On Tuesday, the US Copyright Office Review Board rejected copyright protection for an AI-generated artwork that won a Colorado State Fair art contest last year because it lacks human authorship required for registration, Reuters reports. The win, which was widely covered in the press at the time, ignited controversy over the ethics of AI-generated artwork.
[...]
In August 2022, Artist Jason M. Allen created the piece in question, titled Theatre D'opera Spatial, using the Midjourney image synthesis service, which was relatively new at the time. The image depicting a futuristic royal scene won top prize in the fair's "Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography" category.
[...]
This is not the first time the Copyright Office has rejected AI-generated artwork. In February, it revoked copyright protection for images made by artist Kris Kashtanova using Midjourney for the graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn but allowed copyrighting the human-arranged portions of the work.
Related:
AI Systems Can't Patent Inventions, US Federal Circuit Court Confirms
Related Stories
'There is no ambiguity,' says judge:
The US federal circuit court has confirmed that AI systems cannot patent inventions because they are not human beings.
The ruling is the latest failure in a series of quixotic legal battles by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to copyright and patent the output of various AI software tools he's created.
In 2019, Thaler failed to copyright an image on behalf of an AI system he dubbed Creativity Machine, with that decision upheld on appeal by the US Copyright Office in 2022. In a parallel case, the US Patent Office ruled in 2020 that Thaler's AI system DABUS could not be a legal inventor because it was not a "natural person," with this decision then upheld by a judge in 2021. Now, the federal circuit court has, once more, confirmed this decision.
[...] The Patent Act clearly states that only human beings can hold patents, says Stark. The Act refers to patent-holders as "individuals," a term which the Supreme Court has ruled "ordinarily means a human being, a person" (following "how we use the word in everyday parlance"); and uses personal pronouns — "herself" and "himself" — throughout, rather than terms such as "itself," which Stark says "would permit non-human inventors" in a reading.
[...] According to BloombergLaw, Thaler plans to appeal the circuit court's ruling, with his attorney, Ryan Abbott of Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan LLP, criticizing the court's "narrow and textualist approach" to the Patent Act.
Previously:
UK Decides AI Still Cannot Patent Inventions
When AI is the Inventor Who Gets the Patent?
AI Computers Can't Patent their Own Inventions -- Yet -- a US Judge Rules
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 12 2023, @06:09PM (2 children)
> Artist Jason M. Allen created the piece in question
and if Artist Jason M. Allen weren't an attention whore, he would have just copyrighted the work in his own name.
I use watercolor paints, made by advanced scientific processes, with finely crafted brushes onto specialized paper stock that heavily influences how my watercolor art looks when it's finished. Those are tools, and the creation is mine. Arches paper company, Winsor & Newton paints and brushes have no place in the copyright of that work, though I might optionally credit them.
AI is a tool, people attributing personhood and intelligence to it simply are lacking in their own.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday September 14 2023, @03:11AM (1 child)
All of the people who worked on the Sistine Chapel were tools too, to be wielded by Michelangelo. Certainly, they were never credited for it.
Ownership and creation are nebulous concepts at best. Humans invented them, and they define them based on where society is at the moment.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 14 2023, @12:01PM
Then we can talk about Edison Labs... and the 21 patents with me named as co-inventor (several as lead inventor) which are wholly owned by my various employers over the years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Tuesday September 12 2023, @08:32PM (6 children)
How does that image even win a prize? There is nothing inspired about it, relays no experience, if you looked hard you could probably find the source of the elements used in the image. It just combines them in such a surreal way - the technical term is bullshitting - that someone can look at it and read whatever they want in to it.
But I've looked through online galleries of thousands of those AI generated images, so AI generated bullshit stands out when I look at it now.
They tried to grant the copyright to the AI? It is a tool like a pencil, paper, or a functionally programed template generator. Good for them for rejecting the copyright.
The person who used the AI to make it... how much work did they put in to getting what they wanted? If they just pushed a "random image" button and eventually got this, then I wouldn't even let the person claim copyright. A few lines of text describing it? Still no. Not sure where the limit lies, but an actual PERSON should have to spend a good amount of time and skill using the AI to claim any kind of copyright.
The contents of this post are copyrighted by my Nan Tan Computer Corporation 6451EA XT/AT switchable keyboard.... not!
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2023, @09:31PM (5 children)
All art is bullshit. Become friends with artists and you'll figure that out fast.
People who don't know that piece was AI art would be less critical of it.
