US Copyright Office Issues Official Policy for AI Art
ArtAngel
Posts: 1,782
The US Copyright issued an official policy on Ai art recently. How do you feel about this? Apparently, the AI program is treated like a comissioned artist and the prompt are simply instructions. Written, visual, or musical works, generated by AI cannot be copyrighted by humans who are using AI and entering prompts. If we incorporate the AI generated components into a new unrecognizable work, the generated AI components are still excluded and only the human contributions copyrighted. Anyone who can extract those AI portions can freely use them. Comics written by a human, but using AI art can only be copyrighted for the text portion. If AI was involved in the production of text/prose the text cannot be copyrighted. Kitbashed original art made in part with AI elements can be copyrighted, but those AI elements can be freely extruded from such copyrighted work and the AI elements can be used in a kibash by a different author/artist. Basically entering a prompt is considered to be a non-creative contribution. It upholds that original art is copyrighted by the owner and cannot be used by AI or AI users. Also when a defendent who used photographs without permission "because a photgraph is created by a camera", the court ruled a photgraph is indeed subject to copyright, and found the defendant guilty. They are investigating other AI issues and usage, so additional statements of policy are on the horizon. Although I do not plan to use AI generated music, text or art, I think this is a step in the right direction. What do you think?
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Comments
I simply treats the AI art on the same level with collages and photomanipulation. Except this time separate components used for image can't be protected because there's no human maker to them and legal protection only applies to people. It's not surprising.
I think it's a very good thing, as the rules have been laid out so now AI art should no longer cause any fear of people's art being used with it, as no artists work can be exploited by those that would have abused this new tech, so now maybe the new tech can continue to flourish... and no, I do not believe AI art will make artists obsolete, as an artist, unlike normal people, have a near-pathological compulsion to create, and you cannot kill that off with AI... Artists will find a way even if the worst-case scenario of being replaced comes to pass.
The policy actually gives an example of a monkey's art not being protected by copyright because . . . whispers so dogs and cats won't hear . . . an animal is not a human.
How true. Many companies still want to own the copyright to the character, cover, music, text or art and will not want AI generated components, but some other comapnies who value profit over copyright may choose to replace artists with AI. Look at the grocery stores.At self-serve checkouts, we checkout and bag our groceries while some humans stand and watch us work for free :)
The legislation is a step in the right direction and will normalize usage of AI.
Much better, than doing nothing and think, that problem magically disappear by itself.
Changes nothing. This is only the position of US copyright office. Plenty of places don't care about that. Not-for-Profit companies still harvested vast quantities of copyrighted images without consent of or compensation to copyright holders under the auspices of "fair use" and "research." Then these NFP corporations spawned for-profit subsidiaries or made deals with for-profit companies to use this data - copyrighted artwork and images - for training the AIs which are the basis of for-profit enterprises. Thse AIs don't work without the tons of data in the dataset. So, no, this is not some kind of absolution for the AI companies. And where's my compensation?
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Not really any different from someone telling a photographer to point the camera and take pictures of various objects or people. Unless there's some prior arrangement (usually employment), the actual camera operator is the creator (for intellectual property purposes) of the photographic image, not someone offering suggestions or instructions. This is a logical extension of existing IP principles, and the application's owners would retain the rights to any images generated by their app, unless specially assigned to the prompt writer.
Her's a curious thing: There is a 3d asset store based in the US that has no problem with vendors issuing commercial license for assets made using AI output. Often, the items are marked as AI output. If AI output can't be copyrighted, then how can someone put a commercial license on it? I would not download or use such assets. YMMV.
The AI companies themselves stand to profit greatly from all the art and images harvested to train the AI. Their profit will come (perhaps already comes) from the sale of access to their AIs and the output from their AIs. This Copyright Office policy does not change the basic equation. People will still spend readily to use the AIs to generate images.
Sounds okay to me...
I would just note that for many, myself included, one of the biggest concerns is with the current popular image generating engines being trained using images without the creator's consent, credit, or compensation and then selling access or outputs. These guidelines don't change that concern as it is focused on the output. Hopefully it is a good sign that additonal regulations get passed that will help with those issues. Then the next test will be how much direct change a human will need to make to an AI generated image to be able to copyright it!
It amazes me how anyone could believe that tech research organizations were "non profit" to begin with. It's not their work was dirt cheap. Those were all commercial ventures from the square one, regardless of what was claimed.
" a new unrecognizable work "
This has already been discussed here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/441452/ai-is-going-to-be-our-biggest-game-changer#latest