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AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says In Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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So if I use a hammer to create art I can't protect it because I used a hammer? Exchange hammer for AI
From my reading it was more like if you created art with a hammer the copyright doesn't automatically go to the hammer which would then transfer to you via the "work for hire" clause. So if you then say lent out that hammer to a bunch of other artists to make art with you would theoretically have a copyright claim to everything they made using your hammer.
Only if it is some sort auto-magic hammer that you can give a description of what you want, but the hammer actually decides what the final piece of art looks like and produces it on the medium without you needing to make the strikes.
Now if you took the output of that auto-magic hammer and than significantly reworked it to meet your vision, that derivative output would be copyrightable.
Giving a description of what you want doesn’t count as producing it is what this seems to be saying. Which is not in favor of people who just want to plug random things into a black box to use that black box as a cash machine.
This also means that the person who owns the black box can’t steal ownership of your output by merely being the owner of the black box. This would be equivalent to you leasing a printer and the company you’re leasing it from saying they own anything you print.
So good ruling. You can copyright the output if YOU rework the output, but you can’t copyright the direct output.
Way I see it a hammer is a tool, like a paintbrush or a camera or Photoshop or chatGPT.
If you use the hammer to break a plate and call it art, you get the copyright.
If you set the hammer up on a machine and feed it a million plates to smash, but with your direction and intent - to choose the types of plates, speed of the hammer, to use the tools to output different results - its still art and you still get the copyright.
But if your hammer sits inside a Platesmasher 9000 which randomly takes plates as input, selects which plates to smash, smashes them, assesses the results, smashes more, then outputs a perfect smashed plate without you doing anything - that's not copyright able. You can't sya you deserve the copyright, as you did not meaningfully contribute to the work - the Platesmasher did everything. You cant point to the output of the system and say "the system made that and deserves copyright" because it's just an algorithm, it doesn't know or have intent behind what it's doing, and can't be assigned a right.
What this does is stop corporations from building a million Platesmashers and claiming copyright on a billion versions of smashed plates - human intervention is required as part of the creative process to use the tools in order for there be a right in the first place.
Maybe you could get an AI to write a better argument. The hammer doesn't steal others work to make its own.
You could train a LLM using only your own art, and then generate art that is based solely on your own. Do you not own that AI generated art?
The way I understand it if you did that and tried to take just the raw AI output and get a copyright on it you couldn't based on this ruling. But if it was one of the tools you used to create a piece of art even if it was just editing and making small changes to it to suit your creative vision based on what the AI put out then you could. It sounds like the judge is mainly talking about works solely generated by AI.
Also my understanding was that this guy was trying to get the AI generator itself to be considered the author for the things it generated for the purposes of copyright. Which would theoretically transfer to whatever entity is running the AI because of the "Work for Hire" clause.
Did you steal other's work to learn how to write that sentence?
It's a good thing they weren't making an argument then - but asking a (flawed) question. Just like comparing machine learning to stealing is a flawed comparison.
None of you AI boosters can make a coherent and cogent argument in good faith. Why is that?
Thank you for asking the question, because I'm sure you were not the only one that thinks that. How else are we supposed to learn?
It's a bit of a flawed comparison (AI vs a hammer) - but let me try.
If you put a single nail into wood with a hammer, which anyone with a hammer can also do, and even a hammer swinging machine could do without human input, you can't protect it.
If you put nails into wood with the hammer so that it shows a face, you can protect it. But you would still not be protecting the process of the single nail (even though the nail face is made up of repeating that process many times), you would specifically be protecting the identity of the face made of nails as your human artistic expression.
To bring it back to AI, if the AI can do it without sufficient input from a human author (eg. only a simple prompt, no post processing, no compositing, etc) it's likely not going to be protectable, since anyone can take the same AI model, use the same prompt, and get the same or very similar result as you did (which would be the equivalent of putting a single nail into the wood).
Take the output, modify it, refine it, composite it, and you're creating the hammer equivalent of a nail face. The end result was only possible because of your human input, and that means it can be protected.