The courts just take issue with him naming his AI system as the sole author and himself as the copyright owner.
If you just copyright it normally with yourself as the author, seems like it would be fine to copyright whatever bs you want?
[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/page-16193
So it's not the case, contrary to what many people (including me!) have said before, that the decision was "works produced by AI tools cannot be copyrighted". Rather, it's "you cannot assert that the AI tool itself is the author, you must assert that a human is the author". And the amount of work put into the prompt will definitely matter.
In other words, if you just prompt “draw a picture of a cat” then it’s possible you didn’t put enough work into the image to count as the author. But if you have a specific picture in mind that you want to create, and you prompt “draw a picture of a two-year-old cat with orange fur and orange eyes, in a sitting position, looking out of the window of a train. The interior of the train is lit with dim orange lighting. Outside, it is night and there is a full moon visible through the train window,” and then you refine that prompt until the AI produces an image close enough to what you had in your mind’s eye, then that image is clearly your own creation: the AI tool was just the tool you used to take the idea in your head and turn it into an image that other people could look at. Whether you use a paintbrush, a digital-art creation tool like Krita, or a digital-art creation tool like Midjourney, as long as you came up with the concept and did the necessary work to make the tool produce the image, then you're the author and you can assert copyright. (Note that this paragraph is my own opinion, not the judge's ruling, but I think it's a pretty defensible opinion: "draw a picture of a cat" might not be specific enough to assert that you created the resulting image, but "draw this very specific picture that I have in mind" is specific enough).
That's not really clear; the Copyright Office has guidance on copyright with AI used as a tool (which both complicated and lacks clear, objective standards), but its not at all clear how the courts would view it (I think there have been some trial court cases over it already, but I am not aware of any appellate law).
What is clear is that this case doesn't address that issue at all.
I mean, I guess lying is something you could do.
I think that this means that a single prompt alone does not convey copyright. But if you had spent many hours before the prompt fine tuning the model, or much effort after the prompt shaping the result with further prompts, it could be.
I disagree with this approach because I've seen how much creativity and effort some people can put into slowly evolving a single elaborate prompt. AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece.
But the pure output of a generative model cannot be copyrighted, regardless of how complex the prompt is (note that the prompt itself could be copyrighted).
If that’s how the court interpreted it, then the software industry is hosed, since that’d mean none of the generated code running in production right now is under any sort of copyright or otherwise protection, lol.
Let’s say I use an AI prompt to generate an image with 24-bit color, and then I manually change the RGB value of a single pixel from (255,255,255) to (254,255,255).
Does that constitute a modification and would then allow the image to be copyrighted? If not, where is the line?
What's the threshold? Can the person just slap an LUT on an SDXL image in Photoshop and call it a day?
So the true Renaissance artists are the Medicis and the RC church?
> how much creativity and effort
So art is art prompting, or is it creativity and effort? If some toddler spends two hours on a drawing, it's a masterpiece?
> AI can be used as another kind of brush.
A simile does not a truth make.
Actual creators understand what creativity is and what creation is - not all creation even is creative, as its really more of a process, than it is a singular output, and there are monotonous, time consuming, meticulously frustrating parts of the process of creation.
If you want to limit yourself to creation without the quality of life enhancements, that exist in this time and space - you do you.
Don't proselytize tho - you are not doing what you think you are.
A work doesn't have to be a masterpiece to obtain a copyright so what difference does it make? The point of copyright isn't to subjectively critique art.
Then copywrite the prompt, that's always been allowed. Should be just as good if that's the true masterpiece.
Or, as I think we all know, it's not. It's merely a commission, the product is the output. Not the prompt.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
You have an extremely low bar for calling something a masterpiece.
A prompt can be clever, insightful, unique, and even uniquely productive.
But it is nowhere near the level of decades-deep skill and creative inspiration required to create art anything worthy of the label "masterpiece".
>>AI can be used as another kind of brush
Perhaps that is a valid analogy, but we do not give copyrights to brushes, no matter how much cost or effort was required to make the brush. The brush is not the only tool required to make the art. To continue the analogy, the artist must also select and mount the canvas, mix and color each shade of paint, build up the base layers, and on and on and on...
