art) works cannot be copyrighted, there's hope that the same would apply to the other domains and prohibiting AI-generated works from being patented. Imagine AI finding 50 new ways of making insulin that don't violate the existing patents...
One can dream, right?! This could cripple monopolies and bring more power back to small businesses and individuals, as the capitalistic playing-field is leveled.
Last I heard, nothing generated by an LLM can be copyrighted. Copyright is for protecting the intellectual work of humans, not computers.
The closest I've heard is a LLM generated book had portions of the book copyrighted by the "Author", but only the portions where the author had significantly altered the LLM generated text.
The irony is so thick that you can eat it with spoon. Is like stealing meat from a market and then arguing that it is his, because he already transformed it into a meat pie, and that's his own product now. :)
Y'all really want to be mad at this but this is one of those tragic cases where the worst person is correct.
* AI companies claim that training should not be covered by copyright. This says nothing at all about the model outputs which can still violate copyright.
* Curation makes something a copyrightable work. This applies to photographers and machine generated art.
The copyright office's ruling doesn't change that second point although in practice it might raise the bar.
I know one or two countries have "database rights" which give a special type of IP protection to collections of methodically collected facts, like digital maps and phone books. But I've never heard of "curation" being copyrightable in and of itself.
Genuinely asking: would/should the ownership rest solely with the person promoting the model, or would part of all of it belong to the model itself (and/or its creator)? My hunch is that this is a somewhat unprecedented scenario, so comparing Midjourney to a tool like Photoshop wouldn't be completely accurate—in the sense that of course Adobe doesn't hold the rights to things you make in Photoshop—but there could very well be established cases I'm unaware of!
No, curation of a public domain painting does not make your scan of the painting copyrighted, even is someone somehow take your scan in his own book. I think it's called integration works, and basically the copyright remain with who owned them in the first place (cc/public domain images makes genAI a very fun case for IP lawyers. I think the 'nah, not human=not IP' is a good punt).
I don't think copyright applies to the image itself. The work of curation can be copyrighted, but here it's trivial, just selecting one image. If he published a book of AI-generated artwork, the curation of images could be copyrighted as a whole, but each individual image would not be copyrighted.
The AI generated content would not be copyrightable. Manipulations of that AI content by people would still be copyrightable.
Copyrightable output of pure AI is the nightmare situation. Imagine Disney trains an AI on purely content from in-house work-for-hire artists. They would then be free to generate an infinite amount of content that they claim ownership of.
Copyright law, like all laws are intended to benefit society, not individuals. They can be changed as circumstances change. Sure, lobbyists can have a strong influence and attempt to tilt the playing field towards some individuals, but the primary strength of lobbyists is that they show up. Change goes to those who show up.
It means that studios will shift how they lobby for copyright law as they train internal AI models on their asset catalogs. Eventually, Allen's claim will be mainstream.
Disney may well buy AI companies that may compete with them (like a next level acquisition equivalent of when they bought Pixar) and copyright everything instead.
We live in an insane world where capitalism is a weapon which destroys and limits art, rather than art enriching us and the world.
The inpainting tool in Photoshop is AI. If you use the inpainting tool, congratulations you're an AI artist. Should copyrighted of any images produced with the inpainting tool be ignored?
Nature photographers can spend weeks or months scouting out a proper locale, picking the vantage point, waiting for just the right moment (or collecting and curating hundreds of moments), and then doing (possibly) final touch-ups in a photo editor.
Their work is copyrightable, and it can be argued the only "work" they did was pushing a shutter button and maybe some touch-ups. Nature did the rest.
We extend copyright protection to them; it's difficult for me to see why we wouldn't extend copyright protection to AI-synthesized works on similar grounds.
Can we please end this delusional demand that property rights can be applied to data? Pretty please? If not now, then when? How much more unfeasible does copyright need to be before we move on? How much more unfeasible can it really get? When are we, as participants in a society, going to simply give up on playing this ridiculous game?
Copyright demands that we all participate in its own failure. That is, all of us but a select few who have already won the game.
> “The refusal of the U.S. Copyright Office to recognize human authorship in AI-assisted creations highlights a critical issue in modern intellectual property law. As AI continues to evolve, it is imperative that our legal frameworks adapt to protect the rights of those who harness these technologies for creative expression,” Allen’s lawyer, Pester, recently said.
Got it. So while substantial efforts have been made to claim that real artists—people who spent years of their lives working to produce actual works of art—have no legitimate claim to legal protection from AI companies, the people that should get legal protection are the people using Midjourney.
I don't agree that AI generated work should grant a copyright to the prompter, but it's not an inconsistent position. The belief that training a model is fair use does not preclude the belief that copying the work directly is not.
Real AI artists are spending hundreds of hours and their human labor is absolutely copyrightable.
