If those people have ever tried actually using image generation software they will know that there is significant human authorship required to make something that isn’t remotely dogshit. The most important skill in visual art is not how to draw something but knowing what to draw.
Then why does all AI need to harvest the work of millions of artists in order to create one mediocre painting? Millions upon millions of hours of blood sweat and tears is hidden behind that algorithm. Thousands of people starting to draw when they are 5 and never stopping in order to get as good as they are.
All big AI services refuse to disclose the training set they use and those that we know anything about absolutely uses copyrighted material from artist that didn’t consent to be part of the training set.
This is what fuels my contempt for AI. People that uses literal billions of dollars of stolen time and talent and then pretend that actually having ideas is the important bit.
I mean, I agree that the developers of these AI tools need to be made to be more ethical in how they use stuff for training, but it is worth noting that that’s kind of also how humans learn. Every human artist learns, in part, by absorbing the wealth of prior art that they experience. Copying existing pieces is even a common way to practice.
Yeah, that shrug you did about how it would be nice if AI didn’t steal art is part of the problem. Shrugging and saying joink doesn’t work when you want to copyright stuff.
Human learns by assimilating other people work and working it into their own style, yes. That means that the AI is the human in this and the AI owns the artistic works. Since AI does not yet have the right to own copyrights, any works produced by that AI is not copyrightable.
That is if you accept that AI and humans learn art in the same way. I don’t personally think that is analogous but it doesn’t matter for this discussion.
There’s a reason I said “they should be made to be more ethical” and not just “they should be more ethical”. I know that they aren’t going to do it themselves and I’ll support well-written regulations on them.
but it doesn’t matter for this discussion.
Isn’t it what almost your entire comment was about?
The argument was basically “that is how humans learn too”. I accepted that analogy because it doesn’t change my conclusion that AI can’t be copyrighted. Had the discussion been about something else I wouldn’t have accepted that argument.
The difference is a human artist can then make new unique art and contribute to the craft so it can advance and they can make a living off it. AI made art isn’t unique, it’s a collage of other art. To get art from AI you have to feed it prompts of things it’s seen before. So when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
My point is that this description literally applies just as much to humans. Humans are also trained on vast quantities of things they’ve seen before and meanings associated with them.
it’s a collage of other art
This is genuinely a misunderstanding of how these programs work.
when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
Because the only art anyone has ever done is when someone else paid them for it? There are a lot of art forms that generally aren’t commercially viable, and it’s very odd to insist that commercial viability is what advances an art form.
I do actually get regularly paid for a kind of work that is threatened by these things (although in my case it’s LLMs, not images). For the time being I can out-perform ChatGPT and the like, but I don’t expect that that will last forever. Either I’ll end up incorporating it or I’ll need to find something else to do. But I’m not going to stop doing my hobby versions of it.
Technology kills jobs all the time. We don’t have many human calculators these days. If the work has value beyond the financial, people will keep doing it.
Human brains don’t have perfect recollection. Every time we retell a story or remember a memory or picture an image in our head it is distorted with our own imperfections.
When I prompt an AI to create an image it samples the images it learned from with perfect recollection.
This is incorrect actually. The models these AIs run from by definition have imperfect recall otherwise they would be ENORMOUS. No, that’s actually exactly the opposite of how these work.
They train a statistically weighted model to predict outputs based on inputs. It has no actual image data stored internally, it can’t.
This is incorrect actually. The models these AIs run from by definition have perfect recall and that is why they require ENORMOUS resources to run and why ChatGPT became less effective when the resources it was allocated were reduced.
No, they take exponentially increasing resources as a consequence of having imperfect recall. Smaller models have “worse” recall. They’ve been trained with smaller datasets (or pruned more).
As you increase the size of the model (number of “neurons” that can be weighted) you increase the ability of that model to retain and use information. But that information isn’t retained in the same form as it was input. A model trained on the English language (an LLM, like ChatGPT) does not know every possible word, nor does it actually know ANY words.
All ChatGPT knows is what characters are statistically likely to go after another in a long sequence. With enough neurons and layers combined with large amounts of processing power and time for training, this results in a weighted model which is many orders of magnitude smaller than the dataset it was trained on.
Since the model weighting itself is smaller than the input dataset, it is literally impossible for the model to have perfect recall of the input dataset. So by definition, these models have imperfect recall.
The reason they fuck up hands is because hands are usually moving during pictures and have many different configurations compared to any other body part.
So when these image AIs refer back to all the pictures of hands they’ve been fed and use them to create an ‘average approximation’ of what a hand looks like they include the motion blur from some of their samples, a middle finger sticking up from another sample or extra fingers from the sample pictures of people holding hands etc and mismatch them together even when it doesn’t fit in the picture being created.
The AI doesn’t know what a hand is. It is just mixing together samples from its perfect recollection.