It doesn't matter if your "brush" is a five hundred billion dollar machine and you spend six months whispering to it to find just the right incantation to generate your file of pixels — SCOTUS is right, you have not make art to which you can claim a copyright.
And the starving student artist in their garage mixing their paints and using the dollar-store brush did make art worthy of a copyright claim.
Absolute nonsense. A work of art is made of semantic stratification, experience, thought process. A prompt lacks all that. AI art can be a tool, but this sentence is a good reminder that on average it’s worth shit all.
Sorry, but... cringe. If we are calling prompts "masterpieces" now - letting alone the image generated by it - maybe we don't deserve art at all.
What a joke. No, AI is not a brush, it is a slop machine that spits out derivatives of the actual masters. If you go back and forth with a human artist about a commission where you keep nitpicking and wanting adjustments, does that make you the artist? No, it makes you the “ideas guy”
A brief history of art in general.
Meanwhile, random person, gets the exact same AI that you used to create literal DaVinci'esque, visibly masterpiece inspired - maybe not "masterpiece" but "masterpiece adjacent" - thats apparently, its not perfect art, but it could have been created in a workshop...
You can't do that. Rather, you cant nake the AI do that.
What is the difference between you and the random person with artworks in the style of the old masters? What do we call that gap?
Isn't that gap normally stuff like talent, ability, skill, knowledge?
All arguments made in this vein are just people whining about their personal lack of ability, as if its a machines fault.
Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and describe those bytes in words and you are no longer the author a perpetual stream of data.
In a world where slapping an overlay of someone looking incredulous over someone else's video is considered "adding substantive commentary" by every major video sharing platform, I don't even try to understand copyright law at all. It is way over my head.
Everything else in the entire system is just bits of monster and building falling randomly. We know if we put the whole population under strict scrutiny ("laser eyes" + "lightning wings"), it would kill every last one of them; every teenager is theoretically criminally liable for the GDP of the Milky Way, a series of violations beginning with a performance of The Birthday Song at their first cake day. Even hiring the cheapest defense lawyer would bankrupt nearly any family in the nation. So we try imperfectly to dodge copyright, hopefully by a couple zip codes, and live in a state of nature on the ground.
it really isn't, you actually have to provide enough relevant commentary for it to be transformative
it just looks like that because
- not every claim leads to a take down, more common is that the advertisement revenue is redirected to the owner of the original video. That is very very common, especially on YT, but not really visible as viewer.
- there are enough copyright holders which overall tolerate reactions, even if they don't fall under fair use.
- Sometimes people claim it doesn't fall under fair use when they don't like how the reaction is done, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be ruled fair uses if it came in front of court.
- Sometimes people reacting have explicit permission from the original author to do so, no matter if it counts as fair use or not.
and maybe most relevant here, pretty much all large platforms have a tendency to favor the person claiming the copyright violation over the person which reacted to it. To a point there is is sometimes a big problem if systematically abused with false claims.
In reality, it is way more complex and less clear-cut. Which makes sense, because oversimplifying it will lead to silly-sounding conclusions and an almost entirely incorrect understanding of how this works.
For those who don’t want to read the actual full explanation (which is a totally normal position, as the explanation is going fairly into the weeds), I will just a put a TLDR summary at the end. I suggest everyone to check out that summary first, and then come back here if there is interest in a more detailed explanation.
----------------------------
First, we gotta settle on 3 key concepts (among many) the US copyright law relies on.
1. Human authorship - self-explanatory; you cannot assign authorship to a fish or your smartphone.
2. Original/minimal creativity - some creative choices, not just "I pressed the button."
3. Fixation - the content needs to be recorded on a tangible medium; you cannot copyright a "mood" or a thought, since those aren’t tangible media.
Now onto your hypothetical scenarios:
1) "Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and write those bytes to disk and you are the author of a perpetual stream of data."
Writing bytes to disk satisfies fixation, but it doesn’t automatically make you the author of a copyrightable work. You gotta satisfy the minimum creativity requirement too (e.g., camera positioning, setup, any other creative choices/actions, etc.). Otherwise you are just running a fully automated security cam feed with zero human input, and those videos aren’t easily copyrightable (if at all). You might own copyright in a video work if there’s sufficient human creative authorship - but mere automated recording doesn’t guarantee that.
