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.”

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      3 months ago

      Machine output cannot be copyrighted. Whether prompt tweaking and the other stuff involved in making AI art is enough for something to not be considered machine output is still to be decided by the courts.

    • john89@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 months ago

      How much of it does he have to make in order for it to ‘count’ in your mind?

    • pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      31
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      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?

      • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        3 months ago

        It’s nothing like photography. It takes zero special training to feed an AI a prompt. 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.

        • tee9000@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          7
          arrow-down
          11
          ·
          3 months ago

          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.

            • tee9000@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              3 months ago

              Rejection of reality? Because you dont like ai?

              So you could create a targeted result with prompts/iterations as well as someone who has practiced with midjourney since it came out?

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          arrow-down
          14
          ·
          3 months ago

          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.

      • pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        3 months ago

        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?

        • Rhoeri@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          3 months ago

          According to these people, YOU become the artist, AND the AI is the artist.

        • IamSparticles@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • Clasm@ttrpg.network
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            3 months ago

            Then there needs to be a copyright ownership agreement between the artist in the article and the artists’ whose work was used to train the AI…

          • pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            3 months ago

            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?

            • IamSparticles@lemmy.zip
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              3 months ago

              There is no legally defined basis for “who gets credit.” An artist is not a tool that you used to produce art. The artist produced the artwork. They own the artwork and copyrights (that is, the right to make and distribute copies) unless there is some legal arrangement that says otherwise. The fact that you paid them and told them what to do, by itself, means nothing in a legal context. That’s why, if you’re paying an artist to do creative work, or if you’re an artist being paid to do creative work, you should always have a contract that defines, among other things, what everyone’s rights are with regard to the final product.

      • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        3 months ago

        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?

        • Soup@lemmy.cafe
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          3 months ago

          According to anyone in the Stable Diffusion communities, yes. And as a matter of fact, because I responded to you, I am now a novelist.

              • Red Army Dog Cooper@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                5
                ·
                3 months ago

                your not doing the work, you are telling the computer to do the work based on words you typed in, at best you could argue you own the copyright to the prompt you typed in, but not to what the computer generated. You did not generate, the computer generated

                • Soggy@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  4
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  3 months ago

                  How is that meaningfully different from “the camera generated”? Both result in a full image from a single input.

                • pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  3
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  3 months ago

                  “you’re not doing the work, you are telling the camera to do the work based on a setting you found / created, at best you could argue you own the copyright to the setting, but not to what the camera captured. You did not take a photo, the camera took it”

          • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            3 months ago

            If I order an photograph by someone, and reject thousands of finished pieces for it to not meet my standards, will i become a cameraman?

        • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          3 months ago

          If anyone deserves copyright over an AI generated image, it’s the people that had their art used without their permission to train the AI. Then, the people most deserving of the copyright are the software engineers that developed the AI.

          • unrelatedkeg@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            3 months ago

            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.

            • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              6
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              3 months ago

              Your argument is erroneous. You’re equating photography to AI art creation. That was your first error. Attempting to make my argument seem ridiculous by reappropriating my sentence structure and offering no real counterpoint was your second error.

          • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            11
            ·
            3 months ago

            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.

            • erin (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              3 months ago

              There is a difference between studying techniques, ideology, history, and mediums to be able to use a style created by another artist in your own creative works, and putting all the creative end products into the ideas blender and churning out a product with no creativity and no intentionality to the application of the process. What’s the end game? At what point does human creativity become redundant and AI starts eating its own slop? Do human artists need to keep creating depictions of meaning or value or whatever else they find important to endlessly feed into the machine so it can duplicate them, missing any of the metaphor, subtext, and soul present in the original? At what point is it obvious that workers are having their labor stolen by the tech bro Soylent Green idea machine to enrich them at the expense of whoever’s life work they seemed to be slop worthy of regurgitation.

              AI can be an excellent shortcut or a great tool, and help us make our work easier and products better, but it is not a creator of original creative works, and cannot be validated at the same level as human artists. I, for one, would like to see a future where artists don’t just exist to feed into their machine betters.

              • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                3 months ago

                AI can be an excellent shortcut or a great tool, and help us make our work easier and products better, but it is not a creator of original creative works

                An AI image doesn’t just pop into the universe apropos of nothing. I don’t think you can say there is zero creativity in the process. A human sat down, conceived of an idea, and used a tool to create it. What is at the core of debate is whether the result is a creative work made by the human or not.

                I agree that the AI is not the creator of the work. But I’m not so quick to say that the person wasn’t either… Cameras have a lot of stuff they do for the human. You can’t credibly say that you create any photo you take with your phone. The billions of transistors and image processing algorithms do that. You chose what to point it at and when. And maybe some technical parameters. And when you prompt an AI you have full creative control over what goes into it as well. Hell - you could probably even copyright the prompt if it’s sufficiently creative! But not the resulting artwork?

                We may not value AI art as much as we do traditional arts. But I’m very hesitant to say that it is not art at all.

                • erin (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  3 months ago

                  Photography has far more depth, complexity, and creativity as an artform and comparing it to AI both misunderstands the process and does it a huge disservice. Even before lining up the shot, the photographer must choose the right focus length, exposure, and a number of other technical settings, then must choose a subject, perhaps modify the composition, and have the right timing.

                  Photography can be as simple as pointing a phone camera for a well timed moment or snapping a once in a lifetime shot with an expensive lens. AI art takes orders of magnitude less creativity or training to do well, because it’s stealing the work of people that have already learned the composition techniques and have done the legwork, which is just being shoddily regurgitated by the plagiarism machine.

                  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    3 months ago

                    Photography has far more depth, complexity, and creativity as an artform…

                    Photography can be as simple as pointing a phone camera

                    I love it when my interlocutor immediately refutes their own argument.