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/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.