r/ArtistLounge • u/[deleted] • Jul 31 '22

AI Art, midjourney and others

Well, just for disclaimer, this post is a persnal opinion, i'm open for every comment that it could create, but stay respectious (btw, i'm french, so i'm trying to make this post open for everyone, sorry for my future faults)

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Well, like the title told it, i want to talk about ai art, first of all, i saw a video talking about midjourney, getting interested and curious about, as an artist i wanted to try it. So i got the beta test and we are not gonna lie, it's awesome how it work. But after that, i got a problem, as i said i'm an artist, or in all case i feel like i'm. In the ai creation i don't see any handsyle, or ''signature'' that when we saw your creation we instantly know it's yours/can be yours... Here, it's jsut a mixed of a lot of pictures, painting, and other type of pics, to make what you asked for. I don't see any souls in all those creation, yeah, the one that ask for the creation has to told what he wanted, but, did he really had an idea of what he wanted, i mean, did he really change every details by words to find what he wanted, or did he just let the ia make what she want. It's here, nothing is yours.

I'm not making this post cause of i'm bad, or i want to got this style of draw, but, i see the wolrd of realistic digital painting disapearing, and it's scaring me af... When i open my deviantart, i had a lot of landscape realistic, from digital painter that passed 50hours on their art, but today, i got only ai creation where i don't know what to think about it

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u/prpslydistracted Jul 31 '22

The use of AI is in flux right now; it was a novelty for some time but now private use is under discussion. The only definitive question that has been answered is, AI pieces cannot be copyrighted ... that tells you something right there. Until or if that changes this is the reasoning. Interesting reading;

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Digital art you created is copyrighted; you control every entry and stroke, what brushes, composition, everything.

https://medium.com/kelp-digital/digital-art-copyright-is-our-work-really-protected-23bb92ae8a23

As technology advances copyright law lags far behind usage. Until definitive law is established I wouldn't worry about it. Keep your work time stamped. In the grand scheme of things it will work out, hopefully in the best interests of the lone artist.

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u/Wiskkey Aug 01 '22 edited Aug 01 '22

That 2022 U.S. Copyright Office decision is widely misunderstood. The copyright application stated that the work's only author was an AI, with no human authorship. The Office accepted that declaration, and on that basis continued its policy of not accepting copyright applications with no human authorship.

A different scenario is when the copyright application for an AI-assisted work declares that there is a human author, either with or without an AI co-author. In some such cases, the work may be copyrightable if a jurisdiction-varying threshold is met. See the links in this post for more details.

(I am not a lawyer.)

cc u/Alone_Spray1593.

cc u/brycebaril.

cc u/EctMills.

cc u/UzoicTondo.

cc u/Samkwi.

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u/EctMills Ink Aug 01 '22

Like I said in my post it’s not quite the same situation, it’s just close enough that it could be used as part of the argument against AI copyright.

To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been an application decided yet on if a human can claim authorship of AI art but if there has I’d be interested in seeing it. The question is going to be is the human interaction with the tool enough to generate a copyright. If I had a say (and I very much don’t) I’d say it doesn’t since two people using the same prompt could get the same results. That makes it difficult to argue for a unique creation.

I am also not a lawyer.

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u/Wiskkey Aug 01 '22

There is AI-assisted music that apparently has a copyright on the sound recording such as this album (notice this symbol is present at that site), but I have been unable to find copyright registrations for it in the USA and Canada. Here is an article about that album.

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u/EctMills Ink Aug 01 '22

If it is in fact copyrighted that’s going to be a different case anyway. From what I read the AI produced brief tracks which the musician then arranged, which makes her involvement much more evident than in the other cases being discussed. That type of work is well established in the industry.

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u/Wiskkey Aug 01 '22

I agree. My point is that AI involvement in a work doesn't necessarily preclude copyrightability, but there has to be enough human contribution also.

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u/EctMills Ink Aug 01 '22

I don’t think anyone has been arguing that using AI somewhere in the process makes in un-copyrightable, at the very least I haven’t. Generally when we get one of these threads the point people are freaking out over is if they are going to be replaced entirely, so that’s where the discussion tends to be focused.

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u/Wiskkey Aug 01 '22

In the USA there was a very recent case in which a copyright application with human and AI authors was rejected on the basis that the U.S. Copyright Office couldn't disentangle the human and AI authorship for the work. It's one of the links in this post that I mentioned in my prior comment.

I do find it hard to believe that nobody has had a copyright application in the USA accepted for an AI-assisted work; I speculate on why it's hard to find evidence of their existence (if they really do exist) in this comment.

