[HN Gopher] Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing ma...
___________________________________________________________________
Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material
generated by AI
Author : nagonago
Score : 376 points
Date : 2023-03-17 00:49 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.federalregister.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.federalregister.gov)
| eloop wrote:
| So if movies use AI to help create characters they won't be able
| to claim copyright? I expect Hollywood studios will have
| something to say about this. With AI already being deeply
| integrated into DCC tools this stance isn't going to last long.
| And how will it be enforced if the artists don't show how they
| made the art?
| kevingadd wrote:
| There's still a ton of human expression in the average movie,
| so they're pretty safe. If they edged towards being fully AI
| though I could see your concern coming true.
| kjksf wrote:
| Applying color balancing in photoshop doesn't make the original
| image taken by a photographer the product of a machine.
|
| Laws are not black and white.
|
| The whole point of lawsuits and lengthy opinions by judges is
| to have a nuanced interpretation of the law.
|
| If the whole movie would be generated by a computer from a
| single sentence then yes, it wouldn't be copyrightable.
|
| But as long as producing movie involves human screen writers,
| human directors, human performers, human camera operators etc.
| they are obviously creative works of those humans and therefore
| copyrightable.
| rvz wrote:
| The human authorship requirement still stands:
|
| > If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by
| a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will
| not register it. [0]
|
| Even with that, applicants now must disclose the inclusion of AI
| generated content and highlight which parts are human authored vs
| AI generated:
|
| > Consistent with the Office's policies described above,
| applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated
| content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a
| brief explanation of the human author's contributions to the
| work. [1]
|
| [0] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-44
|
| [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321/p-59
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to
| know?
|
| It's already not completely obvious with the current state of
| the art in at least some domains.
|
| What happens when the tech moves from "Not completely obvious"
| to "Impossible to tell?"
| pylua wrote:
| Right... I hope this isn't a situation where everyone has to
| be dishonest in order to compete at the highest level. Major
| League Baseball and cycling from the early 00s come to mind.
| I wonder if having correct rules that are unenforceable do
| more harm than good.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| Watermarking seems like a possible solution: https://www.nyti
| mes.com/interactive/2023/02/17/business/ai-t...
|
| I think that OpenAI et al are incentivized to pursue
| watermarking. If someone uses GPT to write a best-selling
| novel or a blockbuster movie script, OpenAI would want a
| piece of the action.
|
| Similarly, publishers/distributors of creative works are
| incentivized to use any available detection tools because
| they don't want to be surprised when someone comes along and
| says, "Actually, you owe _us_ a boatload of cash for that
| work. "
| ars wrote:
| Fraud has existed for a long time.
|
| For the most part society is designed with the assumption
| that most people will tell the truth.
|
| You could create a different kind of society, where the
| default assumption is everyone lies, but I suspect no one
| would be able to live under those conditions.
|
| Note this is not the same as taking steps to check for lying,
| it's just a question of what's the default assumption.
| parhamn wrote:
| "Not going to know" can apply to most laws.
|
| Most people especially enterprises abide.
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| It's stupid to create a rule that's both unenforceable and
| limits protecting unique creations generated by AI but
| initiated by humans. Results are all that matter, not
| process.
| favorited wrote:
| > If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they
| going to know?
|
| USCO doesn't generally proactively investigate (it would take
| too long), but a copyright claim could be invalidated if it
| is proven that the applicant didn't disclose required
| information. As of today, the USCO has explicitly say that
| AI-assistance needs to be disclosed.
| mouse_ wrote:
| The correct response would be the end of digital intellectual
| property. We would have a creative explosion akin to the age
| of free sampling in music, the early internet or the modern
| Chinese digital landscape. The actual response will be more
| layers of bureaucracy, which will have the chilling effect of
| demoralizing small creators and further empowering IP trolls
| and large corporations with lots of money for this sort of
| thing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they
| going to know?
|
| IF a dispute arises, it will be settled in a court of law,
| with the trier of fact (jury or judge, as may be) applying
| the civil preponderance of the evidence standard. (Tools for
| detecting use of generative AI models are being developed, as
| are systems of including watermarks that are unnoticeable by
| casual human inspection in the output of such systems.)
| nige123 wrote:
| This is already a hot legal mess.
|
| The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) should come
| up with Berne convention 3.0 that provides:
|
| - increased protection for human authorship
|
| - longer copyright terms for hoomans
|
| - shorter copyright terms for bots (5 years)
|
| - moral rights preventing 'globbing' by generative AIs
|
| - royalty system for original authors
|
| - derived computer-generated works pay
|
| I'd like to see a blockchain ledger-esque system where human
| authors can claim authorship and they receive nano-royalties
| every time works are derived from it. The generative AI's can
| 'glob' it but they will need to pay their dues.
|
| Importantly GAI's can't register their stuff in the hooman
| copyright chain.
| hnbad wrote:
| I think the last thing we need is even longer copyright terms
| for humans.
| recuter wrote:
| > For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology
| to "write a poem about copyright law in the style of William
| Shakespeare," she can expect the system to generate text that is
| recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles
| Shakespeare's style.
|
| > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words
| in each line, and the structure of the text.
|
| But I can certainly specify those things in the prompt. In fact I
| can write some of the poem and have it riff on the rest for me.
| And anyway how would you know whether or not and how much I was
| assisted by the AI. Strawberry Fields forever.
|
| -- Written by llama 13b, edited by a human(?) --
| Written by a human, edited by llama 13b(?) --
| Written by llama 13b, edited by a human(?)
| bawolff wrote:
| > And anyway how would you know whether or not and how much I
| was assisted by the AI.
|
| Because in a lawsuit you would have to reveal that info.
|
| You can't just sue someone and not answer questions pertinent
| to your claim.
| recuter wrote:
| - Your honor my wholly original work of Halvin and Cobbs, a
| cartoon of a little boy and his pet tiger is entirely
| original to me. - Did you use an AI to produce it?
| - See, the problem with fine art is that it's supposed to
| express original truths. But who likes
| originality and truth?! Nobody! Lifes hard enough without it!
| Only an idiot would pay for it! Popular art knows
| the customer is always right! People want more of what they
| already know they like, so popular art gives it to 'em!
| - Sir, did you use an AI to plagiarize your way to an
| unofficial sequel of a beloved comic strip? Answer the
| question! - Yesn't.
| bawolff wrote:
| You are then held in contempt for not giving a straight
| answer.
|
| Its not like no one has ever thought of the idea of telling
| half-truths or digressions in court as a loop-hole before.
| Pretty sure judges take a very dim view of that.
| PeterisP wrote:
| > - Your honor my wholly original work of Halvin and Cobbs,
| a cartoon of a little boy and his pet tiger is entirely
| original to me.
|
| And as you submit this to the court, the other party
| requests discovery of evidence from your computer, your
| communications and (based on that) the API logs of a
| particular third party provider you could have used, and
| uses that to not only dismiss your court claim but forward
| it to the local prosecutor - previously it was just a civil
| case, but perjury is quite punishable, in USA up to five
| years in jail
| (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1621).
| lxe wrote:
| Good. Works containing any material should not be copyrightable.
| bnj wrote:
| It's all well and good that the copyright office deems that
| protection only applies to the parts of the work where a human
| was in control of the traditional elements of authorship, and
| that there is a duty to disclose the use of generative
| technologies ... but now one can plausibly assert that they are
| the sole author of a work which was produced by one of these
| models, and be 100% confident that no one can dispute that.
| bawolff wrote:
| Being the copyright owner and being the author of something are
| very different things.
| kjksf wrote:
| And it doesn't matter because anyone can use the AI to produce
| thousands of similar images with little effort.
|
| All those tools have randomization so they don't produce the
| exact same image for the exact same prompt.
|
| The value of an image produced by AI is very low because the
| cost to produce it is very low.
|
| No point in committing federal fraud by falsely claim you made
| them.
|
| > no one can dispute that
|
| Of course I can dispute that.
|
| I can even prove you didn't make the AI image by asking you to
| produce a work of similar quality under supervision.
|
| If all you can do is type AI prompts into a computer, good luck
| producing an actual painting.
| theferalrobot wrote:
| > I can even prove you didn't make the AI image by asking you
| to produce a work of similar quality under supervision.
|
| Have you ever seen a court do anything even remotely similar
| to this other than in Hollywood movies? Not only would there
| be serious freedom of expression/compelled speech aspects to
| doing that, it would be entirely impractical and ultimately
| prove nothing.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| The courts are not going to be able to stop the flood of AI
| generated images.
|
| Even now, when it takes a lot more human effort to generate
| an image because It has to be done by a human, the courts are
| ineffective at stopping the rampant and blatant copyright
| infringement that happens daily on a truly massive scale on
| the internet.
|
| Now that the floodgates of creativity have been opened by AI,
| the amount of content being generated is going to
| exponentially increase, and all the laws and courts in the
| world are not going to be able to even slow it.
| layer8 wrote:
| For a single work, yes. If they turn it into a high-volume
| business, it might become more difficult to maintain the
| plausibility in the long run, and they could be asked to put
| their claimed artistry to test in a controlled environment.
| heikegaichengji wrote:
| [dead]
| heikegaichengji wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| brotchie wrote:
| I'm curious. If I've spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt,
| fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8
| different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a
| bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work?
|
| Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the
| finished "work".
| snickerbockers wrote:
| the OP doesnt include any exceptions based on effort, so no.
| Animats wrote:
| That is the "sweat of the brow" copyright argument, and it has
| been rejected in by US courts.
| djent wrote:
| The parent is complaining of amount of effort put into the
| work but should be justifying that each of those steps was a
| creative decision by a human which contributed to the end
| result.
| corysama wrote:
| With ControlNet and LatentCouple you are doing straight-up
| set direction. With Loras you are casting, costuming and
| directing the film/lens/lighting.
| Animats wrote:
| One could argue that setting up a printing press for
| high-quality art printing is creative. Deciding what inks
| to use for a 7-color press and how to separate the
| original image was a creative act.
|
| Or at least it used to be. Now it's automated.
| greenyoda wrote:
| Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
|
| Rejection by US courts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_o
| f_the_brow#United_State...
| mindvirus wrote:
| Very interesting take! I wonder if a similar argument would
| apply to something like
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOD7HQOnKAE - where the setup
| is a lot of work, but the actual execution is entirely up to
| nature/gravity.
| danuker wrote:
| I would assume the prompt itself is copyrightable. As far as
| inpainting or other manual modifications, I'm uncertain.
| hnbad wrote:
| That sounds like your prompt is protected by copyright. I don't
| see why the output of a machine you feed your prompt into
| should be.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| You might be able to copy-write the method by which you
| generated something, but not the thing generated itself.
| Although even the former act might be too far, it's like saying
| that you fooled around with the parameters on a computer for 8
| hours before it started working, and now you want to copy-write
| the operation of the computer: the computer is doing what it
| was intended to do, you just needed time to figure out how to
| use it. You could copy-write a training manual for how to ride
| a bike, but not bike riding itself.
| bawolff wrote:
| You cannot copyright the method of doing anything.
|
| You might be able to patent it, but that is a different
| thing.
|
| Copyright applies to the end result. Patents apply to methods
| and mechanisms.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| No I understand, by "the method" I meant a written work
| about how the operation is performed--apologies if that was
| too vague in my OP--not the literal method itself, as in
| the example of copy-writing a manual for riding a bike.
| mlindner wrote:
| Nitpick: Everyone does this, but it's "copyright" as in "the
| right to copy", rather than "copywrite"/"copy-write".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If I've spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning
| a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different
| checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of
| in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work?
|
| The 8 hours doesn't matter. By the USCO's ruling, iterative
| prompt refinement _probably_ wouldn't, but that's not super
| clear (partially, because the USCO's description of what the
| model is doing justifying its determination is a _fundamentally
| strained metaphor_ , so while its clear how it applies to the
| exact case it describes, its not clear how it generalizes.)
|
| If you are fine-tuning a model (LORA, Checkpoint, whatever),
| then your input _isn't_ just a prompt to the model (once or in
| an iterative process with review of the output), so, your
| pretty far outside of where the ruling provides clear guidance.
|
| > and have done a bunch of in painting,
|
| inpainting is probably the thing most (even though it again
| involves prompting, it involves specific selection of where
| within the image to apply that based on aesthetic concerns)
| similar to the traditional creative parts of visual art, and
| the strongest argument given the shape of the USCO description
| of its rule.
|
| But, I have a feeling that that a rule that appeals to
| tradition and vague analogy to lower tech visual techniques
| probably won't be anywhere close to the final word on
| copyrightability in this space.
| hnbad wrote:
| IANAL but I'd assume "inpainting" is legally considered
| equivalent to arranging. You're not pushing pixels in
| Photoshop, you're just running the AI again on a particular
| part of the output, thus combining that output with previous
| output. This seems equivalent to bricolage at best.
| mlindner wrote:
| Sounds like the prompt itself is quite copyrightable, the same
| as any code is copyrightable.
|
| Indeed in the contents is this:
|
| > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be
| protected by copyright, that does not mean that material
| generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable.
| bawolff wrote:
| In usa (but not uk), effort isn't relevent, just how "creative"
| the work is.
|
| For example, digitizing famous paintings is labour intensive
| but not considered copyrihtable.
| theferalrobot wrote:
| Would this not apply to tons of procedural generation tech as
| well (used in plenty of games and tons of movies)? We give it a
| bunch of elements and write algorithms to do the generation...
| but we are ultimately not the ones putting pen to paper so to
| speak.
|
| I think this is the 100% the right call, some small level of
| human effort should be required otherwise what is to stop a few
| individuals from mass copywriting 10 million images and suing
| everyone that produces something substantially similar.
|
| Having said that, there may be odd knock on effects at play here.
| reneberlin wrote:
| Please let chatgpt4 summarize this
| gumballindie wrote:
| Now the big question is how do we make "ai" companies pay for the
| data they use to generate their content. Stealing ip by scraping
| content and then reselling it is not fair use.
| reneberlin wrote:
| chatgpt4 summarized:
|
| This is a statement of policy by the U.S. Copyright Office to
| explain how it examines and registers works that contain material
| generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The statement is
| effective from March 16, 2023. The Office has experience and
| expertise in distinguishing between copyrightable and
| noncopyrightable works. The Office may require additional
| information from applicants who use AI to create or use
| copyrighted works.
