An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
He spent weeks on fine tuning tbf
It’s like photography: Photographers often spend weeks trying to get the perfect shot, should they be allowed to copyright it?
It absolutely takes training to familiarize yourself with the model and get the results you want.
Copyright or not doesnt change time and effort that can be spent on prompting. Theres no reason to have an objective stance against people that want to explore it.
Yes, photographers, who held their camera, who spent years honing their craft, learning the ins and out of the art of photography, who put their bodies in the field to capture real life, yes, they should be able to copyright their work.
Pull out your phone. Open the camera app. Click the button. You just did an art.
Another thought experiment: If I hire an artist and tell them exactly what they should draw, which style they should use, which colours they should use etc does 100% of the credit go to the artist or am I also partly responsible?
Normally, if you’re commissioning a piece of art for commercial purposes, you would have some sort of contract with the artist that gives you the copyrights. Otherwise, the copyright belongs to the artist that produced the work, even if you buy the product.
But does the artist get 100% of the credit? Ignoring copyright for now, this is just a thought experiment, who’s getting how much credit?
If I order an art piece by someone, and reject thousands of finished pieces for it to not meet my standards, will i become an artist?
If I take lots of photos, print out and frame one of them but delete the others, will I become an artist?
“I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created hundreds of images using it, and after many weeks of fine-tuning and curating my generations, I chose my top three and had them printed on canvas,” he writes.
If anyone deserves copyright over a photo, it’s the people that had their work photographed without permission. Then, the most deserving of the copyright are the camera and film manufacturers that made photography possible.
I think this is an angle that isn’t pften taken. The advent of photography was a very similar situation to the current advent of AI.
However, there are some crucial differences. For example, a photo can realistically be taken for personal use, which is either protected by law, or at least tolerated. AI, on the other hand, doesn’t have this going for it (you wouldn’t really go to the trouble of training an AI model for personal use). Even if the model and everything else is fully transparent and open source, it’s still gobbling up copyrighted data for commercial purposes - the model’s authors or the users’. Luckily, there is no AI fair use carveout (and I hope there won’t ever be one).
Another thing I’d like to point out: in the vast majority of european legal systems copyright isn’t called “Copyright”, but “Authors’ rights”, i.e. its primary purpose isn’t to restrict copying as much as it’s protect the interests of the author (not publisher/corporation, although this unfortunately got bastardised a while ago).
I can only hope the EU takes a reasonable approach to AI (that is, ban it from gobbling copyrighted work, require current “tainted” models be purged along with corporations paying reparations to the authors, as well as banning EULA clauses along the lines of “by signing up we get to feed all your information into the AI”).
By my first comment I was trying to point out the fact that the “time invested” argument isn’t that strong. That doesn’t mean there aren’t better arguments or that I don’t agree with the general idea, just that we need better arguments if we want to win this fight.
it’s the people that had their art used without their permission to train the AI.
This is the least coherent argument I keep seeing against AI art… Every art student in the world trains on the works of other artists. They explicitly study the works of great masters to learn their techniques. But when an “evil corporation™” does it it’s now theft.
It’s literally wanting the laws to reflect who is doing something rather than wanting them to be applied fairly.
