Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 645 points –
doctorow.medium.com

The US Copyright Office offers creative workers a powerful labor protective.

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This is more about control of distribution than outright ownership. You can't control the distribution of AI generated likenesses of yourself because they are now public domain, a photo someone takes is not public domain and not commercialisable without a release from the subject.

At least in the USA: You absolutely can control the distribution of your likeness if it wasn't taken in public.

Photos of you in public can't be controlled because you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. If someone takes a picture of you privately, even if not for commercial purposes, you can absolutely control the use of that image unless you release it.

But your AI generated likeness is now public domain, so explain how you have control over it's distribution, it's ok, I can keep repeating myself till everyone catches up.

You can keep repeating yourself all day long; it's clear you only read the clickbaity headline and not the article that clarified creative credit and copyright can't be owned directly by an AI. Your entire premise is wrong.

Yes, it is. But if it wasn't I'd still be right.

Personality rights are not copyright. At all. It's just that simple. Entirely different branch of law, enforced at an entirely different level in the US (state-specific instead of federal). Something can be totally free of copyright while also still being illegal to distribute for entirely different reasons.

Is it illegal to distribute AI generated likenesses of a person?

That's a somewhat unknown subject given the way personality rights are written across the globe (they are not consistent and some are built on an invasion of privacy scenario only). Deepfake porn lives in extremely muddy largely-untouched ground. But if it is illegal, it would simply never happen under copyright law, and this ruling does not affect it.

Let me put it this way: If I break into your house and film you doing whatever then post it on YouTube, it'll end up getting me penalized for breaking and entering, property damage, violation of privacy and who knows what else; probably a huge laundry list that'll land me locked up for a good chunk of time and you'd win on all those counts. But one you're extremely unlikely to win is copyright, unless I happen to film something like some piece of art you've made yourself in the process.

It seems the point is moot, the article was editorialised, the ruling didn't make AI generated material public domain. It just stated that AI couldn't be the copyright holder for the created materials.