| amon22 wrote:
| Thats a pretty bad summary
| natch wrote:
| Reading this, it's clear a tool like InvokeAI (built on Stable
| Diffusion but with potentially a lot of human input in a mouse-
| driven GUI) could certainly qualify for human authorship under
| their principles.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I would like the Copyright Office to delineate just how much
| effort is necessary for a work to possess "the traditional
| elements of authorship." I type in MIDI instructions and play
| back a tune, but if I type in sentences it doesn't count?
|
| Maybe they can measure entropy. Did you emit a sufficient amount
| of data to make the Music Box work, given the Copyright Office
| defined ratio?
|
| For every unit of data in your song, you must have emitted no
| less than 1/2 of a unit, which was specifically intended to
| manipulate the Music Box in order to shape outputs. Any less and
| the creation isn't yours.
|
| What do you mean I can't copyright this song? My air drumming
| against the cassette player introduced very significant data,
| which adjusted the playback. Just a very slight legato. It's too
| similar? I assure you it is not. Convert the two to Universal
| Data Format and check the Hamming distance. Incredibly different
| pieces of data, believe you, me.
|
| This is basically the origin story for how the US Copyright
| Office became the galaxy's Entropy Police. "Back in 2023 someone
| tried to copyright a photo of an "ottercat" surfing a DeLorean on
| the moon and now we're in charge of how organized is too
| organized."
| sgentle wrote:
| Here you go:
| https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...
|
| 308.2 Creativity
|
| "A work of authorship must possess 'some minimal degree of
| creativity' to sustain a copyright claim. [...] '[T]he
| requisite level of creativity is extremely low.' Even a 'slight
| amount' of creative expression will suffice. 'The vast majority
| of works make the grade quite easily, as they possess some
| creative spark, 'no matter how crude, humble or obvious it
| might be.'"
|
| 310.7 The Time, Effort, or Expense Required to Create the Work
|
| "When examining a work for original authorship, the U.S.
| Copyright Office [...] will not consider the amount of time,
| effort, or expense required to create the work. These issues
| have no bearing on whether a work possesses the minimum
| creative spark required by the Copyright Act and the
| Constitution."
|
| Note that this is not true in every country's copyright system
| (some do recognise effort), but it is true in the US.
| pontifier wrote:
| If I wave my camera around taking lots of pictures, and then
| find one that I really really like I can copyright it. If I
| generate a bunch of AI images and find one that I really
| really like, I think I should be able to copyright that too.
| In both, the creative spark comes from discerning what has
| value.
| hnbad wrote:
| Careful with your wording: you don't generate AI images,
| the AI generates images. You use the AI to generate images.
| An argument could be made that the AI acts like the camera
| and the selection process is the creative act. The text
| hints at this when it mentions curation. But curation also
| provides a far more limited protection than authorship
| (e.g. consider the copyright of phonebooks).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Generally agree. But if it's the AI generating the images
| then it's also the camera generating the images.
| pontifier wrote:
| There is a precedent that any work done in a data center
| on behalf of a user, because a user initiated the action,
| has the same protections as if the user had performed the
| action themselves. It has been used, in connection to
| copyright, to allow "cloud DVR services".
|
| I'd argue that in the case of AI generated work as we see
| it now, especially if a prompt from the user is required,
| that work would not exist except for the action of the
| user, and is thus created by their action.
| modzu wrote:
| as you've discovered, really it just depends on your lawyer
| pmoriarty wrote:
| It's always been all about the lawyers, juries, and judges.
|
| The laws have always been the least significant thing in the
| legal system.
| logicallee wrote:
| On a practical level, in order to protect authors and inventors
| (i.e. give them a reason to keep doing their work), this makes it
| even more vital to closely lock down AI interactions and
| preferably bring models offline in the sense of running locally
| on hardware without network component and where the bits are not
| sent anywhere except to the user. That way the output of the
| interaction can still be covered by trade secrecy if not
| published, since it will not be covered by copyright law if
| published or leaked by employees at the hosting company who have
| access to the output of the interaction.
|
| To give a specific example, if as a paying user you craft a
| prompt to give you a competitive advantage, it will not be
| protected by copyright if leaked.
|
| You can still run the code on your own server and others can
| still try to guess how you did it, but they should not have
| access to the interaction unless you explicitly publish it.
|
| This will continue to encourage innovation. It is not necessarily
| the best trade-off but it is understandable.
| pontifier wrote:
| Art is in the eye of the beholder.
|
| We're going to be awash in so much AI generated content that the
| act of lifting something truly marvelous out of that background
| will be a creative action worthy of protection.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Pointless screaming at the tide hoping it won't come in.
|
| In 3 years there won't be a major digital tool that isn't
| pipelining through ai especially in CG and music, in 10 years the
| pre-AI versions of those tools won't run on a modern computer.
|
| Unless you're ready to say "anything made with Adobe CC can't be
| copyrighted " then this is pointless to debate.
| Entinel wrote:
| They specifically address works that use AI but are
| sufficiently modified by a human
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| What the government needs to do is to say that all AI-generated
| content is CC-SA 4.0 or GFDL and all the code is AGPL <latest
| version>. That oughta do it.
|
| (edit: I put "CC-BY-SA" and then I remembered there's no need to
| give credit to a hunk of sand and electrons!)
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I would speculate there will be no works containing no material
| generated by artificial intelligence soon. At least it will
| become a common practice to use a GPT to improve your language,
| possibly also assist the creative proccess by supplying facts and
| suggesting creative ideas. Everybody uses spell checkers and
| thesauri already (some also use grammar checkers like Grammarly),
| also google things up - this will be increasingly
| extended/replaced with advanced AIs usage. It is generally
| considered correct for a writer to hire assisnatnst who would
| proofread their writings before publishing them or even assist
| their thought through conversation so I can see no big deal in an
| AI doing the same job.
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| If this is the logic, then corporations should lose personhood
| because they can't have it both ways.
|
| I don't see the rationale because ultimately there are owners of
| copyright, whereas the creation process should be immaterial to
| protection whether it was paint thrown against a wall, AI
| generation, or some poor human painting with hummingbird
| eyelashes.
| danShumway wrote:
| > whereas the creation process should be immaterial to
| protection
|
| On the contrary, the US position has been for a very, very,
| long time that the creation process is the _only_ thing that 's
| material to protection. The result is not the thing that
| matters.
|
| Corporations can own copyright not because they're human
| beings, but because the copyrighted work was originally
| generated by a human being's creative expression. There's no
| contradiction or having it both ways here: this isn't a set of
| guidance about who can _own_ copyright, it 's a set of guidance
| about what can _generate_ copyright.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by
| a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will
| not register it.
|
| > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt
| from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical
| works in response, the "traditional elements of authorship" are
| determined and executed by the technology--not the human user.
| Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI
| technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate
| creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and
| generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like
| instructions to a commissioned artist--they identify what the
| prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how
| those instructions are implemented in its output.
|
| > For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology
| to "write a poem about copyright law in the style of William
| Shakespeare," she can expect the system to generate text that is
| recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles
| Shakespeare's style.
|
| > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words
| in each line, and the structure of the text.
|
| > When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its
| output, the generated material is not the product of human
| authorship.
|
| > As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and
| must be disclaimed in a registration application.
|
| This is the crux of the argument for me.
| michrassena wrote:
| Is the lack of human authorship the gist of the argument? Can
| you claim copyright on the output from a compiler? Or is this
| like work for hire, where you just give instructions to the
| creative professional?
| visarga wrote:
| If it's an optimising compiler like the ones used in deep
| learning, then it might have a substantial contribution.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced
| by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office
| will not register it.
|
| I imagine many people have a workflow where they generate
| images with Stable Diffusion and retouch in a painting app, do
| some inpainting and retouch.
|
| It seems all of those should be covered by copyright (nothing
| above makes me think they won't, at least).
| jpe90 wrote:
| Yeah I think people are reading this the wrong way. Software
| was originally considered unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. SS
| 101, but language was developed to allow software to be
| patented by narrowing the scope of the claimed inventions to
| a physical processor which are programmed to contain specific
| algorithms.
|
| I don't think this is a showstopper in terms of copyright
| registration of A.I. works, but rather a first step in a
| back-and-forth process of figuring out the legal structure of
| how to makes rules and enforcement work.
| barrkel wrote:
| Controls nets also blur the line here. You can start out with
| a generated image selected from hundreds of samples (human
| input: curation), do a canny edge detection or fake scribble,
| then start tweaking and adjusting it to remove elements that
| over-determine the output, adding or overlaying sketches to
| add elements, then iterate on prompts, scale up with img2img,
| fix smaller elements with inpainting, and yet more curation.
|
| And that's before we start talking about finetuned models,
| model merging, LoRA and so on.
|
| It's too early to say where we will end up with AI generated
| works. In the search for control over output, there's a lot
| more creative human input needed today. This is in part down
| to limitations in the integration of current AI, and a dialog
| with a chat bot, or even a voice conversation combined with a
| pointer may be enough to convey intent in the future. We just
| don't know yet.
|
| I also wonder if there's a parallel with the relationship
| between modern artists and artisans. For example, many marble
| sculptures by modern artists are actually carved by artisans
| in Italy, following directions from the artist. I expect that
| the artisans are doing work for hire and the copyright is
| retained by the artist with the idea.
|
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/damien-hirsts-army-of-
| geppetto...
|
| > _"More conceptual artists have no work space at all, simply
| imagining ideas for a work, which they communicate with
| words."_
|
| Sounds like a prompt?
| mejutoco wrote:
| > "More conceptual artists have no work space at all,
| simply imagining ideas for a work, which they communicate
| with words."
|
| Very interesting too, since a lot of modern artist work
| like a small company, where they have employees that
| execute on the artist's vision. The copyright still belongs
| to the artist, though, because of the employment contract.
| randombits0 wrote:
| Careful! I've always felt that, as written, copyright should
| not apply to most software. Since only creative expressions may
| be copyrighted and functional expressions are not
| copyrightable, it's very hard to match up the copyrightable
| portions of software with those that are not.
|
| Requiring a declaration of what parts are and are not
| copyrightable for software would be a major shift in policy and
| require major changes in software methodology. It's not a big
| jump to think that any output of AI of software code output
| would not be copyrightable, regardless of original origin.
|
| Another example of "Software wants to be free."
| layer8 wrote:
| We speak of software _design_ for a reason. Arguably,
| anything involving substantial design work is copyrightable.
| Buildings, for example, are copyrightable, even when they
| only exist as architectural documents or as models. Software
| is rather similar.
| brookst wrote:
| Not advocating copyrightable software, but it seems clear to
| me that if databases are copyrightable because they represent
| curation, then software must be too.
|
| Any line of code, probably not. But a program as a whole,
| sure.
|
| Otherwise I think you blow up music copyrights too, since a
| single note isn't copyrightable and a song is just a bunch of
| individual notes.
|
| At some point, choosing, ordering, and organizing a
| collection of non-copyrightable quanta produces a
| copyrightable work. And I think it had to be that way.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" if databases are copyrightable because they represent
| curation, then software must be too."_
|
| Circling back around to creative works, the process of
| making art is also one of curation, as had been amply
| demonstrated over 100 years ago by the Readymades of Marcel
| Duchamp.[1]
|
| The curation involved in prompt selection and selection of
| which AI-generated works/images to use should therefore be
| just as copyrightable as databases, if all that copyright
| demands is curation.
|
| [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_
| Duchamp
| Riverheart wrote:
| I'll just go ahead and say Readymades aren't art and
| express my belief that the artistic community will
| survive the copyright loss of loosely arranged furniture
| so we can avoid justifying the current state of affairs
| with avante garde silliness. John Cage made a musical
| piece 4'33 which is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence
| which has as much to do with music as Readymades do with
| art.
|
| His other works include curated noises such as buzzing
| blenders, falling objects, and street traffic. The only
| art is the act of convincing someone these things are art
| or deserving of copyright.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I've yet to find a better definition of art than that of
| Andy Warhol, who said "art is what you can get away
| with." Considering that both Duchamp and Cage got away
| with convincing the world that their work is art, it is.
| sethrin wrote:
| To the degree that I've been able to verify, Warhol
| borrowed that one from Marshall McLuhan.
| HPsquared wrote:
| You mean to say he's a con artist?
| Riverheart wrote:
| I give the benefit of the doubt that Marchel Duchamp and
| others genuinely believed in the artistic merit of their
| works and their enthusiasm made it easier to persuade
| people to agree with their viewpoints. The brief history
| of these artforms suggests that in the absence of their
| champions they don't resonate with artists but are still
| talked about because they stoke conversation about the
| nature of art. Maybe that was their original intent. I
| don't think these endeavors were profitable enough to
| suggest dishonesty over passion but if someone tries to
| sell you a moose head mounted over a toilet for 500k
| because it's "art" you may want to question their
| motives.
|
| Good art typically stands on it's own and connects with
| people without the need to explain why it's significant.
| Salvador Dali's work is visually interesting even if you
| have no clue what any of it means. If I see a bunch of
| objects scattered around a room it looks like clutter. If
| I see a bunch of paint splattered to a canvas if looks
| like a mess. If someone has to explain why these things
| are "art" is it the art that's compelling or their
| argument? The exception to that would be optical
| illusions.
|
| Art is somewhat subjective so someone will always argue
| their own preference but if anything is art because "it's
| all subjective" then nothing is art. Buttering my toast
| in the morning could be art because I spread it using a
| spoon instead of a knife and that is an expression of
| rebellion against societal norms. Did I sell you on my
| art or my argument and is the latter what we want?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Apologies, I wasn't being serious - an attempt at
| wordplay.
| andybak wrote:
| John Cage also wrote some genuinely beautiful music and
| was a sincere and thoughtful artist.
|
| It just needs to said that he wasn't a merely a "gimmick"
| man.
| Riverheart wrote:
| I'm only familiar with those elements of his career so if
| you have so recommendations I'd be happy to explore his
| other work.
| andybak wrote:
| Try "A Room" for solo piano. It's akin to proto-
| minimalism with a bit more "spice".