There are three types of labor-intensive AI art: (1) ComfyUI node graph editing, (2) canvas-based compositions that use AI as a filter or brush, and (3) large multi-day compositions typically built for film and gaming. Sometimes all of these manual and laborious methodologies are employed for one work.
We're so past the "prompting" phase: artists are building complicated workflows, manually drawing and sketching on diffusion canvases, and spending days precisely rendering the videos that they want. It's more like Photoshop combined with custom-built shader pipelines than Midjourney. Or a long virtual filming and editing process with deliberate intention.
You wouldn't call algorithmic manipulation by Photoshop non-copyrightable. If AI is just a "brush" employed by a human, and the human is doing a substantial amount of work, it shouldn't render the entire work uncopyrightable.
If you'd like to see what actual AI artists are doing, check these out to get started:
You can't possibly tell me that these are uncopyrightable.
And while you may or may not like these pieces yet, there is clearly something incredible is happening here. These are real artists. And as individual creators and small teams, they will soon be capable of taking on the likes of studios like Pixar without the millions of dollars of capital the big studios have employed.
I don't think I agree. I know a woman who live by copying paintings (huge ones usually, only saw her copy 2-6m wide painting) in different museums, then sell the copy to buyers who want them in his manor. She doesn't copy 1 for 1 (it's impossible to get all the brush strokes right, even though she spend days studying them), and in fact specialize in 3 specific styles to avoid visible divergence, but her work isn't copyrightable. She spend arguably way, waaaaaay more time on her paintings than 'ai artists' (I met her in a art museum in Lille where she was halfway through the painting after 2 months, she became fast friend with my dad though, spent hours speaking about pigment and brush techniques), that doesn't make her work any more copyrighted.
The U.S. Copyright Office has made a bogus claim -- 'work derived from AI platforms “contained no human authorship”' -- my belief is that this incorrect and probably illegal edict is simply a poor excuse for the office to neglect its mandate. They do not have the resources and technological footing to register the flood of AI art they would likely receive for copyright protection. Regardless of chutzpah I support Allen's move against it. Style has not been copyrightable, living human artists learn and are influenced from their exposure to the broad history of art, it is not somehow different for AI models to do so as well. Infringement lies in the output of AI models, not on its inputs. Artists using generative art making techniques have been provided copyright protections for generations. While inconvenient for the office, AI mediated works also warrant protection.
spondylosaurus|1 year ago
When the news first broke about it winning an award, I was like "well damn, I can see why—it's visually striking!" But the longer I look at it, and the more LLM-generated images I see in general, the less this one stands out to me. It's still pleasing, but seems less unique in both its strengths and flaws: the soft glowing lights, the tasteful muted palette, the random greebled details.
And it bothers me that the glowing orb/archway in the center has a distinct border around most of its circumference, but the part from 4 to 6 o'clock is fuzzier and blends into the nearby wall(?) :P
rsynnott|1 year ago
ginvok|1 year ago
harisec|1 year ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_model
iamleppert|1 year ago
This is the fundamental problem with AI -- if the government isn't willing to protect it, there is fundamentally no market for it. What does that say about the value of the actual AI tools? If the content and images you produce with them can no longer be protected, what value are the tools used to create them?
Lerc|1 year ago
If you accept that, does that mean source code is copyrightable but compiled code is not?
I'm kind-of ok with the raw output of diffusion models being public domain. It gets more complicated when The process is more than just Text->Image. Artists spending large amounts of time iterating, compositing, inpainting etc. are applying their knowledge of style, design, colour, and lighting.
fny|1 year ago
If the food you produce with them can no longer be protected, what value are the tools used to create them?
deepsun|1 year ago
E.g. medieval craftsmen assumed that monopolies were good, but today we consider them bad.
kup0|1 year ago
They are nothing of the sort.
They are, at most, and even this is overly generous, someone commissioning a "fake artist" (AI) to make something for them
lovethevoid|1 year ago
Yet “AI writers” isn’t really a thing journalists/bloggers refer to them as. It’s interesting from the outside, as neither a writer or an artist.
egypturnash|1 year ago
moshegramovsky|1 year ago
EasyMark|1 year ago
mensetmanusman|1 year ago
As a photographer you did not create the universe you are walking around in, you prompt your camera to look at a certain location and you push a button.
waffletower|1 year ago
JohnFen|1 year ago
onemoresoop|1 year ago
beej71|1 year ago
But he's wrong. If there were a fee to use this image, basically zero people would use it. They'd all go to midjourney and make their own better images for free.
dvngnt_|1 year ago
> When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship.