2) "Initialize an algorithm to point your camera at the street and describe those bytes in words and you are no longer the author a perpetual stream of data."
This is just close to being plainly incorrect. If you (a human) write a textual description, that text is typically copyrightable as a literary work (assuming it’s not purely mechanical like "frame 1: car, frame 2: another car, etc." with no expressive choices). Creating a description doesn’t erase any copyright you may or may not have had in the underlying recording. They’re just different works (audiovisual work vs. text work).
Important to note: neither makes you the author or owner of the underlying "data" of reality, because copyright protects expression, not the underlying facts.
----------------------------
TLDR:
* Recording the street can produce a copyrightable work if there is human authorship and minimal creativity in how the recording is made. Pure automated capture may fail that.
* Describing the street in words is usually a separate, independently copyrightable work (e.g., a text or audio version of those words), but it doesn’t change the status of the underlying recording.
Photo (w/ camera): 1. MET: Human authorship - somebody picked the tools (lens, body) and used them.
2. MET: Creativity - somebody chose a subject, lighting, etc.
3. MET: Fixation - film (or SD card)
Photo (w/ AI): 1. MET: Human authorship - somebody picked the tools (models etc) and used them.
2. MET, maybe?: Creativity - somebody wrote the prompt, provided inputs, etc. (how is this substantially different than my wife taking a random snapshot on her phone?)
3. MET: Written to disk, same as a digital camera.
What if I use Photoshop and context-aware fill a cloud in? Is that AI-generated or human-generated art?
So if you start with something you truly made, it would be difficult to use so much context aware fill to negate that.
If you start with something AI generated,at what point does it become copywritable? This is less clear.
But that's fine, because the decision does not torpedo anyone's existing Photoshop workflows.
like most things copyright there is a gray area there
but in most cases it's either pretty clear and courts would most likely rule in your (copyright holder) if you somehow manage to hit the perfect middle of the gray area
through if you tell the court "the author is my AI" (like in this case), the outcome is pretty obvious
also for better understanding using AI doesn't erase copyright, it just doesn't add it. So if you image was copyrightable before you used an AI tool to change it will stay copyrightable (as long as the original image is still in there to a reasonable degree).
This also raises the meta question: how much does an image need to change to acquire a new copyright? For example, if you change the Last Supper to include two fat Jesuses on either side of the single skinny Jesus, is that enough?
Companies responsible for several billion dollars worth of software written over the past ~36 months would really like to know the answer to that one.
Patents have the drawback of being expensive and very slow to acquire, but having worked on a bunch, they are uniquely suited to be radically optimized by GenAI.
Also patents are very flawed in practice, but the only real protection that is left. Copyright is meaningless when, as people have done, you can reproduce entire saas products by feeding AI screenshots.
Intellectual Property as a whole has been in need for a revamp for a while now, but it's even more critical in the age of AI.
> Copyright is meaningless when, as people have done, you can reproduce entire saas products by feeding AI screenshots.
What do you mean?
Separately, I think code is more like an invention than a work of art, and should have been subject only to patent laws instead of (and not in addition to!) copyright laws. This doesn't really make much difference now, as AI doesn't (at least in the UK) have personhood for either copyright or patent law: https://www.briffa.com/blog/can-you-obtain-a-patent-for-inve...
> The Supreme Court previously rejected Thaler's request to hear his argument in a separate case involving prototypes for a beverage holder and a light beacon concerning whether AI-generated inventions should be eligible for U.S. patent protection. His patent applications were rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on similar grounds.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...
As source code becomes more of a generated artifact of software development the way object code is an artifact of compilation, we might be moving toward a world where secrecy, constant forward motion, and moats become even more of an asset (vs plain IP protection).
I do think what happens in this case is SCOTUS will ultimately rule that AI-built code is copyrightable while art is not. I'm sure there's some rationale thick enough for them.
So the ruling doesn't necessarily endorse the Copyright Office's analysis referenced in the article (https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...), and I think that analysis is just not correct. They describe a creator of AI art as simply "re-rolling the dice" when they try different prompts, but that's not correct, clever prompt engineering definitely allows you to "constrain or channel the program’s processing of the sourcenmaterial" and "alter[] the degree of control over the process"
Through this isn't true for AI assisted art.