|
| His writing is apparently very good although I've never
| delved deep. His work was motivated by his interest in
| Zen and similar topics rather than any kind of high-
| concept modernism.
| [deleted]
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I think the open question is whether software is in the
| realm of patents or of copyrights. It's not unreasonable to
| suggest the former, since software is kind of like a widget
| that does stuff, except virtualizing the "widget" part to
| run on a generic widget of sorts. Copyrights traditionally
| applied to works that you would consider "artistic" rather
| than "inventions."
|
| What you're suggesting, about a minimal work, is litigated
| endlessly with respect to music copyrights (since a lot of
| pop music is very similar, arguments about plagiarism get
| crazy), but is part of the law already.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Software alone is not patentable. You get around that by
| patenting a system.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That is the state of the law today, where software gets
| copyrighted and can't be patented, but the debate about
| this is more about what ought to be the case.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Good luck changing it!
| brookst wrote:
| Aren't dry, non-fiction books copyrightable? I don't
| think "creative" necessarily means "artistic", just
| making something where there was nothing. It's hard for
| me to see a software program as a whole as uncreative in
| the same way logarithm tables are.
|
| I agree it's a complex are with no easy answer. But I
| really think that software, like words and notes and
| numbers, scales from the generic and unprotectable to the
| highly creative and protectable. I guess I'm saying we
| shouldn't invalidate copyright based on the medium being
| software, any more than we would for the medium being
| audio.
| randombits0 wrote:
| The expression can be as dry as a desert. Is the result
| an act of creativity? The bar is pretty low.
|
| Say you had a book that listed the price of eggs over 100
| years. You introduced each chapter, perhaps describing
| the egg market at the time, etc.
|
| The book is copyrightable though lists of egg prices
| aren't. Maps are another fun case for copyright.
| randombits0 wrote:
| It's neither, it doesn't fit. Chip masks are another
| whole branch of IP law. As strange as it sounds, they are
| a bit like two sides of the same coin.
| smeagull wrote:
| It would be good if songs weren't copyrightable. Going back
| to having music as a part of culture would be nice.
| hakre wrote:
| software works are normally subject to copyright without
| much further ado.
|
| database works are more commonly subject to rights
| _similar_ to copyright, but often a class of work in its
| own right.
| brookst wrote:
| The US has for IP protections: copyright, patent,
| trademark, trade secret. There is no "similar to"
| copyright.
|
| Databases can be copyrightable. Not all are, but to the
| extent IP protection extends to databases it will
| virtually always be copyright, with maybe an occasional
| trade secret (which is almost the opposite of copyright)
| randombits0 wrote:
| While not so in other jurisdictions, databases are not
| copyrightable in the US. That was true when I last read
| Groklaw at least.
| shagie wrote:
| Sweat of the brow (any work you do is copyrightable)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
|
| vs.
|
| "Original work of authorship" https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... (in particular the
| comparison section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyrigh
| t_law_of_the_United_St... )
|
| The court case that set this difference down was Feist
| Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...
| .
| laserbeam wrote:
| > these prompts function more like instructions to a
| commissioned artist
|
| I find this very reasonable and a great analogy. However,
| today, can one not copyright commissioned work? Can a company
| not own copyright for work produced by its employees?
| ROTMetro wrote:
| In that scenario the original artist is granted copyright and
| assigns it to the company. Another option would be for the
| artist to 'license' the work to the company and keep
| copyright ownership themselves. Since there is no original
| artist to be granted copyright then there is no one to assign
| it to the company so no copyright under current statute. I
| and others got so many downvotes here for pointing this out
| previously.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In that scenario the original artist is granted copyright
| and assigns it to the company.
|
| Not if it meets the standards for a "work for hire", then
| the employer is the copyright owner _ab initio_.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _In that scenario the original artist is granted
| copyright and assigns it to the company._
|
| Whoever paid you to create it is the copyright holder, the
| artist doesn't have to grant anything when commissioned to
| produce work for hire, as it's the employers'.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Don't overlook the fact that agencies like the USCO are at the
| bottom of the totem pole in terms of determining stuff like
| this. They move first because they're on the front lines, as it
| were, but they can be overruled by the courts and the courts
| can be overruled by congress.
|
| 100% this will be litigated and likely altered in the coming
| months/years.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Also don't overlook that this is a "solely a prompt"; real
| non-trivial workflows for systems like SD (MJ I've used less)
| are different than "solely a prompt" and may or may not
| result in the same result even at the Copyright Office level.
| visarga wrote:
| Add one manual detail here and there on the image, they
| will have copyright protection.
| dublinben wrote:
| This position statement makes it clear that only the
| manual details themselves merit protection, the base
| image itself must be disclaimed from the copyright
| registration. It would be fraud to attempt otherwise.
| zirgs wrote:
| If I use controlnet and openpose to generate a character
| in the exact pose that I want - what does count as a
| manual detail then?
|
| So with some custom LoRAs to maintain consistent
| appearance of characters and controlnet/openpose to pose
| characters exactly like I want I could make a comic book.
|
| Would my work be copyrightable then?
| wincy wrote:
| I've been noticing my workflow in Automatic1111 basically
| always ends up taking an hour. I like to compare it to
| going to a weird shoreline filled with strange objects,
| picking out the "shells" I like the most, then taking them
| home, cleaning them up, and arranging them in a way I think
| looks pretty.
|
| At some point I'm making something artistic. My friends
| think I've got a keen eye on what looks cool so I've been
| improving by leaps and bounds even though strictly speaking
| I'm not drawing anything? I'm just really good at being
| descriptive and inpainting the weird parts.
| Aachen wrote:
| I was expecting this argument.
|
| I'm sure they're happy to register copyright on a text you
| wrote yourself and used your imagination on--a prompt. I
| agree this has creative input on the artist's part and can
| be tricky to get right. Similarly, if you do significant
| edits to the result, I'd assume this ought to continue to
| legally function just like photo editing functioned before
| AI-generated images.
|
| They're just saying they're not going to copyright what you
| didn't actually paint or decide on (like the words in each
| sentence or how to rhyme them, as in their example).
| gwd wrote:
| I think the comparison to photography or electronic music
| is apt.
|
| If you just open up Garage Band and click a couple of
| times to enable loop "autofill" chords / rhythm, should
| that be copyrightable? I'd say probably not; but if you
| spent a bunch of time tweaking and honing all the
| parameters to get something unique and interesting, I'd
| say they should. Should the person then _only_ get the
| copyright on the Garage Band parameters, but not on the
| resulting output audio?
|
| Or consider the amount of creativity that goes into
| _most_ photographs -- it 's often nothing more than
| deciding to take a picture. And yet you have an implicit
| copyright on every photograph in your phone, just for
| having made the decision to pick up your phone and click.
|
| Or consider the Copyright Office's comparison to giving
| instructions to an artist. Yes, if you just said to an
| artist, "Draw a picture of the Eiffel tower", then the
| artist should own the copyright. But if you worked
| closely together with the artist, iterating over dozens
| of designs and sketches, giving feedback and direction on
| the creative decisions, then personally I think you
| should share in the copyright. (Not sure what the law is
| in this case.)
|
| Similarly, if you spend an hour iterating through dozens
| of prompts to get the output of a generated image exactly
| the way you want it, then you're an artist and should be
| able to get a copyright on that image.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| It's more complex than a straightforward totem pole. (For
| example, you could look into Chevron deference)
| ftxbro wrote:
| It's the part of the bottom of the totem pole that moves
| first because it's on the front lines.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Each of them have long, complex procedures they have to
| follow in many cases, and some exceptions. A court might
| well be able to issue a preliminary injunction faster
| than an agency can do notice-and-comment rulemaking.
|
| Agencies specialize at problems that don't need a simple
| rule, but rather need large amounts of meticulous and
| tedious special cases. They've got more bandwidth, but
| not necessarily shorter latency.
| epgui wrote:
| IANAL but AFAIK the way this typically works (as a general
| principle of administrative law in... most/many countries?)
| is that the administrative bodies who are delegated the power
| to make decisions are the authority on them.
|
| If a court reviews a decision of an administrative body, the
| court typically starts with the assumption that the decision
| was correct, and puts a relatively high bar towards reversing
| that decision. Typically a decision of an administrative body
| would only be overturned by a court if that decision was
| patently unreasonable or fell outside the jurisdiction of the
| body (eg.: if it violated a different law or some
| constitutional provision).
|
| YMMV in different countries (I know more about Canada).
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| "The courts can be overruled by congress" is, to put it
| mildly, not correct.
|
| Congress can pass legislation that changes the legal status
| of things (as long as it doesn't run afoul of the
| constitution). But that's a far cry from "overruling".
| yafbum wrote:
| I'm still hoping it stays that way. That'd be a fantastic
| direction for works in the public domain.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Agree, it's fascinating to think we could just generate a
| whole new public domain.
|
| Also, it's fascinating to think humans might be kept in the
| creative loop only to establish copyright status. Legal
| enablers.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Also, it's fascinating to think humans might be kept in
| the creative loop only to establish copyright status.
| Legal enablers.
|
| I don't know of any specially, but any union or trade
| group that represents creatives should be jumping to line
| the pockets of politicians to enshrine this asap.
| techdragon wrote:
| Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the
| providence of their content and let you know up front that
| it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by
| copyright... and given the preponderance of copyright info
| in website footers, I expect this will be an error of
| omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By
| simply not giving individual articles a more specific
| copyright note mentioning the AI all you have to go on is a
| generic copyright statement in a footer and thus can only
| safely assume it's protected.
| jxcole wrote:
| I think it's possible that some generous person
| determines a sequence of prompts that generate, say
| novels, and then pipes these prompts into a program
| causing thousands or even millions of wholly varied
| novels to be generated in the public domain. I imagine
| this is what the OP meant.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| I've been changing my mind a lot on AI these past few
| weeks.
|
| I don't think the price is what stops most people from
| reading books. People already have access to countless
| works they don't have time to read, adding a bunch of
| soulless ones to this seems like it won't change much.
| vidarh wrote:
| What can change is that people can get more of exactly
| what they like. In which case many might well put up with
| imperfect continuations, and the AI will have material to
| mimic.
| dotancohen wrote:
| As a (once avid) reader, the worrying part will be
| discovery. Why I was eight I could pick any book off the
| library shelf and it was interesting and enlightening.
| Today, the noise so outdrowns the signal that I have to
| rely on recommendations. Tomorrow, when both the books
| and the recommendations will be generated by bots
| outpacing human authors by orders of magnitude, I expect
| that quality new material will be impossible to find.
|
| I pray that I am wrong.
| vidarh wrote:
| Or maybe you'll just be able to talk to ChatGPT about
| what you like and get recommendations.
| eternalban wrote:
| (Closed) Knowledge communities* -- will resurrect and
| undoubtedly there will be communities with a spiritual
| basis. Possibly a new age of Modern Midevalism awaits.
|
| * think monks and manuscripts
| visarga wrote:
| same with art and code
| Jevon23 wrote:
| People will lie, sure, but you only need to introduce a
| small amount of risk to make big risk-averse companies
| wary.
|
| Say an ex-Blizzard employee takes a character design from
| the last project he worked on there and uses the exact
| same design for his new indie project. Blizzard sues and
| says they own the rights to the character design. The ex-
| employee pulls up a video he took on his phone showing
| that Blizzard employees generated the design with AI.
| Judge throws the case out because Blizzard can't
| legitimately copyright the design.
|
| Maybe not the most realistic scenario, since big
| companies can usually scare people into submission before
| you ever get to litigation in the first place. But the
| mere possibility of such a scenario would have to be
| something that the legal team accounted for in their risk
| analysis.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| People might not be honest. But large organizations, oh
| boy. There's zero way Disney will want any chance for
| their materials to not be copyrightable. If the Copyright
| office's view on this stands, there will be no great
| disruption of the employability of creatives.
| pakyr wrote:
| True. Though I wonder what will happen when someone sells
| a wildly successful novel to a publisher for millions of
| dollars, _and then_ it turns out that it was composed by
| an AI.
| prepend wrote:
| Reid Hoffman just published a book written with gpt4 [0]
| so it's not even a hypothetical.
|
| He made it available as a free ebook but it's also for
| sale on Amazon.
|
| I wonder if people remove his portions and just retain
| the ai portion if they can distribute it freely.
|
| [0] https://greylock.com/greymatter/amplifying-humanity-
| through-...
| janosdebugs wrote:
| Lawsuits and headlines :)
| golem14 wrote:
| Well, if joe doe can now make a picture that rivals
| Pixar's and it's a commercial success, that puts a lot of
| pressure on Pixar & Co to reduce costs. Doesn't matter
| whether joe doe gets rich with this or not.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their
| materials to not be copyrightable.
|
| Sure, but Disney will just not release the intermediate
| products that are the direct outputs of pure prompting,
| and make sure they are doing at least enough beyond that
| before they release anything that the whole is covered by
| copyright.
| thayne wrote:
| On the other hand, you can bet big companies like Disney
| will lobby hard for copyright to extend to AI generated
| works. And it wouldn't be the first time Disney has
| influenced copyright law.
| malborodog wrote:
| Why can't the Disney creatives simply lie and use the AI
| to ideate and produce drafts that they touch up and pass
| off as their own? Seems totally rational.
| cornholio wrote:
| The way this will work in practice is that Disney will be
| strongly incentivized to disclose the AI generated parts,
| for fear it might lose the entirety of their copyright on
| that work if their human authorship is not properly
| delineated.