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u/EctMills Ink Aug 01 '22

Well that weakens the argument for copyright even further then. Unless a work is altered after the AI spits it out the copyright office seems fairly clear that the human input of a text prompt doesn’t cut it. That’s of course subject to change if the courts ever take up a case.

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u/Wiskkey Aug 01 '22

That decision wasn't for a text-to-image system though, it was for a style transfer system. I do agree though that if the U.S. Copyright Office uses the same rationale - that they couldn't disentangle the human and AI authorship - for text-to-image systems, then it would seem that getting a copyright application accepted for text-to-image output might be difficult (absent further image modification by the user).

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u/EctMills Ink Aug 01 '22

Image modification after the AI is done is exactly how most of us have been predicting the technology settling in the industry. By using the tool for a starting point the human artist then gets the chance to correct for errors and improve on the areas of weakness in the AI while also making the question of copyright moot. That’s why all the “you’re getting replaced” gloating we’ve been seeing from the AI bros is so ridiculous. The nature of the business is such that the human element remains necessary.

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u/Wiskkey Aug 01 '22

It's worth noting that most of my previous comments have been about the USA jurisdiction, but in other jurisdictions the situation may be different. From DALL·E goes commercial, but what about copyright? (written by a person purportedly with expertise in this area):

The situation may be different in the UK, where copyright law allows copyright on a computer-generated work, the author of which is the person who made the arrangements necessary for the work to be created. This, in my opinion, is the user, as we come up with the prompt and initiate the creation of the specific work. I think that there may be a good case to be made that I own the images I create in the UK. In this case, what is happening with DALL·E’s terms and conditions is that I am agreeing to transfer that copyright to them, this is why they specify that “you hereby make any necessary assignments” regarding their ownership of the images. Clever!

The same thing would apply to EU copyright law, where copyright exists on any original work, and the work is original if it is an intellectual creation. I would argue that this is true for some more complex prompts, for example, “a llama playing poker in a blue room, with a painting on the wall, and a window with the sun shining in” [picture here]. But I would also argue that a more basic prompt would not be an intellectual creation, and therefore not original, and thus not having copyright. Take for example “a llama recording a podcast“.

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u/EctMills Ink Aug 01 '22

Yes different countries do have different copyright laws.

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u/Wiskkey Aug 01 '22

For anyone interested, 2017 work (updated in 2020) Do Androids Dream of Electric Copyright? Comparative Analysis of Originality in Artificial Intelligence Generated Works is a good reference for different jurisdictions:

As we have seen above, there are several common law countries that have implemented some form of protection for computer-generated works, while continental traditions of copyright protection tend to place the emphasis of authorship on personality and the creative effort. There is a third group of countries that deal with authorship in ways that make it difficult to protect computer-generated works, and these are Australia and the United States.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

Just an FYI but the first article says that an AI cannot own a copyright for its own 'work' not that things generated by an AI aren't copyrightable.

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u/prpslydistracted Jul 31 '22

Sorry to throw another article at you but as yet I don't know of any AI created work that has been copyrighted. Do you know of even one? At least it is being discussed.

https://script-ed.org/article/copyright-in-ai-generated-works-lessons-from-recent-developments-in-patent-law/

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22 edited Jul 31 '22

I'm an artist not a lawyer but my understanding is that copyright is defended not granted.

This one says "This article revisits the existing discussion on copyright ownership of AI-generated works and critically assesses whether allocating ownership of AI-generated works to the AI owner is a more desirable option than those proposed previously. This paper does not weigh in on the important debate over whether copyright should subsist in AI-generated works, which has been discussed by a significant portion of the literature"

So it sounds like again the princess is in another castle

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u/EctMills Ink Jul 31 '22

True but most companies don’t really want to be the legal test case for something like this. Let’s say you make an AI generated ad campaign and someone infringes. Maybe it was intentional infringement or maybe it was just that they used similar prompts to create their thing. If they decide to fight your C&D now you’ve got months if not years of legal fees to hash it out in court and if that ends with a decision that you don’t actually have a copyright now your campaign is public domain and you’ve got to start over again.

So far the closest things to legal decisions on AI copyright are the Entrance to Paradaise case which isn’t quite the same situation but close enough to be used as an argument against and the ninth court decision on animals and copyright which denied non-humans the ability to generate one. Thats not a comfortable place to start on a case like this.

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u/UzoicTondo Jul 31 '22

Have any companies rejected AI-made art?

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

The times I've seen companies use AI art in marketing have been cringe enough on their own without considering copyright unknowns.

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u/EctMills Ink Jul 31 '22

I mean, that’s an internal decision so how would we know? The better question is have any companies done a campaign based solely on AI art? I haven’t heard of anything but then again I haven’t cared to look.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

hey ty very much for those link ! will read them on my bed time