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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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This doesn't change much because of a simple difference: This was an AI product put in wholesale.
There was no human intervention in (visually) creating this product, thus no human can claim copyright.
Studios aren't gonna do this when replacing some of their writers, because AI may not be good enough yet. Instead, it'll be a smaller team, they'll do the edits, and they can claim copyright.
This only really matters If AI advances to the point where we can completely create a full movie or TV show from scratch with just purely prompting, which, currently, we can not.
A spoof of Seinfeld runs 24/7 from only AI input after the initial prompt. It is bad, but exists. Depending on your quality standards, we are there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
The rigging and models are copyrightable.
Having tried to do something similar, "Nothing, Forever" must have some pretty serious coding to engineer the prompts and reconstruct tiny snippets of AI generated dialogue into a full meaningful script. I wonder if that's enough for the creators to claim copyright.
That's what I see likely. Writers will eventually use this as a tool. Say setup a scene and generate 40 versions. Pick the best one, edit it, feed back what you improved, generate another 40...
We are still reading Shakespeare and I think part of the reason was how he wrote those plays.
Write the scene, pass to actors, actors have notes, rewrite scene, pass to actors, have actors act out scenes, make changes, run changes by actors, rewrite scene, perform scene, watch audiences (are they laughing at the jokes? Are they sad when they are supposed to be sad?), make edits,.....
He did it like a collaborative activity and gradual refinement. Almost none of his plays have an official indisputable version, instead we have multiple versions with slight differences.
Stop worrying about your jobs writers, this is a tool. Use it.
It's only a tool for lazy, shot by, hack writers. Like the writers for Big Bang or any kids show by Disney.
Why would a real writer need AI to steal words from others? Do you think Neil Gaimon needs help from a shitty program to write? Or any other high caliber writer? No. Because AI is for untalented artists and writers. They are the ones getting terrified that it might replace them.
Which speaks to their skillsets.
The thing is there was uncountable amout of people intervention. AI art is derivative work achieved via mathematical means.
Not in the copyright sense.
Yes, there were millions of people's work that was in the training data that was used to make whatever AI program created those AI images, but (at least right now) that isn't considered for legal ownership.
The US Copyright Office is taking the stance that there must be human effort that can be seen/pointed to in the final product directly in order to count as an "Author".
Think about that guy with the monkey taking a photo, and how that got into the public domain. Just because the company selling the camera "created the camera used to take the photo" (made the AI model) or because someone using the camera "set their own settings for the photo to be its best quality" (typed in a proper prompt for the model) doesn't mean that either party "owns" that image.
That whole paradigm could maybe change if/when AI LLM programs get seriously regulated, but even so, I personally don't think that changes the chain of ownership, nor should it.
So it's the same as when the film industry got started?
The element of human creativity derives from the Constitution.
"To promote art the author has the exclusive right." Something like that.
By that logic, all human art is derivative work achieved via biological means. No artist works in a vacuum. Everything an artist sees subtly influences their style.
This is why "intelectual property" is such bullshit
The work itself must be a product of creativity, reduced to a tangible medium.
The code that makes the art, the prompts, could be copyrighted. But not the output.