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| > There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their
| materials to not be copyrightable.
|
| Surely you can see how easy it is around this? Even if it
| was a "prompt" that originated the design of a Disney
| character, they wouldn't try to get a copyright on that.
| mhandley wrote:
| It will be interesting to see what position large
| software companies take on this. They also won't want to
| run the risk of losing copyright in their software, when
| programmers use AI assistants. Likely there's less risk
| here, at least at the moment, because you still need to
| do a lot of manual work above what AI does for you. But
| how close are we to the point where the corporate lawyers
| start to get nervous?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the
| providence of their content and let you know up front
| that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected
| by copyright...
|
| Detection systems for generative AI are being developed
| (potentially helped by generative AI systems being built
| with wwatermarking capabilities that are designed to be
| unobtrusive to humans, but detectable with tools.)
| Research on this (and experiments by the people selling
| generative AI, who also want to sell detection tools, and
| sell their product suite as providing "safety" because of
| that combination) is quite active.
| gambiting wrote:
| I honestly think this is a fools game - maybe it will
| work in those very very early stages of generative AI
| we're in now, but there's no way this can work reliably
| going forward. If anything, I imagine it will soon start
| yielding false positives against human generated work
| too.
| VLM wrote:
| Probably not. This is gross simplification of how
| counterfeit photocopied money is detected, but human
| visual acuity for yellow dots on white paper is pretty
| weak compared to red dots, so color photocopiers and
| color printers have/had firmware that would seed money
| with extraneous yellow dots. Computer vision has no such
| visual distortion and as such computers see counterfeit
| money as covered in yellow dots.
|
| In a way its simpler with AI. AI is the ultimate
| groupthink tool and record keeping is simple. Simply ask
| the AI if this is the only possible output that could
| have been generated that's consistent as of March 17 2023
| based on political limitations and censorship rules and
| artistic fads trends memes and styles of that era. The
| smaller the AI contribution (perhaps an icon bitmap) the
| (edited: easier) harder it is to hide AI involvement and
| the smaller the damage caused by AI to the copyright
| status of the work. The larger the AI contribution the
| easier it is to detect, but the larger the damage AI is
| causing, so it balances out.
|
| As a concrete example, today, ask an AI "Please write a
| Harry Potter book" you will get a story that's
| extensively filtered and censored and bowdlerized to
| March 2023 political / cultural standards (hmm who's
| standards, the book buying public or some other group?
| Most people do not like our current censors... but they
| are in total power right now...), it would NOT look like
| a 1997 book at all, books from that long ago are only
| suitable for public book burnings now. In theory it
| should be possible for an incredibly politically
| incorrect AI to be permitted in 2033 solely for lawsuit
| discovery purposes to "Please write a Harry Potter book
| adhering to what we now call the hate filled politics of
| March 2023", then compare the md5sums, they match. Done,
| AI detected.
|
| There's not many AIs and there's not many people
| permitted to grind their axes by censoring those AIs, so
| its a pretty small solution set.
|
| There's an interesting political aspect to banning
| copyright of AI production, anything turbo-woke can be
| assumed to be AI generated and as such uncopyrightable,
| so the only way to make money in the 2030's will be to
| sell remakes and sequels of "Birth of a Nation" and "Mein
| Kampf" because an AI would never be permitted uncensored
| expression, so those cannot be AI produced and must have
| been made by humans, and as such only "right wing"
| content can be copyrighted and sold for huge profit.
| provenance wrote:
| Did you intend to summon me, instead of the word
| providence?
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| to explain:
|
| - provenance: the source or origin of something
|
| - providence: divine guidance.
| techdragon wrote:
| Sometimes I think autocorrect needs a little divine
| guidance, it is remarkably bad at correcting anything to
| certain words I forget the spelling off, and sometimes
| it's definitely got a bias in its "most likely word" and
| I'm not suggesting a prejudicial bias, just a bias that's
| less than ideal for me, and it never seems to learn that
| i never use one word over the other spans just keeps
| suggesting the words I don't want over the ones I do.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I've caught my phone autocorrection replacing "you" with
| "U". I honestly believe that errors are intentionally
| introduced. Sometimes I even conjure up plausible-
| sounding theories as to why. "Engagement" is my current
| almost-plausible theory.
| techdragon wrote:
| I assumed there was learning heuristics in some layers of
| the software responsible for the autocorrect. But other
| than new words that turn up in my autocorrect that I know
| are new because they only entered common use or were
| coined recently, I generally just find the autocorrect to
| be stubbornly insistent on it's likeliness ordering... or
| just utterly incompetent...
|
| It's really bad at the word, bureaucracy. It _never_
| suggests this word, no matter what combination of "beuro"
| "beauro" or anything else my brain might ineffectually
| grasp for when trying to remember the spelling. I can get
| it to suggest it as a possible replacement when I ask
| spellcheck to give me potentially correct words, but the
| layers of autocorrect that try to predict word even if
| it's not spelled correctly, they are utterly unable to
| predict the word bureaucracy.
| testrst4247 wrote:
| I really hope it doesn't since the interpretation of
| copyright laid out above and held by the USCO is so obviously
| the only interpretation that preserves any usefulness of
| copyright as a concept whatsoever.
| r00fus wrote:
| Absolutely agree - in fact, I'd say it will never be settled
| as long as AI contributors exist in any meaningful way.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| But following from that, a machine can not create a copyright
| violation either.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| I noticed this as well.
|
| The implication to generated code is pretty astounding tho.
|
| What about all those (c) foo 2023 prologs you see all over the
| place? Will there be arguments that specific lines weren't
| written by a human so therefore the entirety the claim isn't
| valid? Or will there be refactors to push generated code out to
| a well known path or construct (akin to a header /
| implementation or some such)?
|
| And on top of that, what if your "secret sauce" comes back to
| some form of generated construct (looking at you, Whoop, with
| your "strain" and "recovery" scores.
|
| Further still - can a "machine-readable medium" that was
| written by a machine be patented?
| undefinedzero wrote:
| As per this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192038, I reckon the
| whole is "creative enough" and would be protected as the
| developer only used parts and cherry picked and combined what
| they needed.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I'm curious where the "line" is, though. If I do a web search
| for a term, I get various results. As I refine my search, the
| results get closer to what I want. Eventually, there comes a
| point where it's possible to recognize that there is "skill"
| associated with crafting a good web search. To some extent, the
| same is true of crafting what you tell the AI to generate for
| you; especially as AIs become more complex in what they can be
| told to do.
|
| So, given that, at what point does enough creativity go into
| the crafting of the instructions that it _can_ be considered,
| at least in part, a work by the person giving the commands.
| [deleted]
| avereveard wrote:
| Never for the generated work, because a human isn't doing it,
| but you may be able to copyright the prompt
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Being good at using a search engine doesn't mean that the
| produced results are your IP.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _"write a poem about copyright law in the style of William
| Shakespeare"_
|
| Oh, this can be fun.
|
| "Write a story about copyright law in the style of Franz
| Kafka."
|
| In a world that was both strange and familiar, a man named
| Josef K found himself entangled in a complex web of legal
| disputes. It all started when he received a letter from a law
| firm claiming that he had violated copyright law by using an
| image on his blog without permission.
|
| Josef K was bewildered by this accusation. He had always
| believed that his use of the image was fair and reasonable, and
| he had no idea how he could have infringed on anyone's rights.
| Nevertheless, he was summoned to appear before a tribunal to
| defend himself against these charges.
|
| The tribunal was a labyrinthine bureaucracy, with endless
| corridors and dimly lit rooms. Josef K wandered through the
| maze, trying to find the right office, but every door he opened
| led to another hallway or another set of stairs.
|
| Eventually, he found himself standing before a stern judge who
| peered down at him from behind a towering desk. The judge had a
| sour expression on his face and a stack of papers in front of
| him.
|
| "Mr. K," the judge said, "you stand accused of violating
| copyright law. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"
|
| Josef K stammered nervously, trying to explain his side of the
| story. But the judge cut him off.
|
| "You do not understand," the judge said, "the law is the law,
| and it must be obeyed. Your intentions are irrelevant. You are
| guilty simply by virtue of having used the image without
| permission."
|
| Josef K tried to protest, but the judge was unmoved. He handed
| down a verdict of guilty, and ordered Josef K to pay a hefty
| fine and remove the image from his blog.
|
| Josef K left the courtroom feeling confused and defeated. He
| had always believed that he was a law-abiding citizen, but now
| he found himself caught in a nightmarish world where the rules
| made no sense and justice was arbitrary.
|
| As he wandered through the labyrinthine corridors of the
| tribunal, Josef K realized that he would never be able to
| escape the clutches of copyright law. He was trapped in a
| Kafkaesque nightmare, where even the slightest misstep could
| result in a crushing blow from an inscrutable legal system.
| [deleted]
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| But this does not read like Kafka at all... Am I missing a
| joke here?
| amalcon wrote:
| Clearly the model interpreted "in the style of Franz Kafka"
| to mean "featuring an inscrutable, uncaring, and
| inescapable bureaucracy".
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Perhaps it interpreted it as more along the lines of 'write
| a story exhibiting features that are Kafkaesque'.
| visarga wrote:
| yeah, it has that GPT style, sounds like a rushed story
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's a decent start, but everything is just _cheap_. Lots
| of low-hanging fruits, ignoring anything higher up. In a
| way, it's like as if I, someone who doesn't enjoy writing,
| and is bad at it, wrote the story.
| z3c0 wrote:
| You don't even have to read it. This _GPT-2_ output
| detector tags it as 0.63% chance of being written by a
| human.
|
| https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/
| piaste wrote:
| Should have called it "LLM Runner".
| 6nf wrote:
| Ok but how will they know?
| amoss wrote:
| I wonder how this will apply to code that comes out of systems
| like copilot?
| foota wrote:
| What's the difference between this and a corporation owning the
| work of an employee?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| The difference is that the employee is a person.
| layer8 wrote:
| The difference is that a human employee would normally own
| it, and only because the corporation pays the employee to do
| it does the ownership transfer to the corporation, whereas in
| the case of an AI there is no copyright to begin with,
| because it's an AI and not a human that creates the work.
| This is because the existing law ties copyright to human
| creations exclusively.
| tqi wrote:
| > When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of
| its output, the generated material is not the product of human
| authorship
|
| "Expressive elements" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Is
| there a a point at which a prompt becomes sufficiently complex
| or detailed that it would quality?
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, the point at which the prompt, and not the AI, is found
| to determine a sufficiently substantial part of the
| expressive elements. From what I've seen it's probably
| difficult to make a prompt _that_ specific with the current
| models.
| smeagull wrote:
| Wow, someone needs to notify photographers about this
| immediately. No more copyright for them.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Did you read the linked article?
|
| > In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant
| accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued
| that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by
| Congress was unconstitutional because "a photograph is not a
| writing nor the production of an author" but is instead
| created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there
| was "no doubt" the Constitution's Copyright Clause permitted
| photographs to be subject to copyright, "so far as they are
| representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the
| author."
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" so far as they are representatives of original
| intellectual conceptions of the author."_
|
| "representatives of original intellectual conceptions"?
|
| Wouldn't that only to apply to photos made with some
| preconceived idea of what you wanted the photo to look
| like?
|
| What about spontaneous, "point and shoot" photos? What
| about a photo that I take with my eyes closed, without
| intent? And how original is your typical family snapshot or
| wedding photo? They're about as generic and unoriginal as
| you can get, yet there's no doubt they're copyrightable.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| point and shoot is almost certainly copyrighted. eyes
| closed might not be, (I kind of doubt there's case law
| here). the bar for originally is pretty low for copyright
| but it's not zero.
| gwd wrote:
| What if someone who's blind just randomly pulls out a
| camera and takes some snaps (without knowing anything
| about what might be going on). Do they get a copyright on
| their photos?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| probably not
| zamnos wrote:
| Interestingly is the case of a monkey taking a selfie.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_d
| isp...
| s1mon wrote:
| The notice explicitly covers photography.
|
| > In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant
| accused of making
|
| > unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the
| expansion of copyright
|
| > protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional
| because "a
|
| > photograph is not a writing nor the production of an
| author" but is instead
|
| > created by a camera.
|
| > The Court disagreed, holding that there was "no doubt" the
| Constitution's
|
| > Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to
| copyright, "so far
|
| > as they are representatives of original intellectual
| conceptions of the
|
| > author."
| basch wrote:
| > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words
| in each line, and the structure of the text.
|
| What if I generate it 50 times and cobble together a final
| product from the variants, choosing which line and word and
| rhyme I like from each sample? Where is the line between LLM
| and thesaurus/dictionary?
|
| The comic book the office rejected seems to me to have crossed
| a line of significant human editorial discrediting after the
| generative fact, and they didn't care.
| greensoap wrote:
| Pretty sure the office said the arrange of the book was
| itself protectable but the individual images were not.
|
| https://www.onmanorama.com/news/world/2023/02/23/comic-
| book-...
| basch wrote:
| Didn't the author claim to be photoshopping and compositing
| the images themselves?
|
| If I render 6 characters, composite them into a background
| and run the complete composite through another generative
| step to clean it up, where do I fall?
| layer8 wrote:
| The document addresses that:
|
| > In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated
| material will also contain sufficient human authorship to
| support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or
| arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way
| that "the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original
| work of authorship."
| telotortium wrote:
| They allowed the comic book author to copyright the
| accompanying text and the overall arrangement of the images
| into a comic book, but not the images themselves.
| News-Dog wrote:
| Soup anyone? 'Andy Warhol Copyright'
| mmaunder wrote:
| What if I created the training data and instantiated and
| trained the AI? If this still applies it suggests an AI has
| human standing and can compete with me for ownership of
| intellectual property by negating my rights, rather than me
| being a programmer and it being merely an algorithm.
| undefinedzero wrote:
| > Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a
| commissioned artist--they identify what the prompter wishes to
| have depicted, but the machine determines how those
| instructions are implemented in its output.
|
| If you commission an artist, the produced result becomes yours
| and you own copyright on it. How different is it with AI?
|
| The AI did not creatively decide to do something. An order was
| placed, it fulfilled it, and ownership was transferred.
| rtpg wrote:
| Because when you commission someone _they initially get
| copyright_ and then assign it to you.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| I never thought what would end copyright would be artificial
| intelligence, but I'm glad at least something positive came out
| of it.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| > But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words
| in each line, and the structure of the text.
|
| But what if the prompter then takes the AI text, changes some
| of the rhymes, perhaps adds a word here or there, does it
| suddenly come back under copyright.
| chii wrote:
| Let's take it to the extreme - if you randomly outputted
| noise as a picture, that picture is not copyrightable (or
| ditto with random letters/numbers and printed it as a book).
|
| It feels to me that the copyright office is using this
| similar line of logic, to make the claim that the resultant
| work is not copyrightable if it was wholly generated using
| _only_ a prompt and an AI.
| person3 wrote:
| It's a bit odd though. What if you built your own ML model
| and trained it over a set of data that your wrote yourself.
| Would the work generated by the AI based of your prompts be
| not be copyrightable?
|
| The original copyright laws were thought up way before even
| cameras, and we're still trying to apply them today to
| generated AI. Why can't we just realize that the world is
| very different now, and just create new laws? Instead we
| keep trying to arbitrarily interpret the law in a biased
| way to try to fit our modern goals as best we can.
| chii wrote:
| > The original copyright laws were thought up way before
| even cameras, and we're still trying to apply them today
| to generated AI
|
| but the original laws worked well with cameras didnt it?
|
| The legal idea, that unless a human had creative input,
| it won't have copyright, doesn't fall afoul of ai
| generated content. There's nuance of course - what counts
| as creative input etc.
|
| Of course, a new paradigm is possible with the advent of
| AI, but it would make copyright _looser_, rather than
| tighter, imho (and it would be to the progress of the
| arts and science to do so). But i don't see why it is
| fundamentally needed.
| badkitty99 wrote:
| [dead]
| dllthomas wrote:
| It's not clear to me that this position is wrong, but it seems
| wildly inconsistent with our policy that every photograph I
| take is protected by copyright, no matter how inane and low
| effort. I have images I generated with Craiyon (then Dall-E
| Mini) into which I put way more creative effort than any of the
| photos on my phone.
| visarga wrote:
| Take a photo of your screen! BAM. solved
| josephcsible wrote:
| Didn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_
| v._Corel.... rule that that trick doesn't work?