Of course, that is not the best art that "AI" has to offer. It was an early demonstration of Midjourney and these programs keep getting better. AI as a tool can be a small part of a human's creative process. You can type a prompt and accept the first thing it spits out in seconds, or you can spend hours arranging elements, inpainting, drawing in portions yourself. Similar to Photoshop but more powerful.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 12 2023, @09:45PM (1 child)
The artists I have known who really did art for a living were selling... themselves. They'd talk up a good line about the piece, their inspiration, what they're trying to convey, but... in the end it's a matter of getting patrons to open their wallets. Not too different from old-school ballet dancers.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Wednesday September 13 2023, @12:55AM
German has a saying "Das Wort Kunst kommt von 'können'." (The word for 'art' is derived from the linguistic root of 'being able'). To which I always reply, "Ja, verkaufen können." (Yes, being able to sell.). ;)
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday September 13 2023, @04:39PM (2 children)
People who don't know that piece was AI art would be less critical of it.
Not people who understand art. I doubt any of my old professors would approve of that trite painting. You are to art like fundamentalists are to science, criticizing what you have little understanding of.
That image may be an excellent illustration, but I wouldn't call it art.
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday September 14 2023, @12:19PM (1 child)
> You are to art like fundamentalists are to science, criticizing what you have little understanding of.
From
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art [wikipedia.org]
"""
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
"""
From
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/art [cambridge.org]
"""
The making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings
"""
I argue that a piece of work that requires significant expertise to appreciate its quality has, in a significant manner, failed to be "Art".
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday September 15 2023, @01:27PM
The word "art" comes from the word "artifact". If it's not made by a human being it's not art, including art made by elephants and monkeys. Yes, it could be argues that the monkey is a human's tool, if you were a politician or a lawyer.
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 12 2023, @11:27PM
As the output of a math algorithm, they probably don't want to open the pandora's box of flooding this Wikipedia page with nonsense 'art'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number [wikipedia.org]
I looked into the legal issues of generative art and it gets pretty weird. There was a lot of legal debate a couple decades ago about copyrighting Mandelbrot and Julia set images. Around the turn of the century a legal scholar type named Darin Glasser wrote a two dozen page legal brief about all the issues relating to trying to copyright a Mandelbrot fractal image. I have a printout of it. It seems to be available online. To make a long story short, two decades ago my opinion of an opinion is it seems to be a bad legal strategy to try to spend money to copyright a fractal. I don't know if anything significant has changed in a quarter century WRT fractals and copyright law. My guess is "no".
The problem with programmer / sysadmin types talking about law is law is not source code and no individual has root on the system and its mostly driven by money. Or rephrased the legal system exists to avoid complete dominance of the system by money, but it does not remove all influence. Also everything in the legal system is some variety of "likelihood of getting away with it" and there is no such thing as total certainty. Its a law code not a set of RFCs, and even RFCs aren't perfectly enforced LOL.
You can trademark something using generative art, as near as I can tell its not categorically excluded or laughed at like trying to copyright a fractal. If SN changed its webpage logo to a little piece of the Mandelbrot set or a piece of Wolfram's rule 110 or the generative AI in the article, then paid to TRADEMARK it, not COPYRIGHT it, that is AFAIK legally strong, or at least stronger (assuming some bigger company didn't already trademark something similar looking to your fractal)
Because of this minefield I have not been successful finding registered trademarks based primarily on fractal art. I suspect a trademark-specializing lawyer would also discourage a client from using generative AI in a trademark much like they seem to have discouraged companies from trying to trademark fractals for several decades now.
The general opinion of the legal system WRT AI seems to be "this is a headache no one needs and no one asked for, but now we're stuck with it".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ShovelOperator1 on Wednesday September 13 2023, @08:07AM
An interesting thing is that this modern AI is the language model. It means that it transcribes Language->Language->Language, where the middle Language is internal description (coefficients). The border ones can be everything, from English, COBOL, images, smoke signals etc., it is only important to squeeze the proper input->output from it. The input data is always human-generated, but computer-encoded, like a really effective compression with self-adapting algorithm to unpack the data.
There are some edge cases when the training data is artificially "stretched" by using human-generated algorithm (let's consider a textbook AI example with fixing scratched photos - generating training set mimicking the input data is quite easy), which is applied like computer graphics in modern film industry.
So, now it looks like I can transcribe, let's say, Hollywood's Saint Mickey Mouse :), and it will not be copyrighted because in the process of translation the image got distorted some way? (they always get distorted a bit).
Wait... So it means that all these lo-fi "pirated" DivX DVDRips were 100% legal because were not 1:1 copies and were transcribed by model???
The fight for making "Intellectual Property" a sole privilege of greedy corporations becomes more and more funny and shoves more and more fallacies down people's throats.