> As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.
but i think that's only if it's entirely prompt driven. you could argue that manual edits or additions would allow it to to have copyright?
sgc|1 year ago
mcintyre1994|1 year ago
throwaway918299|1 year ago
Oarch|1 year ago
volleygman180|1 year ago
One can dream, right?! This could cripple monopolies and bring more power back to small businesses and individuals, as the capitalistic playing-field is leveled.
caskethopper|1 year ago
falcolas|1 year ago
The closest I've heard is a LLM generated book had portions of the book copyrighted by the "Author", but only the portions where the author had significantly altered the LLM generated text.
Yizahi|1 year ago
Spivak|1 year ago
* AI companies claim that training should not be covered by copyright. This says nothing at all about the model outputs which can still violate copyright.
* Curation makes something a copyrightable work. This applies to photographers and machine generated art.
The copyright office's ruling doesn't change that second point although in practice it might raise the bar.
michaelt|1 year ago
Are you sure about that?
I know one or two countries have "database rights" which give a special type of IP protection to collections of methodically collected facts, like digital maps and phone books. But I've never heard of "curation" being copyrightable in and of itself.
spondylosaurus|1 year ago
orwin|1 year ago
EnergyAmy|1 year ago
bickfordb|1 year ago
lainga|1 year ago
Lerc|1 year ago
Copyrightable output of pure AI is the nightmare situation. Imagine Disney trains an AI on purely content from in-house work-for-hire artists. They would then be free to generate an infinite amount of content that they claim ownership of.
Copyright law, like all laws are intended to benefit society, not individuals. They can be changed as circumstances change. Sure, lobbyists can have a strong influence and attempt to tilt the playing field towards some individuals, but the primary strength of lobbyists is that they show up. Change goes to those who show up.
waffletower|1 year ago
Bilal_io|1 year ago
partomniscient|1 year ago
We live in an insane world where capitalism is a weapon which destroys and limits art, rather than art enriching us and the world.
zoklet-enjoyer|1 year ago
mikro2nd|1 year ago
jms703|1 year ago
shadowgovt|1 year ago
So technically, he has zero right now and is begging the government to use force of law (i.e. threat of violence) to direct millions to him.
DonHopkins|1 year ago
...I gave up on my first...
ilwrjtlaiwjertl|1 year ago
Manuel_D|1 year ago
falcolas|1 year ago
Or rather, it should get the same copyright consideration as all the artwork that went into building the models.
So still yes.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
remon|1 year ago
shadowgovt|1 year ago
Their work is copyrightable, and it can be argued the only "work" they did was pushing a shutter button and maybe some touch-ups. Nature did the rest.
We extend copyright protection to them; it's difficult for me to see why we wouldn't extend copyright protection to AI-synthesized works on similar grounds.
dorianjp|1 year ago
thomastjeffery|1 year ago
Can we please end this delusional demand that property rights can be applied to data? Pretty please? If not now, then when? How much more unfeasible does copyright need to be before we move on? How much more unfeasible can it really get? When are we, as participants in a society, going to simply give up on playing this ridiculous game?
Copyright demands that we all participate in its own failure. That is, all of us but a select few who have already won the game.
MisterBastahrd|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
hyggetrold|1 year ago
Got it. So while substantial efforts have been made to claim that real artists—people who spent years of their lives working to produce actual works of art—have no legitimate claim to legal protection from AI companies, the people that should get legal protection are the people using Midjourney.
ToValueFunfetti|1 year ago
echelon|1 year ago
There are three types of labor-intensive AI art: (1) ComfyUI node graph editing, (2) canvas-based compositions that use AI as a filter or brush, and (3) large multi-day compositions typically built for film and gaming. Sometimes all of these manual and laborious methodologies are employed for one work.
We're so past the "prompting" phase: artists are building complicated workflows, manually drawing and sketching on diffusion canvases, and spending days precisely rendering the videos that they want. It's more like Photoshop combined with custom-built shader pipelines than Midjourney. Or a long virtual filming and editing process with deliberate intention.
You wouldn't call algorithmic manipulation by Photoshop non-copyrightable. If AI is just a "brush" employed by a human, and the human is doing a substantial amount of work, it shouldn't render the entire work uncopyrightable.
If you'd like to see what actual AI artists are doing, check these out to get started:
https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/
Here's something that was "prompted", but that took days of effort in pre-production, composing, and editing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ftvole/ouroboros_...
Here's something else that was built up from lots of node graphs and drawing and editing. This is a tremendously complicated work:
https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/comments/1fse25a/putting_th...
You can't possibly tell me that these are uncopyrightable.
And while you may or may not like these pieces yet, there is clearly something incredible is happening here. These are real artists. And as individual creators and small teams, they will soon be capable of taking on the likes of studios like Pixar without the millions of dollars of capital the big studios have employed.
ProllyInfamous|1 year ago
orwin|1 year ago
croes|1 year ago
You can't have your cake and eat it.
uxhacker|1 year ago
DonHopkins|1 year ago
waffletower|1 year ago
wetpaws|1 year ago
[deleted]