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Based on this reasoning, does that mean that you could not
| claim copyright over a picture captured by a motion sensor
| camera.
|
| Basically you instructed it to capture when it determined
| movement and the camera determined how those instructions are
| implemented in its output.
| netr0ute wrote:
| I'd think so, considering how security camera installers
| never put any effort into capturing footage themselves and
| are usually the only ones to have the opportunity to do so.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Made the larger context needs to be considered. Being in a
| place at the right time. The choice of lens, the type of
| camera, the direction of the sun. A camera captures a moment
| in time, and that moment will never be repeated. If AI
| removes blemishes from a face, it's still a photo of a face,
| and that face only existed that way in that moment.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I disagree, because instructing the device the circumstances
| to capture the image, whether it's a timer or motion or some
| other detector or your direct button press, that is not the
| only element of photography. They're saying the only creative
| elements of the work were done by machine.
|
| If you asked me to write a poem about copyright law in the
| style of Shakespeare, is that something you can copyright, or
| a work derived from something you can copyright? I don't
| think so.
|
| It's not that producing a prompt for a writer might not be a
| somewhat creative act itself, but that's not really
| recognized by copyright law. _Ideas_ aren 't copyright, works
| are. Colloquially people might agree that a work could be
| significantly derived from an idea, but I don't think that's
| how copyright law itself works.
|
| Linux was written from scratch, copying no code from Unix and
| therefore is not a derived work or infringing on Unix
| copyright. Unquestionably it faithfully copied many ideas
| verbatim from Unix, the invention or development or discovery
| of those ideas were probably the most substantial creative
| contributions that Ritchie and Thompson had, and the code
| itself relatively mundane (though expertly written) by
| comparison. Those ideas/inventions are not classed as
| copyright works though.
| [deleted]
| markive wrote:
| Also look at all the post processing and AI that goes into
| smartphone cameras right now. The human element doesn't even
| choose which photo this is done algorithmically and the photo
| is stitched together in lots of different ways. The human
| just prompted: 'Now!'
| pmoriarty wrote:
| We don't need to invoke smartphones here. There's no more
| or less creative input from a human in traditional
| photography.
| [deleted]
| brookst wrote:
| ...as long as you don't count choice of subject matter,
| shooting angle, composition, crop, or moment to shoot to be
| creative choices.
| Retric wrote:
| Timing is only one aspect of creativity.
|
| In most settings a video camera's output is copyrighted
| because of how you select the location and angel to film.
| Motion capture has all of those elements, and simply doesn't
| capture 99.9% of the possible images. ie: Someone picked a
| log crossing the river as a place where something interesting
| will happen _and_ they setup the shot to look interesting.
|
| Which is the general argument why such setups fall under
| copyright. Though as always there are many edge cases.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I would argue that location and angle to film are analogous
| to specifying that you want a poem (as opposed to an essay)
| about copyright law (as opposed to quantum mechanics) in
| the style of William Shakespeare (as opposed to John
| Milton).
|
| Basically, those are very broad parameters specified, and
| the machine is the one that decides to produce the output.
| You aren't even picking the timing or the subject or likely
| even the focal length. The machine is doing that based on
| its algorithms (and with autofocus) even the focal length.
| Retric wrote:
| It's not just location and angle but where to aim the
| motion capture sensor, what if any bait to use etc.
| There's effectively infinitely many possible ways to set
| of these things.
|
| With chat bot's every possible response is predetermined
| when the algorithm is setup. Saying you should get
| copyright is like saying you should own the results of a
| search engine response to your query.
| phire wrote:
| There is so many places to inject creativity into the
| process.
|
| Before the capture you have: Chosing the location, posing
| the camera, adjusting objects in the background, setting up
| bate to attract wildlife, choosing optimal camera settings.
| Even selecting a camera could be considered a creative
| input.
|
| After the capture, the artist can choose which of the
| thousands of captures best fits their vision, crop it and
| applying color correction.
|
| I don't think a single one of those actions can make it a
| creative work on its own. But when you combine a few of
| them along with intent, it becomes a creative work.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| You can do most of that with prompting and tools like
| control net in stable diffusion as well. And then take it
| into photoshop and do changes, feed it back into img2img
| and inpaint until your hearts content. One can spend
| multitudes more time than it too to tap the shutter
| button on an iPhone. In Midjourney of course, you have
| far less control.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| There's a ton of control that prompt crafting alone gives
| you. There's also the choice of which version of
| midjourney to use, and various meta options that it gives
| you.
|
| The copyright office clearly has not the slightest clue
| about what they're talking about when they claim that the
| AI is the sole creator here. AI generated content has
| always been a _collaboration_ with humans, and there 's
| _always_ human creativity involved.
| Retric wrote:
| You can own the copyright to the prompt used to generate
| the output.
|
| But the algorithm isn't collaborating, every possible
| outcome is fixed when the algorithm is finalized and
| users can't actually change the possibilities. I clearly
| don't own the copyright to my Google search results even
| if my query is quite unique.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| The essay that has helped me most to think about this
| sort of thing has been Brian Eno's _Composers as
| Gardeners_.[1] It 's about music, but I think it applies
| equally well to AI-generated art, where humans
| collaborate by writing the algorithms, choosing the
| subjects, providing the prompts, and curating the
| results.
|
| Here's an excerpt:
|
| _"...essentially the idea there is that one is making a
| kind of music in the way that one might make a garden.
| One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds,
| carefully planting them and then letting them have their
| life. And that life isn 't necessarily exactly what you'd
| envisaged for them. It's characteristic of the kind of
| work that I do that I'm really not aware of how the final
| result is going to look or sound. So in fact, I'm
| deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the
| same position as any other member of the audience. I want
| to be surprised by it as well. And indeed, I often am._
|
| _" What this means, really, is a rethinking of one's own
| position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as
| me, the controller, you the audience, and you start
| thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as
| people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included._
|
| _" We're used to the idea, coming from the industrial
| and very intelligent post-Enlightenment history that we
| have, we're used to the idea that the great triumph of
| humans is their ability to control. And indeed, that must
| be the case, to some extent._
|
| _" What we're not so used to is the idea that another
| great gift we have is the talent to surrender and to
| cooperate. Cooperation and surrender are actually parts
| of the same skill. To be able to surrender is to be able
| to know when to stop trying to control. And to know when
| to go with things, to be taken along by them. And that's
| a skill that we actually have to start relearning. Our
| hubris about our success in terms of being controllers
| has made us overlook that side of our abilities. So we're
| so used to dignifying controllers that we forget to
| dignify surrenderers..._
|
| _"...my idea about art as gardening is to sort of
| revivify that discussion and to say let 's accept the
| role of gardener as being equal in dignity to the role of
| architect, as in fact, is shown in this lovely pavilion
| here."_
|
| [1] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-
| composers-as-gar...
| Retric wrote:
| Simply planting a tree doesn't give you copyright of the
| shape the tree ends up in the way you would on a
| sculpture.
|
| That's been the case for a very long time, you need
| significant control over the specific output because it
| quantifies. A garden is copyrightable based on the layout
| of the plants when that involved creativity.
|
| That's been a legal distinction for a very long time, and
| this statement is simply consistent with that history.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But the algorithm isn't collaborating, every possible
| outcome is fixed when the algorithm is finalized and
| users can't actually change the possibilities.
|
| But that actually reinforces the idea that all of the
| creative work is in the prompt, everything else is purely
| mechanical process implementing the command given by the
| prompt. Arguably, its analogous to saying that a
| programmer can copyright the prompt but not the resulting
| image is like saying I can copyright source code, but can
| have no copyright on the output of the compiler.
| Retric wrote:
| Compilers don't create a new copyright the output is
| covered as a derivative work.
|
| However, derivative works have clear limitations and the
| output of a chat program doesn't qualify any more than
| you own the copyright of what someone says when you
| interview them.
|
| Put another way you don't own the copyright on the
| specific shape of a tree as a sculpture because you
| selected its species when you planted it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Compilers don't create a new copyright the output is
| covered as a derivative work.
|
| A derivative work is a separate work that, considered
| apart from the one it is derived from, separately has the
| required creative input to be a copyrightable work, and
| it does, in fact, have a separate copyright from the
| original (creating derivative works is an exclusive, but
| licensable, right of the copyright holder of the
| original, but the copyright of a derivative is separate.)
| World177 wrote:
| There was a case last year where a person sued a content
| creator on YouTube for distributing parts of their
| accidental livestream. [1] The argument for fair use was
| that there was no creative input, so fair use. Though, I
| really do not know, as I think images and videos can be
| copyrighted exactly for the reason in your comment.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk1Tzqc5vk4
| hammock wrote:
| How is setting up a motion camera on a log not similar to
| setting up a prompt for ChatGPT?
| Natsu wrote:
| Yeah, I think in the general case there's going to be a
| significant amount of selection and arrangement of the
| works from the AI, though I guess that even then none of
| the underlying images (or such) of the AI get protection.
|
| I wonder if they know about the "inpainting" technique
| where the human generates an image, erases parts of it,
| then adds another image and has the AI fill in the blanks
| and make a new image based on the resulting image?
|
| I think that'd be harder to disentangle the way they do
| right now to say these parts are copyrightable because
| the human did them and those parts are not because the AI
| did them since you can't really separate the inputs at
| that point.
| brookst wrote:
| The camera doesn't decide what to put on the picture?
| hammock wrote:
| It does... or at least the human doesn't.. it's motion
| activated
| Retric wrote:
| Motion capture rigs are doing capture whatever
| trees/rocks/buildings etc the person setting it up aimed
| at. The only thing motion capture does is pick
| interesting times, but you can write software that does
| the same thing with a video.
| olyjohn wrote:
| The camera is not making a decision. The human made the
| decision to set the camera up to take pictures when
| motion activated.
| tantalor wrote:
| You could argue the person who set up the camera chose the
| angle or frame, just like a normal camera operator.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| In the same way that the person using ChatGPT chose the
| prompt?
| tantalor wrote:
| No.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| How are they different?
| acomjean wrote:
| No. You instructed the camera, placed it and set the angles.
|
| If a monkey steals your camera and takes a selfy you can't
| copyright that.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp.
| ..
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You instructed the camera, placed it and set the angles.
|
| And I instructed the model, and set its tuning parameters.
| Jensson wrote:
| Someone else could just use the same prompt and get the
| same results, would you sue them for copyright
| infringement then? Do you think that makes sense?
| layer8 wrote:
| The concept of "threshold of originality" plays a role in
| whether something is copyrightable:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
|
| Your question therefore cannot be answered a priori. The
| copyrightability has to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Has anyone tried to claim copyright over that before? I
| wouldn't be surprised if it was rejected.
| beerdoggie wrote:
| Yes, definitely. Trail/nature cam photos fit this
| description.
| [deleted]
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dis
| p...
| logn wrote:
| But if you asked it to generate a story in the style of Stephen
| King, whose works are still copyrighted, then does King have a
| copyright claim even though he didn't operate the AI?
| hayksaakian wrote:
| Seems like a win for artists who oppose generative AI. Now those
| who use AI to claim a copyright are "put on notice" to clearly
| disclaim the AI generated portions of their content.
|
| It will be interesting to see if Prompts themselves could be
| copyrighted, since presumably humans came up with the prompts.
| Laforet wrote:
| Recipes are usually not copyrightable as they are just a list
| of ingredients and instructions with no room for expression. I
| wonder if the same argument could be applied to prompts.
| mlindner wrote:
| They state this in the document as well:
|
| > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be
| protected by copyright, that does not mean that material
| generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself
| copyrightable.
|
| It sounds like it would depend on the complexity of your
| prompt.
| [deleted]
| raincole wrote:
| Companies will just outsource to small studios/individual
| artists that don't admit they use AI.
| unsignedint wrote:
| Just curious... with such a decision in place, wouldn't more
| artists be inclined to make their use of generative AI less
| transparent? In other words, what would prevent them from ceasing
| to disclose that their work includes elements generated using
| generative AI?
|
| This could indeed increase skepticism, particularly when it comes
| to img2img and, if not as much, txt2img usage.
| RyanShook wrote:
| Exactly. When someone rips off someone else's art a court can
| usually determine that the copyright was infringed. But when an
| artist uses an AI model trained on other people's works how can
| that be proven even in a courtroom?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Yay, the software development industry is saved! (only partly /s)
|
| Not that I thought AI would be writing decent code for a while
| yet, but the fact that AI-generated code can't be copyrighted
| (and therefore licensed[0]) is going to create problems.
|
| It'll be interesting where they draw the line with this, though:
|
| If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and
| alters it, is that copyright that can be owned? Does the entire
| code base then become copyrightable?
|
| If a human reverse-engineers uncoyrightable AI code, does that
| reverse-engineered code become copyrightable?
|
| If a human downloads someone else's uncopyrightable AI-generated
| code, and makes some changes to it, can they then claim copyright
| on that code?
