Artist is Suing Copyright Office For Refusing to Register His AI Image
Artist is Suing Copyright Office For Refusing to Register His AI Image
The Copyright Office has a clear policy on AI.
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.”
AI Prompt User is complaining people stealing their artwork? Well that's new.
its debatable who the artist is, however, because if you remove the ai from the picture he could never have made this, and if you remove the training data the results would also be different.
Realistically: everyone whose data this was trained on should be included as authors if its not just public domain
Super interesting. The guy claims is wasn't just ai, that he performed alterations as well. If that's true but he still gets shot down it might pave the way for AI being much more shunned in the world out of IP concerns on the output side rather than the training data.
You can't copyright that music, game, book, screenplay or video because AI made some contribution.
because it was an expression of his creativity.
yeaaaah no chief, that ain't it.
Oh gee so scammers aren’t getting protection for lying? Dang what a cruel world poor him…
/s
He did not make it. He essentially commissioned a machine to create an image for him using millions of pieces of art that were stolen from artists. It's no different from commissioning an artist to draw something for you, except the artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people's art, or copy and pastes it, and then you attempt to take credit for it instead by claiming that you made it. I predict that this lawsuit is not going anywhere as he does not have a proverbial leg to stand on.
This is stupid and I hope he gets his butt handed to him, but:
A federal judge agreed with the Office and contrasted AI images to photography, which also uses a processor to capture images, but it is the human that decides on the elements of the picture, unlike AI imagery where the computer decides on the picture elements.
Journey outside the world of API models (like Midjourney) and you can use imagegen tools where " the human that decides on the elements of the picture"
It can be anything from area prompting (kinda drawing bounding boxes where you want things to go) to controlnet/ipadapter models using some other image as reference, to the "creator" making a sketch and the AI "coloring it in" or fleshing it out, to an artist making a worthy standalone painting and letting the AI "touch it up" or change the style (for instance, to turn a digital painting or a pencil sketch to something resembling a physical painting, watercolor, whatever).
The later is already done in photoshop (just not as well) and is generally not placed into the AI bin.
In other words, this argument isn't going to hold up, as the line is very blurry. Legislators and courts are going to have to come up with something more solid.
Ah, I remember this image. It received some kind of award or something and created a stir when it was revealed to be AI gen. I can see why that would be incentive to want copyright.
I play with AI image generation all the time. No way do I see that as my work, there’s no skill other than positive and negative prompts, maybe feeding it a a starter image set or something.
Where it might be more concerning is if you use AI gen to create an 2D example of something, then an artist creates a 3D physical representation of the thing. Who owns it? AI famously is not good at creating “whole” things, but one can certainly interpret that image to make a whole of it.
Womp womp
Fun idea: let him copyright his prompt, if he's so particular about his "creativity."
I keep saying dude could have just painted it over by now. Is he just stupid. Just paint the picture you already have it.
""my work""
Edit2: I wrote this in response to the first comment I read but after reading rest of thread I wanted this more visible. I'm not karma whoring and didn't mean to spam the comments posting this twice but the comments here are all engaging as fuck but feel like they're all circling around what im specifically pondering.
So why can't he copy right the prompt which created it? Obviously not being 100% cereal about this specific scenario but in the early days of GPT4 I fed it fucking dissertation length prompt threads writing ridiculously niche and in depth scripted functions. I don't know how to code but used a tool to create something extremely useful for my job. Some of the project took weeks to fully put together.
So what Im really asking is, why would it matter if I used cnc lathes to make something id want copywrited/patented or if I use a LLM to make it? Should it be any less protected because it's taking the "muscle" or "legwork" out of it? Should engineers only design prototypes destine for copywrite/TM/R/patent office if the prototype can be made on manual machines? Again, I kinda understand I went over the top with this but I am fascinated with how the fuck people are guna come up with regulatory frameworks to define the modern age of intellectual property and all the TM/C/R/P drama to follow.
Edit: To expand, the shit I have made using GPT having limited but interested experience with IT work also didnt stike me as anything marketable until I got feedback from vendors and customers I gave it to but from reps that didn't know I made it. It's not the point of me asking I just thought itd help anyone who is guna respond to see that my questions are coming from more of a manufacturing a tool type of understanding rather than the AI toookurjerbs from the suffering artist or musician type of understanding.
no artist to begin with
I’m glad you posted this here, because there’s obviously a lot of controversy about this.
The philosophical depth of so many comment threads on this post kind of highlights the issue with AI and intellectual property rights.
By definition, AI leverages existing work, crucially in a way that usually does not credit or benefit the original creator.
If I took two images from random creators, cut one out, and pasted it onto the other: have I created a new work? Is it a copyrightable work? (I genuinely don't know the answer to that).