this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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One of the reasons I like AI art is that it's pretty settled law that something produced by purely "mechanical" means can't itself have copyright, since copyright requires both originality and a human author.
It seems like a reasonably compromise, the AI was created by hoovering up the commons, so anything it creates should belong to the commons. I expect a lot of lobbying in the future to try and change it though.
And if AI work would be copyrighted by the "prompt artist" then all the artists whose work is in the training set can sue the prompter for profiting of their work without licensing fees. It would be a legal clusterfuck so it was pretty wise to side step the whole issue.
AI art requires more input though. Like a song made on a computer is still copyrightable. We've yet to see a court decide if writing a prompt is enough to copyright the output.
I'm of a split mind because getting good results from it is more difficult than people think but it's often not as hard as ai users make it out to be. And it doesn't help people emotionally when AI models are trained on already copyrighted stuff without permission, but that's more like asking if you could copyright the content you make with a pirated copy of Photoshop in my opinion.
I haven't made my mind up on this and my opinion flips a lot. If someone is doing something like modifying a prompt over a few iterations, maybe using infill to make a "composite", then getting a single image at the end they claim as their creation, I think that's fine. If people just sort of throw a prompt in and then make thousands of images and claim all of them are their creations then I have a verily difficult time seeing that as something other than "machine output."
A scary thought is that case law on this might be determined by which sort of these two approaches ends up in court first. Imagine the more valid type above ending up there first (even if you view it as invalid it's definitely more valid than the other lol) and a jury agreeing it's a unique creation. It just protects all the AI slop creators more. But if the reverse happens, it could affect what people view as real artists. Just a random, extreme example: Someone uses a little AI on an otherwise totally original piece to do something like add good looking wrinkles to fabric. Is it suddenly not copyrightable? Could I now steal this and put it on shirts? It's just sort of scary because we don't know what's going to happen when it actually goes to court.