|
| [0] Since the whole of software licensing rests on copyright,
| this is going to get tricky for licenses. How do we determine if
| a restrictive license has been added to uncopyrightable (and
| therefore unlicensable) code?
| Kerrick wrote:
| > If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it
| and alters it, is that copyright that can be owned? Does the
| entire code base then become copyrightable?
|
| I am not a lawyer and I did not research anything for this, but
| I'm under the impression that a derivative work of something in
| the public domain is itself copyrightable. If something isn't
| copyrightable, it's in the public domain. So, if you alter it
| sufficiently to create a derivative work, the altered form
| should be copyrightable. But the original would still be public
| domain. I think?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Yes, exactly. If you for example rewrite parts of
| Shakespeares Romeo and Juliette you have copyright on the
| changes you made. So the parts you didn't change are in the
| public domain while the parts that are changed you got the
| copyright for (assuming the changes reach the level of
| copyright and aren't just for example spelling errors). Same
| with code. If you extend a MIT library you have copyright to
| the changes you made but not the parts that aren't changed.
| datpiff wrote:
| > derivative work of something in the public domain is itself
| copyrightable
|
| I don't think this is true in most of the world.
|
| Here's a UK referience: https://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyri
| ght/p22_derivative_work...
|
| "You cannot extend the duration of copyright in a work by
| creating a derivative work. If the original work is in the
| public domain, it will remain in the public domain; you
| cannot prevent anyone else using the same public domain work
| for their own purposes."
| vidarh wrote:
| What you've quoted directly agrees with the interpretation
| of the person you replied to.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| How do you determine if code is written by an AI?
| amon22 wrote:
| This does not really matter in practice. The risk of legal
| sanctions is too high for most businesses, they will follow
| the law. This is kind of similar to pirate software,
| businesses almost never use them even if they could
| definitely get away with it in most cases. The issue is that
| a single angry former employee is all it takes to make your
| life hell. This is even more true for large organizations
| where many people would know about the unlawful practice.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I have two thoughts about this.
|
| First is who cares about large corporations? Sure large
| corporations have the money to buy licensed software, but I
| know plenty of small-to-medium corporations that operate on
| pirated software.
|
| Second is your statement doesn't mean anything at all. Yes,
| you can enact a policy in your corporation that no one is
| allowed to use AI tools like Copilot to write code, but how
| do you monitor this? How do you know if some developer did
| use Copilot? This all feels like complete lip service with
| no actual force behind it. I am 100% sure that even my
| corporation's code base already contains stuff written with
| help of an AI, but there is also no question that the code
| is fully copyrighted.
| ayewo wrote:
| > _Yes, you can enact a policy in your corporation that
| no one is allowed to use AI tools like Copilot to write
| code, but how do you monitor this? How do you know if
| some developer did use Copilot?_
|
| That's easy: corporate firewalls that block all traffic
| to openai.com, its subdomains and the IP ranges used by
| GitHub Copilot.
|
| Enterprises that care about exfiltration of code from
| their internal networks (e.g. banks and other heavily
| regulated entities) typically hand out computers that are
| locked down to their employees, including developers. So
| any engineer that wants to install the GitHub Copilot
| extension or indeed any non-approved third party
| extension from the VSCode Marketplace will first have a
| word with the folks in IT.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| yeah but you could get the AI to write the code on your
| personal laptop, then copy it over to the work laptop.
|
| I can see this being a thing.. "I have three jobs as
| Senior Engineer for three different organisations. All I
| do is copy code from an AI engine to my work laptop all
| day"
| amon22 wrote:
| I guess that could happen and we will definitely see some
| people try this. But in the grand scheme of things, it
| will be exceptionally rare. Most developers can't work
| outside their developer environment set up by their
| company, they often rely on internal tools, services
| hosted on the internal network, stuff like that. If
| stackoverflow and google didn't cause this to happen, I
| don't see how GPT will.
| reset-password wrote:
| In practice, the larger the organization the less likely
| the potential legal sanctions are to dissuade them. My
| observation has been that once an organization (in the US
| anyway) grows large enough it is in a special protected
| status where no real penalties can come to it and there is
| certainly no risk of exposure to criminal charges for the
| decision makers.
|
| Source: front page here every single day.
| amon22 wrote:
| As someone who works for large enterprises: they are
| absolutely terrified of legal sanctions and pay huge
| amounts to contractors who can mitigate the risk. And
| sanctions do regularly happen, they are just not
| advertised on the HN frontpage I guess :)
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Good question. I assume the methods they're using to
| determine if an essay is written by an AI won't work on code?
| JCM9 wrote:
| So this effectively destroys any concept of AI digital art for
| sale. If there's no way to protect it then there's really nothing
| to own. It would be like trying to sell someone public domain
| content.
| lxe wrote:
| As an AI artist who's been selling digital art, it really
| depends on whether you really care about "protecting" your
| work. I've seen my stuff stolen all over the place, NFTs
| minted, etc. Most sites will take the copycats down. Lack of
| copyright protection doesn't necessarily supersede individual
| marketplace policies.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" I've seen my stuff stolen all over the place, NFTs minted,
| etc"_
|
| The overwhelming majority of artist do not have the
| resources, time, or inclination to constantly chase down
| copycats and copyright infringers.
|
| Copyright law is just ineffective at stopping or even
| penalizing most of the infringement that goes on in the
| digital era.
|
| It's a relic of a past when making copies was hard.
| el_nahual wrote:
| There's plenty of copies of public domain works available for
| purchase on Amazon. It does mean that AI digital art will fetch
| commodity prices, but not that it won't be sold.
|
| Sort of like hotel art.
| danuker wrote:
| Not quite; having it exist is something that may be worth
| paying for, even if it's equivalent to public domain.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| Digital art as a whole has already been made worthless by the
| creation of diffusion models, whether there is copyright on
| them really doesn't matter at that point, because pretty much
| any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in
| under a minute.
| exodust wrote:
| > pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial
| to produce
|
| What? That's not true at all!
|
| If you're talking about "art", most artists are fussy and
| want things exactly right. They will spend a long time
| tweaking the image, or combining different images, painting,
| processing, pixel-pushing to get the thing they imagined.
|
| If you're talking about some random need for an image of a
| "horse with metal legs", and settle for whatever the AI spits
| out, and then call that "my valuable art", that's different.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| There is plenty of ability to tweak AI images, I don't
| understand this objection.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial
| to produce in under a minute"_
|
| That's overstating it a bit.. but it is likely we'll get
| there within the next decade or so.
|
| Currently there's still a lot of art that's hard for AI to
| mimic effectively, and only certain types of art can be
| created quickly and without much effort using AI.
|
| The above is based on my experience of creating well over
| 5000 images in Midjourney, and keeping a close eye on AI
| generated art created by others.
|
| It's amazing tech that's close to magic, but it still can't
| do everything.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| You're neglecting the fact that the types of art that can
| be created quickly are the ones that make up the bulk of
| the training data, which are also the types of art most
| people will want to make.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| In the studio, the photographer directs the lighting, the model,
| tweaks the shot, issues commands to modify the scene, presses a
| button, checks the outputs, iterates, chooses the best shot.
|
| In a virtual conversation, the promptographer directs the
| computer to set the tone, chooses their model, tweaks the inputs,
| issues commands to change the virtual parameters, presses a few
| buttons, checks the outputs, iterates, and takes the best output.
|
| One of these is a creative work guided by a tool and one is a act
| that shows no human creative authorship at all.
| bearmode wrote:
| Creating AI artwork is simply telling the computer the result
| you want, and picking what you believe to be the best output.
| There may be something of an iterative process there, but it's
| really not creative.
|
| Also the photographer is not "guided by a tool". The camera
| doesn't guide them.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what makes something creative or not?
|
| On the 2nd point, the camera guides photographer. Watch
| anyone take a selfie, they use the camera to decide what to
| do with the camera. It is iterative.
| bearmode wrote:
| Sure. It's like having a friend who can draw. You detail to
| them something you're picturing in your mind, and they make
| it into something actually real.
|
| Who would have ownership over that art piece? Who actually
| did the work to make it exist?
|
| Copyright doesn't protect ideas, it protects the _specific
| creative expression_ of those ideas. By creating a prompt
| you 're creating an idea, but that isn't a copyrightable,
| creative action. You're just the 'ideas guy' for a robot
| artist.
|
| And again on the 2nd point, the camera doesn't guide the
| photographer. It can help them dial in their vision, but
| they're in full creative control at all times. It guides
| you no more than a hammer guides you to the nail.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| One part I found particularly interesting about this is footnote
| 27:
|
| > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected
| by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a
| copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable.
|
| I wonder if this is meant to imply that no possible prompt can
| produce copyrightable output. What if the prompt already contains
| expressive elements that the model faithfully reproduces in its
| output? (For instance, in the limiting case, "Exactly repeat this
| poem that I wrote: ...") Or perhaps this is meant only in the
| strict sense, that a creative prompt does not _necessarily_
| produce copyrightable output, if the expressive elements in the
| output originate from the model instead of the prompt.
| layer8 wrote:
| There will be a case-by-case weighing of which artistic aspects
| were contributed by the human and which by the AI. What they
| are indeed saying here is that a prompt being copyrightable
| does not by itself imply that the generated output is
| copyrightable. I believe this also means that if someone takes
| your copyrighted prompt and uses it to produce some output,
| then that output doesn't a priori infringe on your copyright.
| prhrb wrote:
| The document is too long let me summarise it with ai
| DeathArrow wrote:
| _ChatGPT sues US Government_
|
| _Anti AI discrimination NGOs call for public protests._
| Cypher wrote:
| non ai content will be drowned out by the massive wave of
| generated content.
| favorited wrote:
| It's great that USCO is ending speculation with an official
| stance. Their rationale seems perfectly reasonable, and in step
| with the court rulings that they cited.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Ok, so I won't tell anyone what tools I used to make my art. Not
| a big deal.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The problem will come when somebody takes your art and starts
| selling it themselves. It will be down to you to prove you have
| a copyright.
| auggierose wrote:
| That's not going to be practical. How do you distinguish if
| something was created by mere computation, or by AI? Oops, AI is
| just mere computation. So if you forbid mere computation, I
| cannot use fancy numerical algorithms in shading my 3D art? Ain't
| gonna fly.
| ummonk wrote:
| The U.S. Copyright Office seems to be living under a rock and
| completely unaware of how much creative work goes into prompt
| engineering, as well as selecting the subsequent image and
| applying variations to it until it meets the human's creative
| desires.
| mlindner wrote:
| They state this about the prompt engineering:
|
| > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be
| protected by copyright, that does not mean that material
| generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable.
|
| The prompt is fully copyrightable but the output isn't.
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| If there is substantive work in the development of the prompt,
| then the applicant can submit the prompt for copyright.
|
| The finding seems pretty reasonable, if the machine is doing
| the work then the machine can claim authorship. Otherwise, we
| would say that the Pope was the author of the Sistine Chapel as
| they prompted Michelangelo to paint "a large curve display of
| heaven including with clouds and pictures of angels
| triumphant".
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Many commenters seem to be under the impression that "because I
| made something, it is copyrightable". That's not how it works.
| What is protected under copyright is determined by long processes
| of lobbying, legislation, lawsuits, and court cases. For example:
| a melody is copyrightable, a chord progression is not, even when
| the chord progression is so unique as to be the primary
| intellectual asset of a piece. (Look up contrafacts from the
| bebop era!) Another example, the rules around the copyright of a
| sound recording are very different from those of the intellectual
| property of a song.
|
| Only specific things are copyrightable. There is nothing unusual
| (from a legal sense) in the government and others taking a stance
| on which things those should be and under what circumstances. You
| have no a priori right to copyright something because you fucked
| around with a prompt for a long time.
|
| I don't see how they could go with a different stance given that
| all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it
| and declare it copyright (IFF it _is_ copyrightable, that is).
| This will fall apart it if it 's possible for a company to have
| AI spew out eleventy-billion variation of training input and
| declare them all copyright.
|
| Don't forget that in the early 90's we went through an era of
| records being yanked off the shelf at great cost to labels when
| the sampling laws finally settled. (Anyone else remember the
| appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of Us3's "Hand on the
| Torch"? fond memories!)
| Bjartr wrote:
| > all that is required to copyright a written work is to write
| it and declare it copyright
|
| You don't even need to declare it. Declaring it only affects
| things like whether infringement is "willful" or not when
| deciding penalties. If you create a (US) copyrightable work,
| you retain the copyright by default. For it to not be under
| copyright you have to explicitly place it in the public domain.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I think I remembered reading that in
| music at least, you have to do _something_ with it (like
| capture it on paper or recording). I seem to remember reading
| this came about to prevent people from being able to say
| something was copyright because they maintained they had
| written something say 10 years ago but just not gotten around
| to recording it - and then wanted to sue. But this is vague
| memories from reading about the bizarre and convoluted world
| of music publishing....
| dublinben wrote:
| Correct. The law requires it to be "fixed in any tangible
| medium." Such as transcribing onto paper, recording onto
| record, exposed onto film, etc. Merely thinking, saying,
| playing, singing, dancing, etc a newly created concept is
| too ephemeral to be a recognizable act of authorship.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Well, almost any proof that you danced that concept would
| be fixing it to a tangible medium. That rule mostly just
| rules out heresay, eyewitness accounts, and other such
| methods of "proving" that you created something
| auggierose wrote:
| Putting it on a website is enough.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| The issue to me here is that code is a literary work. Literary
| works are copywritable. Except that AI generated works without
| human authorship aren't per this.
|
| Interestingly this came up when copilot was announced and one
| comment or another was "this will be an interesting bit of case
| law."
|
| Well now we have to see who wants to go first and establish
| precedent for the next half-century. :-)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The issue to me here is that code is a literary work.
|
| Code (or anything else) is not a "work" without the required
| element of human creative input.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If I look at how the law is written, I get an impression that
| technically you might even say that copyright law doesn't
| exclude non-human authored works - they fit the clause of
| types of protected work, a machine might be considered an
| author, etc, _HOWEVER_ , when all that is said and done, a
| machine can't have any rights or standing in court; i.e. even
| if someone would assert that a machine is the author of some
| work and has an exclusive right to reproduce it, then that
| right is unenforceable because the human society and its
| courts simply will ignore any violations of a machine's
| rights.
| statop wrote:
| It isn't AI, it's a glorified Xerox machine.
| visarga wrote:
| That form of AI has already been invented long ago, it's
| called simply Copy & Paste.
|
| GPT combines prompt, context and knowledge, it selects and
| adapts code. It even does problem solving: above average
| human rating on easy problems and 20% over humans on medium
| level problems. When did the xerox or parrot for that
| matter do that?
| statop wrote:
| If you think copy and paste is artificial intelligence
| then there probably isn't much of a discussion to be had
| here.
|
| Yes, very smart and talented people have released ground
| breaking and amazing tools leveraging massively trained
| ML models. The model is not problem solving or
| intelligent in any sense of the word (take it from oai:
| https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt)
|
| "ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but
| incorrect or nonsensical answers..."
|
| To be back on topic, I don't think some sweaty dude from
| the internet should be issued a copyright for typing
| "Minnie Mouse wearing a pikachu t-shirt!" into DALL-E and
| submitting the resulting image.
|
| At the same time, I read a post like this one:
| https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw and I have really no
| objection to copyright being assigned. I think the
| difference is the human authorship, and I think the
| Copyright Office has made a pretty good first swag.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| A bit more like a sampler than a xerox machine... but
| sampling laws got clarified eventually too!