And the gray area is very wide and very legal unclear (gray area between human art with AI assistance (e.g. "AI"/transformer architecture based line smoothing or color calibration) and AI art with human touch added to it).
The way I think of it is this: typical art creation starts from a blank canvas and the artist adds layer upon layer of what you want. Eventually something coherent (to the artist at least) pops out.
AI art starts from a canvas which is filled, and the artist changes the filled canvas to meet their perspective. It’s like those projects where people take a vintage painting and add Pokémon to it. Mostly the people I see using AI art are traditional artists who view it as a new medium in their process, very few “generate” and call it a day.
It's like the advent of photography after painting. It was dismissed as an art form for a long time:
- https://antique-photography.com/when-was-photography-conside...
- https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an... (from 2018!)
Similarly, right now AI art is widely dismissed as "just prompts." But having tried many times to generate images via prompts, it's very hard to get what's in my head to show up in the result. I ended up spending much more time editing the images than creating them... but, I could do that with much simpler tools, without learning advanced tools like Photoshop.
In a couple of instances though, the AI has blown me away by generating something that better captured what I wanted to convey! I suspect the trick is in beng very detailed in where I was coming from and the emotions I wanted to engender.
I predict appreciation of AI art will shift to overall imagination, taste, and appreciation of technical nuances noticeable only to those "skilled in the art", such as prompting techniques and the quirks of the model used. I even suspect there will be genres of AI art using weaker models (kind of like photographs with Polaroid cameras.)
It doesn't even promote the progress of science and useful arts anymore, and in fact when mixed with our current form of capitalism, it hinders it.
so a AI based transformation of a copyrighted input is as much a potential copyright violation as a non AI based transformation.
It's just that the human transformation can by potentially itself be seen as art, so if you have a license or fair use you now can have copyright on the transformed peace (with some limitations (1)). And if the transformation is done by AI you won't (but the original authors "partial" copyright on the outcome is still there).
(1): Like if you (human) "transform" a peace of art in 1000 different ways each keeping 0.001% of the original you will likely get 1000x copyright. But if you then use this 1000 peaces you have copyright too to regenerate the original you still have full copyright infringement. In general the law doesn't care about your "trickery" trying to bend laws.
If you are "anti-AI" and you’ve never changed or evolved your argument - I suggest a pause, a step back and a substantial revaluation.
Some of these comments in this thread - have me wondering if they have actually interacted with an AI.
You are not correct on "principle" - this isn't a moral thing, if you have taken an ethical position - its bc you dont have a functional understanding of how to make it function.
If you were functionally interacting with AI, you would have a more substantial postion, with actual criticism that would have value.
I'm reading a lot of sloppy- written by people, about AI slop.
If I take your AI-generated code file and write it as an artsy-looking image, do I get to deny you copyright?
Personally I hope it's not. To me, this is the best outcome for AI in general. If we are going to violate everyone's copyright training AIs, then it's only fair you don't get AI protection on the output.
It is, and if you did what the actor in this case did with code (tried to register a copyright on a piece of code disclaiming any human authorship and claiming an AI tool as the sole author) it would also not be copyrightable.
This case does not actually address what people are actually mostly interested in with copyrightability of works made by humans with the assistance of AI tools, where the human running the tool is claiming authorship, because that was not what happened that was being fought over here.
so yes it applies to fully AI-generated code as much as to "AI art".
like with AI assisted art it doesn't apply to AI assisted coding
and yes if everything is fully AI generate there is no copyright anymore, that is by design!
Copyright is there to protect human creativity/time investment. If there is no creativity/time investment, then there is no reason for copyright to exist either. Having still copyright there would mean moving it from a law to protect creative work to a law to protect the privileged few which can afford to just mass generate "everything" with AI. That isn't just very undesirable, it's kinda plain evil, as it would mean screwing over the majority of humanity.
Naturally as mentioned that only applies to full AI products, not to AI assisted products in which case the "human contribution" and thinks resulting from it still have copyright.
