AI-generated images are interesting in that, in general, the more you look at them, and in particular the more you look at the detail, the worse they look. This is, arguably, one simple way to distinguish them from actual art.

Pretty images are worthless, there's no point staring at images that have were made without intention or effort. Making a prompt is hardly any effort and more of a lucky hit.

There are no "LLM-generated images". These images are generated using diffusion models. LLMs are very different from diffusion models.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_model

>in this case, it's the prompt or conversation he had with the AI. That should definitely be able to be copyrightable, but I agree that the image itself should not.

If you accept that, does that mean source code is copyrightable but compiled code is not?

I'm kind-of ok with the raw output of diffusion models being public domain. It gets more complicated when The process is more than just Text->Image. Artists spending large amounts of time iterating, compositing, inpainting etc. are applying their knowledge of style, design, colour, and lighting.

Recipes are not copyrightable.

If the food you produce with them can no longer be protected, what value are the tools used to create them?

Yes, but we need to figure out whether it's good or bad.

E.g. medieval craftsmen assumed that monopolies were good, but today we consider them bad.

I always wondered why there was an immediate rush to call them AI artists despite the first and predominant use being writing. Even a prompt is just writing text. Even with all the fancy visual tools, you still need to write a prompt somewhere along the lines.

Yet “AI writers” isn’t really a thing journalists/bloggers refer to them as. It’s interesting from the outside, as neither a writer or an artist.

He's the very picture of entitlement. A portrait of entitlement even.

It tastes even better if you buy into the zeitgeist

This ^^^. So many cannot see the blatant parallel with photography here -- there is a rich art historic debate regarding the value of photography that went through very similar stages of rejection (and ultimate acceptance). This is a fantastic example of George Santayana's famous aphorism.

I assume he added up the number of times people have used the image and multiply it by some fee.

But he's wrong. If there were a fee to use this image, basically zero people would use it. They'd all go to midjourney and make their own better images for free.

According to my communications with the US copyright office, you never get a global copyright by editing. At best you get a copyright on your changes - and that only if they are copywritable on their own. Minor changes to wording or tweaking an image would generally not pass that threshold. It is a case by case judgment as to the status of any individual change.

Also the other way - if you use an AI tool to edit an original image, is the output copyrightable? Is the answer different if the AI thing is doing a generative fill vs a bigger change? I guess this is the more financially important version of when Facebook was tagging any use of AI-powered tools in eg Photoshop as an AI generated image.

I was looking for exactly this comment and was not disappointed.

Last I heard, nothing generated by an LLM can be copyrighted. Copyright is for protecting the intellectual work of humans, not computers.

The closest I've heard is a LLM generated book had portions of the book copyrighted by the "Author", but only the portions where the author had significantly altered the LLM generated text.

> Curation makes something a copyrightable work.

Are you sure about that?

I know one or two countries have "database rights" which give a special type of IP protection to collections of methodically collected facts, like digital maps and phone books. But I've never heard of "curation" being copyrightable in and of itself.

Genuinely asking: would/should the ownership rest solely with the person promoting the model, or would part of all of it belong to the model itself (and/or its creator)? My hunch is that this is a somewhat unprecedented scenario, so comparing Midjourney to a tool like Photoshop wouldn't be completely accurate—in the sense that of course Adobe doesn't hold the rights to things you make in Photoshop—but there could very well be established cases I'm unaware of!

No, curation of a public domain painting does not make your scan of the painting copyrighted, even is someone somehow take your scan in his own book. I think it's called integration works, and basically the copyright remain with who owned them in the first place (cc/public domain images makes genAI a very fun case for IP lawyers. I think the 'nah, not human=not IP' is a good punt).

I don't think copyright applies to the image itself. The work of curation can be copyrighted, but here it's trivial, just selecting one image. If he published a book of AI-generated artwork, the curation of images could be copyrighted as a whole, but each individual image would not be copyrighted.

Close! If Hollywood starts doing it, it will become copyrightable. (But somehow only if you can retain 5+ lawyers.)

The AI generated content would not be copyrightable. Manipulations of that AI content by people would still be copyrightable.

Copyrightable output of pure AI is the nightmare situation. Imagine Disney trains an AI on purely content from in-house work-for-hire artists. They would then be free to generate an infinite amount of content that they claim ownership of.

Copyright law, like all laws are intended to benefit society, not individuals. They can be changed as circumstances change. Sure, lobbyists can have a strong influence and attempt to tilt the playing field towards some individuals, but the primary strength of lobbyists is that they show up. Change goes to those who show up.

It means that studios will shift how they lobby for copyright law as they train internal AI models on their asset catalogs. Eventually, Allen's claim will be mainstream.

You bet they will lobby to protect their IP.

Disney may well buy AI companies that may compete with them (like a next level acquisition equivalent of when they bought Pixar) and copyright everything instead.

We live in an insane world where capitalism is a weapon which destroys and limits art, rather than art enriching us and the world.

Or he could just sell them as an NFT...

It's hypothetical millions. He's claiming unrealizable profits because he can't protect his work from being copied without compensation.

So technically, he has zero right now and is begging the government to use force of law (i.e. threat of violence) to direct millions to him.

I'm working on my second million!

...I gave up on my first...

Yes.

Or rather, it should get the same copyright consideration as all the artwork that went into building the models.

So still yes.

Nature photographers can spend weeks or months scouting out a proper locale, picking the vantage point, waiting for just the right moment (or collecting and curating hundreds of moments), and then doing (possibly) final touch-ups in a photo editor.

Their work is copyrightable, and it can be argued the only "work" they did was pushing a shutter button and maybe some touch-ups. Nature did the rest.

We extend copyright protection to them; it's difficult for me to see why we wouldn't extend copyright protection to AI-synthesized works on similar grounds.

I don't agree that AI generated work should grant a copyright to the prompter, but it's not an inconsistent position. The belief that training a model is fair use does not preclude the belief that copying the work directly is not.

Within the US' jurisdiction, the USPTO has ruled NO.

I don't think I agree. I know a woman who live by copying paintings (huge ones usually, only saw her copy 2-6m wide painting) in different museums, then sell the copy to buyers who want them in his manor. She doesn't copy 1 for 1 (it's impossible to get all the brush strokes right, even though she spend days studying them), and in fact specialize in 3 specific styles to avoid visible divergence, but her work isn't copyrightable. She spend arguably way, waaaaaay more time on her paintings than 'ai artists' (I met her in a art museum in Lille where she was halfway through the painting after 2 months, she became fast friend with my dad though, spent hours speaking about pigment and brush techniques), that doesn't make her work any more copyrighted.

If that's the case then they are sampling previous artists and need to pay them.

You can't have your cake and eat it.

But the prompt should be copyrightable?

The prompts and node graphs are copyrightable human work product, but not the images, so publish your beautiful prompts and node graphs instead.

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