US rejects AI copyright for famous state fair-winning Midjourney art - eviltoast

Controversial AI art piece from 2022 lacks human authorship required for registration.

  • treefrog@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    My point is that this description literally applies just as much to humans. Humans are also trained on vast quantities of things they’ve seen before and meanings associated with them.

    In which case the machine would get the copyright (which legally they can’t now), not the prompter.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      Copyright just isn’t compatible with AI, we need to abolish it.

      If a picture gets generated, who is the owner? The one writing the prompt? The AI that generated it? The researchers that created the AI? The artist on which the picture is based?

      How about none of them? It is a picture, a piece of information. It doesn’t need an owner.

    • Skua@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I agree. Well, that is assuming there’s no human editing of the results of the AI tool afterwards. There was heaps of it in the piece referenced in the article, and there usually is if you want to get something actually good. The piece referenced was entered in to a photomanipulation and editing category too, which seems like it’s very much in keeping with the spirit of the competition. But the reason I said that was because the comment I was replying to wasn’t about who has the copyright of the tool’s output, it was about the value of the output and tools in general

      • treefrog@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The tools are valuable for sure.

        Where the law is on copyright it looks like we’re figuring out. For now I’m glad to see rulings like this as it will, hopefully, take some of the wind out of Hollywood studios and aide union negotiations.

      • paintbucketholder@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Well, that is assuming there’s no human editing of the results of the AI tool afterwards. There was heaps of it in the piece referenced in the article

        If there was, then the artist should have discussed those heaps of human editing that went into the creation of this piece of art, and he would have been granted a copyright.

        The fact that he refused to disclose what - if anything - was done after the AI spit out the result is what resulted in him not being granted copyright.

        • Skua@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          He did? This article mentions it only briefly, but he talked about it more when it was first getting attention for winning the competition. Is this something he did in the court case that you’ve read elsewhere?

          But also, if you used Midjourney at the time that the image was made, you’ll know that you did not get an image like that straight out of it

          • paintbucketholder@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            This wasn’t a court case.

            This was a copyright application.

            The Copyright Office asked him to provide them with an unedited version of the image generated by Midjourney in order to determine how much (human) work went into the final version.

            Allen refused to provide them with an unedited version, so the Copyright Office had no way to verify how much or how little work was actually done by the artist compared to work that was done by the AI, so they had to assume that the vast majority of the work was done without any human artistic contribution.

            They were essentially forced to reject his copyright application because he refused to provide evidence that he actually did any kind of creative artistic work.