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" You have no a priori right to copyright something because
| you fucked around with a prompt for a long time."_
|
| Rights are a legal fiction anyway, so there are no a priori
| rights to anything.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Rights are consequences of valie decisions that cannot be
| deduced from facts, so there are only _a priori_ rights.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| They're only consequences in the sense that definitions are
| consequences, because that's pretty much what a "right" is:
| a definition.
|
| They don't exist before they are defined by humans, so in
| that sense they do not have an a priori existence.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > They're only consequences in the sense that definitions
| are consequences,
|
| _A priori_ truths are, exactly and only, those things
| that are true by definition (and only exist within a
| particular axiomatic framework.)
|
| You've described exactly why rights can only be _a
| priori_ , but used it to deny that they are.
|
| > They don't exist before they are defined by humans, so
| in that sense they do not have an a priori existence.
|
| If things exist before they are defined by humans and
| human knowledge of them comes as a result of experience
| with their existence, that knowledge is _a posteriori_.
| You've marshalled a cogent explanation of why rights
| cannot be known _a posteriori_ , but then presented as an
| argument for why they cannot be _a priori_.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I think the difficulty we're having in communicating here
| is that I'm not using "a priori" in the Kantian sense as
| being in contrast to "a posteriori", but rather in the
| colloquial sense of "having a prior existence".
|
| It's also irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make how
| or whether humans have knowledge of some pre-existing
| things (through experience or through some other means).
|
| Since you brought up axiomatic frameworks, I'll have to
| differ on that as well, as I don't think the majority of
| humans that talk about rights do so based on any kind of
| axiomatic framework, but rather on their biases and
| because they've essentially been brainwashed in to
| thinking that way through education, socialization, the
| media, peer pressure, parenting, etc..
|
| So my view and Kant's view on this differ significantly,
| and while I give him credit for these terms, I don't
| subscribe to his views and don't feel bound to use these
| terms in the way Kant or Kantians would have me use them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I think the difficulty we're having in communicating
| here is that I'm not using "a priori" in the Kantian
| sense as being in contrast to "a posteriori", but rather
| in the colloquial sense of "having a prior existence".
|
| "Having a prior existence" is very much what _a
| posteriori_ is ( _a priori_ or _a posteriori_ are
| epistemic terms, they don't refer to the thing itself,
| but to our _knowledge_ of the thing, if our knowledge is
| independent of our experience [as it is with things with
| no prior existence of their own] then it is _a priori_ ,
| if it is derived from experience [as it is for things
| that have prior natural existence rather than being pure
| products of intellect] it is _a posteriori_.)
|
| Sure, if you reverse the definition of _a priori_ , it
| applies to exactly the opposite of the things it usually
| applies to, but that's probably not the best way to
| communicate. (And this is literally the first time I've
| ever heard the suggestion of an English "colloquial
| sense" of that phrase, which is used exclusively, in my
| experience, as a technical term of art in epistemology
| (and is used in English largely because an imported Latin
| technical term _won 't_ conflict with any colloquial
| understanding that might attach to a more natural English
| alternative.)
|
| > > Since you brought up axiomatic frameworks, I'll have
| to differ on that as well, as I don't think the majority
| of humans that talk about rights do so based on any kind
| of axiomatic framework, but rather on their biases and
| because they've essentially been brainwashed in to
| thinking that way through education, socialization, the
| media, peer pressure, parenting, etc..
|
| That's still an axiomatic framework, its just one that is
| practically useless to discuss because each of the things
| which you might like to be conclusions dependent on logic
| and a smaller set of simple principles are just
| independent axioms not subject to debate. And, yes, its
| very common.
| ar9av wrote:
| I'm sure there will be a number of ramifications but one I know
| of is for those who sell specific captures of guitar amps that
| were created through machine learning just lost their copyright
| on that product. Those works could not have existed without the
| AI that was used to create them.
| YPPH wrote:
| >For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to
| "write a poem about copyright law in the style of William
| Shakespeare," she can expect the system to generate text that is
| recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles
| Shakespeare's style. [...] But the technology will decide the
| rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the
| text.
|
| Neat example and convincing reasoning.
| jasrys wrote:
| In addition to the new registration guidelines, the USCO
| announced a new AI initiative and series of public hearings
|
| https://copyright.gov/ai/
| trippsydrippsy wrote:
| [dead]
| kube-system wrote:
| This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions on
| the matter.
|
| But it doesn't answer any tough questions either, like: if an AI
| model outputs something very close to a training input, does the
| result infringe on the copyrights of the input work?
| karmasimida wrote:
| This article talks about what is copyrightable. Your question
| is about infringement of already copyrighted material.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, I understand it was out of the scope of this article.
| I'm just saying, these are the easier questions to answer.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's why they are being answered first. The others take
| more time.
| kube-system wrote:
| A lot of these things are already addressed on USPTO's
| FAQs and these answers are the same but "with AI" tacked
| on.
|
| eg: "only human works are subject to copyright", "the
| work must be an original work of authorship", etc.
|
| It's just disappointing that they haven't produced
| anything helpful yet. I suspect that the result will end
| up being permissive because there will be a big industry
| built up around people just kicking the can down the road
| by the time anyone authority issues a more specific
| opinion.
| weavejester wrote:
| > This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions
| on the matter.
|
| Is that sarcasm?
| kube-system wrote:
| Not at all. There's literally nothing in this article that
| would go against ideas already covered in an introductory
| lecture in copyright law.
| weavejester wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification; I wasn't sure how you meant
| it.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| The statement addresses this:
|
| >The Office recognizes that AI-generated works implicate other
| copyright issues not addressed in this statement. It has
| launched an agency-wide initiative to delve into a wide range
| of these issues. Among other things, the Office intends to
| publish a notice of inquiry later this year seeking public
| input on additional legal and policy topics, including how the
| law should apply to the use of copyrighted works in AI training
| and the resulting treatment of outputs.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think that the answer they want to say is, "it probably
| does", but they don't want to say it and cause a big
| disruption to commerce until the courts intervene.
| lucubratory wrote:
| There is precedent in Authors' Guild vs Google and Perfect
| 10 vs Google that it doesn't, this isn't the first time
| things like this have come before the courts.
|
| There are also laws to consider. I know this is US law and
| the US doesn't have those laws, but copyright harmonisation
| is a thing and the EU, UK, Japan etc all have laws very
| explicitly stating that TDM is an exemption to copyright -
| some bodies would presumably consider that.
|
| And finally, there's national security. The US's current
| view is that it's in an existential great power competition
| with Chinese society, and needs to compete on every level
| to succeed. One of those levels is very explicitly AI, it's
| considered a main "battlefront" in the new Cold War. If the
| US significantly restricts TDM, that not only makes it less
| competitive compared to jurisdictions that don't like the
| UK, EU, Japan, and China, but it specifically improves the
| effectiveness of the Thousand Talents program which the US
| IC and analyst community view as a very serious threat.
| Academics want to be able to do their research, AI is
| critically important to US national security, and currently
| the US is statistically the best place to be an AI
| researcher. The government won't want to jeopardize that
| when China is already advancing in AI very rapidly and
| actively trying to tempt scientists to come over with
| better pay and conditions.
| eternalban wrote:
| If you (like me) were wondering what TDM means - Text and
| Data Mining.
|
| _A Deeper Look into the EU Text and Data Mining
| Exceptions: Harmonisation, Data Ownership, and the Future
| of Technology_ , Journal of European and International IP
| Law, 2022
|
| https://academic.oup.com/grurint/article/71/8/685/6650009
|
| _" This paper focuses on the two exceptions for text and
| data mining (TDM) introduced in the Directive on
| Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM).
|
| While both are mandatory for Member States, Art. 3 is
| also imperative and finds application in cases of text
| and data mining for the purpose of scientific research by
| research and cultural institutions; Art. 4, on the other
| hand, permits text and data mining by anyone but with
| rightholders able to 'contract-out' (Art. 4).
|
| We trace the context of using the lever of copyright law
| to enable emerging technologies such as AI and the
| support innovation. Within the EU copyright intervention,
| elements that may underpin a transparent legal framework
| for AI are identified, such as the possibility of
| retention of permanent copies for further verification.
|
| On the other hand, we identify several pitfalls,
| including an excessively broad definition of TDM which
| makes the entire field of data-driven AI development
| dependent on an exception. We analyse the implications of
| limiting the scope of the exceptions to the right of
| reproduction; we argue that the limitation of Art. 3 to
| certain beneficiaries remains problematic; and that the
| requirement of lawful access is difficult to
| operationalize.
|
| In conclusion, we argue that there should be no need for
| a TDM exception for the act of extracting informational
| value from protected works. The EU's CDSM provisions
| paradoxically may favour the development of biased AI
| systems due to price and accessibility conditions for
| training data that offer the wrong incentives. To avoid
| licensing, it may be economically attractive for EU-based
| developers to train their algorithms on older, less
| accurate, biased data, or import AI models already
| trained abroad on unverifiable data."_ [reformatted]
| kube-system wrote:
| > There is precedent in Authors' Guild vs Google and
| Perfect 10 vs Google that it doesn't
|
| Fair use is entirely dependent on the specific use. While
| those decisions may protect (for instance) OpenAI,
| they're not helpful in determining if anyone can use the
| outputs from such a model.
|
| Yes Google can index an image and serve it in search
| results. But I cannot copy a copyrighted image from
| Google and publish it in my book.
|
| Questions like "is the output that ChatGPT just gave me
| encumbered by copyright?" are still extremely difficult
| to answer.
|
| I agree that we're losing our technological edge. This is
| why I wish we had better answers for these questions. If
| we want to lead with the rule of law, then the rule of
| law needs to be able to lead.
| rhino369 wrote:
| I don't think that question is very tough. It's almost
| certainly copyright infringement. The method of copying doesn't
| really matter.
| kube-system wrote:
| Well, I more mean that the answer that many suspect is the
| case, is tough to swallow.
|
| In that case, the consequence would be: If you don't validate
| that your AI model is producing something sufficiently
| different than all of the inputs, you've created a copyright
| infringement Russian roulette.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Yep. And DMCA safe harbor doesn't apply, so there won't be
| much of a defense if it happens.
| [deleted]
| kirubakaran wrote:
| And how close is too close?
| [deleted]
| petesergeant wrote:
| You can get ChatGPT to output copyright material very easily
| shagie wrote:
| _You_ can get ChatGPT to output copyright material very
| easily.
|
| You can also copy and paste from an existing copyrighted
| work.
|
| In either case, it is you, the human - with agency to do so
| - who should be liable for the content that you publish.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's the concern. You can easily identify when you are
| copying others work when done directly. If you use a
| black box that _sometimes_ gives you infringing output,
| how do you use it with confidence?
| shagie wrote:
| You can use it, just don't use it for things that you
| publish without doing sufficient diligence to see if that
| work would be infringing on something else.
|
| I intend to make an e-ink panel that displays woodcut
| style images generated by stable diffusion (get a list of
| a 30 or so different descriptions of scenes, and have
| them slowly get generated over the day and display a
| different one each hour).
|
| So, here's the question - are any of those woodcut images
| derivative of some other work? Don't know - and it likely
| doesn't matter as it would be something hanging on a wall
| in a room.
|
| On the other hand, if I was to collect them and publish
| them as a book, then I, as the human who is publishing
| them, would need to do sufficient diligence to see if any
| of them are derivative works. They might be - but I am
| the one publishing it then - not Stable Diffusion.
|
| Likewise, if I was creating a collection of epic rap
| battles between historical figures as generated by GPT...
| then I should search to make sure that none of the
| phrases that are used in there are lifted directly from
| some other source. Again, it is me as the human with
| agency that is publishing it, not GPT.
|
| If you were to go to Fiverr and request 100 pictures of
| woodcuttings or people to write epic rap battles between
| Julius Caesar and Ghengis Khan - would it matter if it
| was a human lifted the text or GPT? It is still upon you,
| the person publishing it to do the check.
| kube-system wrote:
| You are right, but AI products are basically all
| currently being pitched as if that is unnecessary.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Wasn't there a voyager episode about this?
| jcarrano wrote:
| How come work "autonomously created by a computer algorithm
| running on a machine" cannot be copyrighted <<it was made
| "without any creative contribution from a human actor">> but
| machine code as generated by a compiler can?
| vanattab wrote:
| Hmm. I am not so sure about this. What about the fact that to
| produce a image I like with dalle our similar I need to often run
| many many different descriptions to get what I want and some
| times use the edit feature. If a generate an image and use the
| built in photoshop like erase feature and regerate something else
| to fill the space is it copywriteable. What about if photoshop
| has or implements (probably already exits) auto insertion of
| images and people. Say you just paste something onto your image
| and photoshop runs ai algorithm that helps blen it in. What about
| traditional painters that relay on randomness in thier work? Like
| guys who just spin a canvas get blindfold and just throw paint
| around?
