Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted

Technology@lemmy.world – 308 points – 10 months ago

Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted::Matthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.”

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Yes, US copyright law requires human involvement to grant authorship. AI generated works are not eligible for copyright and it's unlikely to change unless copyright legislation goes through to yet further restrict copyright.

Did you read the article? In this case he put in quite a bit of work to generate and alter the image:

He sent a written explanation to the Copyright Office detailing how much he’d done to manipulate what Midjourney conjured, as well as how much he fiddled with the raw image, using Adobe Photoshop to fix flaws and Gigapixel AI to increase the size and resolution. He specified that creating the painting had required at least 624 text prompts and input revisions.

And he is essentially claiming that the work should be transformative enough to be copyrightable. Even if the original image is not.

That all makes this case more interesting then a lot of others in the past as it is about AI generation with some human input. Not just someone generating vast amounts of work to find something they like (which likely will never be copyrightable). When this goes to the courts will will help to define the line of how much and what type of alterations are required to claim copyright over the works.

Not all AI work is the same, but I am glad that the copyright office is pushing back on these claims. Putting the burden of proof onto the author that they did have enough input into the work. The big open question ATM is how much input is needed and what that input can look like.

He's lying though. He's pretending the original (wierdly blurry) output was the only AI output, but the details and basically everything else is also AI generated. Nothing is his own skill, brushstroke or even artistic effort/craft, other than prompting the machine-image-generator that he sources the work from.

I only have this article to go on, and it does not suggest that at all. What sources do you have that show he is lying about his input to the artwork?

I follow artists on twitter. And they pointed out that he was trying to imply that the details were his own work.

Who is they? Do you have links?

I'm not trying to be critical or skeptical, just want to be as informed as possible.

https://twitter.com/Dogloverspizza/status/1699512676861251819

The solution would be to cancel copyright and make everything free for everyone

It's almost impossible to have a living wage as an artist even know. Than it would definitely be impossible.