Artist is Suing Copyright Office For Refusing to Register His AI Image

Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 424 points –
Artist is Suing Copyright Office For Refusing to Register His AI Image
petapixel.com

An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright. 

In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.

Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”

282

You are viewing a single comment

Firstly, I agree with most of what you've said. However...

Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?

Is there anything in the world that isn't a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn't influenced by something you've heard, read, seen? Feeding art to AI is no different than a student walking a gallery and learning the styles of the masters. Is the AI better at it? Sure. But it's still doing the same thing. If someone with eidetic memory paints like Picasso, are they not an artist?

To really drive home the point, if I have a friend that is an artist, like, a really good artist, and I ask them to paint something for me, say, a field with wildflowers in the snow, and they come back with something that looks just like Landscape With Snow by Van Gogh, does that mean my friend isn't an artist? If I ask AI for that, and they come back with something like what my friend painted, how is it any different? We call them "learning" models, but we refuse to believe that they "learn". Instead we call it "theft".

I didn't say I'm completely against imitation. I more or less implied that's where lines start to blur. If someone spends their entire life learning Picasso and can perfectly imitate Picasso then I don't consider that to be not art. Similarly if someone did that and fed it into an AI model that then imitates them imitating Picasso I think that's still fine.

But if you throw in all the famous artists and have the AI generate an image could you really imitate it? Not only would you have to imitate how all of them paint and what colors they use, you should also be able to tell the difference which part of the painting was influence by which artist so you could imitate it correctly. And if we factor in that AI can blend brush strokes it becomes even more harder to actually imitate. That's so muddy water it's easy to make arguments for and against.

Congratulations! You’re now a journalist for having typed that paragraph. Man, you’re really racking up the careers here!

(Do you see the point here? Using a tool that does all the work for you, doesn’t make you comparable to those that spent their lives doing it without cheating. Just like typing something out using auto-correct doesn’t make you a journalist).

15 more...

I'm not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that because AI can blend together the works of hundreds and create something unique, that it is bad?

I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying claiming it as your own original work becomes very questionable. If you want to claim AI art as your own work you have to use only your own artistic expressions in the AI model.

15 more...

Is there anything in the world that isn't a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn't influenced by something you've heard, read, seen?

Yes, i have made something that wasnt influenced by anything else

15 more...