| lukko wrote:
| Then with DALL-E it is like you are instructing a commissioned
| artist (who would own the copyright). I think it's
| fundamentally different to using a tool in Photoshop - content
| aware fill uses the rest of the image to fill in space, so
| whoever owned the original image would own the content-aware
| fill section. If an AI is used to generate new features -
| images, people - then it is like a collage or original and
| copyrighted work. Artists that throw paint around made the
| artistic and creative decision to do that, would choose the
| paint, the canvas etc. and actually it is very difficult to
| create work that has that quality of spontaneity and randomness
| - they would definitely own the copyright.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| It's going to be insanely hard to copyright anything produced by
| AI. Especially now that generative models are widely available/in
| use. The possibility of multiple instances of the same output
| being produced (as a whole, or in parts) is high.
|
| All you have to do is set the temperature low and the generative
| models will start producing repeatable results.
|
| All of a sudden, copyrighting GitHub Copilot supported source
| code is not so straightforward anymore. How does one distinguish
| the human authorship in a function from that generated by AI?
|
| Interesting times we live in. In a way, this may lead to less
| regulation/more openness. Equal opportunity for all. At least one
| can hope.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I like to watch people play with Midjourney in the public
| Discord channels, and I can only assume that if the AI
| generated an image for somebody, it could generate the same
| image for me.
|
| (If the seed and prompt just happen to be exactly the same)
|
| People using AI generated images are not going to be able to
| sue for copyright infringement because they can never be sure
| the AI didn't just generate the same image for somebody else.
| (and more importantly, whose image was generated first :))
| erlkonig wrote:
| The big clue here, is that if we allow generated content to be
| copyrighted, then some asshat company will just generate All The
| Things (within, say, a given space) and copyright them (likewise
| for trademarks and patents, which could be much easier to exhaust
| within defined spaces). Combined with the lifetime of companies
| and the preposterous copyright extensions granted to them, swaths
| of human-generated work could be excluded from copyright, blocked
| by some hidden trove of copyrighted machine output. Especially
| bad if someone manages to copyright everything that _could_ be
| generated by some AI.
| bearmode wrote:
| And how will they know?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI
| technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate
| creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and
| generate material."_
|
| As an artist and a musician I use various degrees of randomness
| in my work - from feedback and "noise" in a composition to
| abstract splatters in my paintings.
|
| Plenty of art, writing, and music is the result of partially or
| completely random techniques, over which the artist has little to
| no control, and AI generated works are just another tool in the
| hands of a creator.
|
| The copyright office understands neither art nor creativity.
| agentwiggles wrote:
| I tend to agree, and I find myself doubtful that this will
| remain the status quo for very long. As soon as these things
| reach the point where they could realistically be used for
| something like a Disney movie, all of a sudden there will be a
| lot of money behind finding ways to make the output
| copyrightable.
|
| It seems to me that there's a spectrum here. If, for example, I
| create an animated music video for a song (that I own) by using
| Stable Diffusion to generate the imagery, generate all the
| prompts that are fed to the model, cut and edit that imagery
| together via my own creative vision... Where does the line
| between my authorship and the model's end? I'm not allowed to
| claim any ownership of that output?
|
| Then again... If someone enters a similar prompt, and gets
| similar output, should I have some claim to that?
|
| It's a pretty tricky philosophical issue, honestly. The more I
| think about it, I think I'm ok with this as the general
| framework, at least for now, as, if nothing else, it may
| prevent powerful interests like Disney from gobbling up
| ownership of the whole generative AI space in its infancy
| mlindner wrote:
| I think that's covered pretty clearly in this document? If
| you add creative vision on top of the generated output, then
| that creative vision is copyrightable.
| user3939382 wrote:
| This works for now. However, I can imagine a spectrum of input
| parameter specificity that could eventually blur the line this
| draws and undermine this strategy.
|
| On one side you have these general prompts.
|
| On the other side you have, say, autotune, where the final output
| is still created by a machine but the human's input (voice in
| this case) greatly constrains the output.
| 1attice wrote:
| This announcement has immediate, significant practical impact for
| creatives.
|
| The most important document a creative had, up until today, was
| their portfolio -- typically, a look-book of finished pieces.
|
| Now, that portfolio needs to include, for every piece, proof-of-
| work -- snapshots of the whatever-it-is in various states along
| the road to completion, in sufficient quantity to dissuade any
| legal claim that the work was AI-produced.
|
| At the limit, those aim to sell organic-certified free range
| content will want to surveil themselves during the entire
| creative process, and associate that recording indelibly with the
| created work.
|
| That's a whole lot of extra work and a whole lot of extra privacy
| violation, but the alternative will be to devalue one's own work:
| for to the extent to which it may have been produced by AI, it
| will be a liability to downstream consumers.
|
| For example, a film director might commission a score from a
| composer, but unless that score comes with timestamped, SHAsummed
| video of _enough of the composition process to preclude
| invalidating the broader claim to a copyright_ (and thus salable
| work), that composition becomes a financial risk for the
| director.
|
| The consequences of _not_ doing so are severe: At minimum, if the
| score cannot be copyrighted, then it can be borrowed, free-of-
| charge, by another film director, and at maximum, the spectre of
| AI contribution might virally taint the entire film (IANAL; am I
| getting this right?)
|
| "Creative" just became the most surveilled job on the planet.
|
| We also may have just found the first agreeable use for
| blockchain -- an indelible public record of organic artistic
| creation, bearing SHAsums associated recorded twitch and youtube
| streams (along with logs of workstation network traffic)
| permanently with the finished work.
|
| Wouldn't it be hilarious if AI copyright law saved crypto?
| tobiasSoftware wrote:
| "at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint
| the entire film" - which would also mean that anyone who used
| GitHub Copilot would not be able to copyright their software
| code.
| 1attice wrote:
| I hadn't thought of that -- but yes, it very well might be
| the case.
|
| Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI
| contribution.
|
| An efficient company will operate close to that line, say,
| targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI
| contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market
| pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage
| points.)
|
| That means that Joey, your new intern, might accidentally
| commit enough SLOC to make the whole codebase
| uncopyrightable.
|
| Even if Joey didn't do that, the _possibility_ of Joey doing
| that will have a strong deterrent effect on hiring Joey,
| especially if he 's WFH.
|
| The only mitigation would be to record everything Joey does,
| so that if there's ever any question, they can whip out the
| recordings of Joey picking his nose or whatever.
| kromem wrote:
| Something I've begun thinking about after playing with
| GPT-4 is that I could see within a year or so any of my new
| software development projects being a "no code" setup using
| comments to define functions and correct problem areas but
| leaving all actual code to the generative AI.
|
| In many ways software projects for years now have this
| issue.
|
| A decade ago when ruby on rails scaffolded out a project -
| is the result copyrightable according to the new guidance?
|
| Separating out copyrighting software design at a comment
| level from software implementation is going to be the
| direction this all goes as the tools rapidly get
| significantly better.
|
| Which is also going to be great, as imagine how a codebase
| designed this way might be able to be switched to a new
| language or switch out the 3rd party API being used or
| database being run on.
|
| People are worried about protecting their busy work rather
| than evolving with the technology to establish their value
| above and beyond the busywork parts.
|
| My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the
| loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in
| knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross
| integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change
| as technology advances, but it will still be some time
| before that part is automated too.
| 1attice wrote:
| > My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the
| loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's
| in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader
| cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that
| will change as technology advances, but it will still be
| some time before that part is automated too.
|
| I think this is just normalcy bias on your part. The
| thing that GPT-4 does apparently works at _most levels of
| complexity_ , certainly more than GPT-3.
|
| It seems likely that, for sufficiently high N, GPT-N will
| enable your boss to, as you say, "manage complexity
| across a broad[er] cross integration of concerns".
|
| There's nothing magical about "cross integration of
| concerns," any more than there was something magical
| about being able to use (say) `git rebase` correctly.
|
| There is no reason to think that GPT-N won't be better at
| you for that, too.
|
| Why would your boss pay you six figures when she can get
| the same deal for $20 a month?
| og_kalu wrote:
| Not possible to reliably tell apart. The Image generation scene
| is one thing. For a lot of output, there are still some tells.
| Text generation though...well good luck ever finding that out.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It sounds like the honor system, which is not unprecedented. A
| lot of governmental systems rely on people to tell the truth
| when interacting with the government, and then they have to
| police cases of suspected fraud after the fact.
|
| If you were dragged into a copyright suit by someone, you could
| probably try to prove that the work was AI generated as a
| defense? Not sure how effective it would be.
| bawolff wrote:
| > If you were dragged into a copyright suit by someone, you
| could probably try to prove that the work was AI generated as
| a defense? Not sure how effective it would be.
|
| It would probably be similar to when wordperfect was sued for
| including famous painting as clipart. WordPerfect won using
| basically this defense (that no human creativity went into
| making the clip art) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgema
| n_Art_Library_v._Cor....
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| Government just found a way to expand itself and give out wages
| for a job that they cannot really do.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Who has the burden of proof? Can I just claim everything and
| anything as "made by AI" and start (ab)using it and then it is
| up to the original author to proof that it wasn't actually made
| by an AI?
| PeterisP wrote:
| You do, in a civil claim its up to you to prove that your
| rights were actually violated.
| Lammy wrote:
| What I'm curious about is how much Neuralink will it take to make
| a person legally less-than-human in this context. If I'm hooked
| up to the Metabrain am I still entitled to ownership of my works?
| tylergetsay wrote:
| If a TV show generates a script using AI in which animated
| characters read using AI voices... would I be allowed to then
| distribute/remix the portion of that episode? What does the
| distinction requirement actually do besides serve as a notice, is
| there some kind of diminished rights?
| kevingadd wrote:
| In this case they're saying they wouldn't register it, you
| could still try to take someone to court for copyright
| infringement. But you'd be rolling the dice since "the
| copyright office says it's unfit for registration" is probably
| a pretty convincing defense to the average judge.
|
| It wouldn't be the first time there was an argument over
| whether a work was copyrightable or who had the rights, though
| - for example the Monkey Selfie case
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
| tobiasSoftware wrote:
| How does this affect programming? Does this mean if a program was
| built using GitHub Copilot, that in order to have copyright on
| software, you have to explain that to the copyright office?
| cush wrote:
| Maybe similar to how software is affected today by open source,
| by providing attribution.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Unpopular opinion : the government shouldn't protect your art
| from getting used as training data. The government shouldn't
| protect your generated art from being copied. Intellectual
| property is not real property. Nothing is being taken from you.
| Force is only justified in response to force, and you don't get
| the right to throw someone in jail for "stealing" something you
| still have.
| hnbad wrote:
| There is no such thing as private property. It's a fiction
| enforced with the threat of violence. It's even fairly recent
| as a concept.
|
| If we agree that private property should exist, "it's not real"
| is not a good argument for why intellectual property shouldn't
| exist. Not all violations of private property have to be
| stealing. If I sleep in the empty house you own, that is
| trespass even if I don't cause any physical damage. If I tend
| to the garden of the summer home you own and eat the fruit that
| would have spoiled by the time you came by, I still violated
| your property rights even if I left the garden in a better
| condition than I found it.
|
| If we abolish intellectual property, why should we keep money,
| which at this point is entirely virtual? Why should we allow
| stocks, which represent a partial ownership claim in a legal
| entity that lays claim on other property? Why should we allow
| corporations, which are afforded similar rights as real persons
| but don't physically exist? Why should we allow ownership of
| land which is unused, homes that aren't lived in, produce that
| isn't consumed? Why should we allow private property at all?
|
| If you want to abolish private property, I'm all on board with
| you, but if you think intellectual property is tangibly
| different you need to take a closer look at how private
| property came about and what it even means.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Am I physically touching your painting when I copy it? If
| not, then your attempt at equating physical property to
| thoughts is nonsense. We both believe in physical property,
| however arbitrarily invented it is. Only you believe in
| intellectual property, and I'm willing to bet you aren't even
| consistent with it. Should you be fined for saving an NFT?
|
| I don't want the government to be involved in virtual money.
| Stocks are a claim to physical property, corporations are (or
| should be) a convenient way to address physical property
| pooled together from multiple people. The rest of your
| comment can be addressed with the homestead principle - if I
| didn't take it by force you can't take it from me by force.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Private property !== personal possessions. I, for one, don't
| agree private property should exist, just like intellectual
| property. There is no place in the future for such concepts,
| they all feel quite antiquated.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Do you also agree that government should not enforce if I
| borrow your bike while you are not using it if I return it? If
| not how is that different? You still have the bike and you
| werent using it while I borrowed it - you just didn't know I
| was borrowing it
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| My bike is real property. Your thoughts are not.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Tell me you have never done anything creative in your life
| without telling me you have never done anything creative in
| your life.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Implying I'd be willing to bend my principles when they
| don't benefit me, which I wouldn't. That's what makes us
| different.
| yipbub wrote:
| In universe of perfectly slippery spherical cows, I wouldn't
| mind. However, in this universe bikes experience wear, I
| wouldn't be able to spontaneously decide to use it, etc.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| You writing a shitty knock off Harry Potter novel "wears"
| on the brand. Just think your favorite book, movie, or
| music and think if you would enjoy it if there was really
| no way to know what was real work and what was just some
| copy-cat or straight up scammer selling rubbish. Now it is
| easy; you can not publish your Harry Potter novel due to
| copyright.
|
| Put it in another way: to become a author in a world where
| copyright is not a thing is pretty much impossible. Either
| you have to sell your book digitally with draconian DRM -
| and you will still get your book stolen or you have to own
| your own print shop, because if you send your book to any
| publisher they can just take your work and publish it as
| their own.
|
| And let's be real the amount your bike wears out from me
| riding it to the shop and back is so negligible that it
| won't make a difference in the life span of the bike.
|
| There are good reasons to have copyright - however I do not
| like how long the copyright is. I've stated it before that
| in my mind good copyright would be something like 10-20
| years or life time of the author whatever comes later. This
| would allow any creative to hold the right to their
| world/characters/whatever until they are gone and it
| wouldn't discourage them from publishing in their old age
| since even after they have passed their families would
| still benefit from the works for sometime.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Probably doesnt mind that entire countries have built their
| economic models around copying ip and selling copycat
| products.
| drcode wrote:
| Autotuning of voices uses AI- Songs using autotune are partially
| AI generated.
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