Technology

Don't post the entire article in the OP, please. You'll end up getting C&D's sent to your instance admins if publishers keep seeing this, because it's - ironically enough in this context - copyright infringement.

Just post a snippet to stay within fair use. Don't ruin Lemmy for all of us over something so silly.

That's great! It means artists can continue to use AI art for projects they don't intend to sell, and Hollywood, which already has too much power, still relies on others.

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, "The Creativity Machine" register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI's the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What's clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn't work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I'm glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

Hope: AI gets so good that people using a personal computer can produce full TV series with a single prompt, delare it uncopyrightable, and share the best results online as a alternative to corporate stuff.

Fear: IP law becomes so disconnected from the current situation that it prompts governments start over from scratch. New IP law is written by the corporations for the corporations, and any form of creativity is restricted and monetized.

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.

couldn't help but lol at this quote:

US copyright law is designed to adapt to the times.

This doesn't mean artists or movie studios can't make AI creations and sell them. It just means they can't stop people from copying and distributing them.

If a well regarded artist uses generative AI to make art, then prints a single copy or a limited edition and signs them, they can sell them. Other people can copy it, but it won't be the same. They won't have the same value as the ones the artist produced, and they won't be signed.

Hollywood will just do what they always do. Pour billions more into lobbying the government until they pass something that will allow certain exemptions.

seems a pretty easy solution here. just say you've written it.. no reliable software exists for proving text is AI generated.

As a person who creates both visual arts and music, though admittedly for my own enjoyment alone, I can't bring myself to ever recognize any of the AI generated stuff as Art. None of it is any good if you look at it close. It's wrong in every way. The machines were supposed to come for our jobs, but that was supposed to mean factory production and construction and shit.

Talk about an inaccurate headline. The conclusion here isn't that AI art can't be copyrighted, it's that AI cannot be a copyright holder. But it's AI, so we can't actually expect anyone to pull their head out of their ass and give it enough thought to write an article that isn't garbage.

Instead we have yet another thread about this case in which no one actually has any idea what the ruling was. Very informative.

You didn't create it so why the hell should you be able to copyright it?

Interesting that he filed the original copyright application as a work for hire situation. I guarantee he didn’t pay AI anything .

This limitation is too easy to get around. Have AI generate a picture. Take a photo of that picture and destroy the original. Copyright is now owned by the photographer. Have an AI write some music, change one note of that music and call in your arrangement of that piece, destroy the original music, and only your arrangement that you have a copyright on exists. etc.

So, if I use AI, then tweak it in photoshop, is us human created and now able to be copyrighted?

The Judge is right. AI is not a living citizen.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

More than 100 days into the writers strike, fears have kept mounting over the possibility of studios deploying generative artificial intelligence to completely pen scripts.

The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI.

Copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found.

His complaint argued that the office’s refusal was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of agency actions.

While cameras generated a mechanical reproduction of a scene, she explained that it does so only after a human develops a “mental conception” of the photo, which is a product of decisions like where the subject stands, arrangements and lighting, among other choices.

In another case, the a federal appeals court said that a photo captured by a monkey can’t be granted a copyright since animals don’t qualify for protection, though the suit was decided on other grounds.

The original article contains 858 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Good.

Well, of course not, because since some diffusion generation are deterministic, that would mean that a specific set of parameters is now copyrighted, so nobody else gets to type in that particular set of numbers into the UI without paying the copyright holder, which of course makes no sense.

Same reason you can't copyright, say, cooking recipe for a burger.