How many pictures do you see online where the hands are in motion, or even blurred?
Hands are usually behind objects when they hold something and can indeed have tons of variations and configurations. Even human artists fuck up all the time or just not draw them at all.
AI don’t combine samples. If they did they wouldn’t be able to generate new pictures of whatever subject you want in a specific style you want and then have multiple variations of that picture.
It isn’t a copy and paste, it is interpreting the drawing and modifying it based upon the prompt.
My point is that this description literally applies just as much to humans. Humans are also trained on vast quantities of things they’ve seen before and meanings associated with them.
In which case the machine would get the copyright (which legally they can’t now), not the prompter.
I agree. Well, that is assuming there’s no human editing of the results of the AI tool afterwards. There was heaps of it in the piece referenced in the article, and there usually is if you want to get something actually good. The piece referenced was entered in to a photomanipulation and editing category too, which seems like it’s very much in keeping with the spirit of the competition. But the reason I said that was because the comment I was replying to wasn’t about who has the copyright of the tool’s output, it was about the value of the output and tools in general
Where the law is on copyright it looks like we’re figuring out. For now I’m glad to see rulings like this as it will, hopefully, take some of the wind out of Hollywood studios and aide union negotiations.
Well, that is assuming there’s no human editing of the results of the AI tool afterwards. There was heaps of it in the piece referenced in the article
If there was, then the artist should have discussed those heaps of human editing that went into the creation of this piece of art, and he would have been granted a copyright.
The fact that he refused to disclose what - if anything - was done after the AI spit out the result is what resulted in him not being granted copyright.
He did? This article mentions it only briefly, but he talked about it more when it was first getting attention for winning the competition. Is this something he did in the court case that you’ve read elsewhere?
But also, if you used Midjourney at the time that the image was made, you’ll know that you did not get an image like that straight out of it
Copyright just isn’t compatible with AI, we need to abolish it.
If a picture gets generated, who is the owner? The one writing the prompt? The AI that generated it? The researchers that created the AI? The artist on which the picture is based?
How about none of them? It is a picture, a piece of information. It doesn’t need an owner.
What? Humans don’t learn to paint by looking at paintings, most people learn by just painting. Humans can also draw art without having ever seen any. AI on the other hand can only draw from other people’s works, it has no creativity of its own.
I don’t hate ai assisted technologies. I just think it’s hilarious that you’ve been ranting and raving about how artists are the true ruling class and ai is our how we break the chains of their oppression.
You see these technologies as somehow a means of democratizing all creative endeavors. I see these technologies, as they stand, as just the latest in the attempts of those who own the tech and data to siphon even more control, autonomy, and wealth from the rest of us
But yeah dude, have fun typing in prompts and feeling like you did something cool.
If I took a few hours to make an impressive AI generated price of art, that’s still %0.0001 the amount of time an actual a real artist would’ve spent developing the skill and then taking the time to make the peice. I get to skip all that because AI stole the real artists’ works.
I don’t think “amount of work” is a good measurement for copyright, if you scribble something in 2 seconds on a piece of paper you still own the copyright, even if it’s not a great piece of art.
I’m pretty specifically trying to bring to mind the time it takes to hone the skill. Photography is similar in that it takes many many hours to get to the point where you can produce a good work of art.
If an artist (or photographer) spends a couple hours on a peice, that’s not the actual amount of time needed. It takes years to reach the point where they can make art in a few hours. That’s what people are upset about, that’s why nobody cares about “it took me hours to generate a good peice!”, because it takes an artist 10,000 hours.
What AI art is doing is distilling that 10,000 hours (per artist) into a training set of 99% stolen works to allow someone with zero skill to produce a work of art in a few hours.
What’s most problematic isn’t who the copyright of the AI generated age belongs to, it’s that artists who own their own works are having it stolen to be used in a commercial product. Go to any AI image generator, and you’ll see “premium” options you can pay for. That product, that option to pay, only exists on the backs of artists who did not give licensing for their works, and did not get paid to provide the training data.
People have made millions off of photographs despite having zero training and only casually snapping the photo. You can get lucky, or the subject of your photo might be especially interesting or rare (such as from a newsworthy event).
I think we need something more nuanced than ‘effort input’
I would argue that the artist produces the copyright and transfers it to you. If the artist isn’t human and cant produce copyrights then it cant sell it to you. A lot of argumentation here is that we should treat AI like we treat a human artist. That is an insane line to go down because that would make any AI work effectively slavery.
Hahaha, hahaha, no. That is absolutely NOT the default arrangement. Unless otherwise negotiated in the contract, the artist retains the copyright for the produced work and is free to use it as they please, including putting it in their portfolio, making further edits to the work, reusing it for other purposes, etc. The commissioner gets a copy of the finished product, but by default has few rights to use it themselves. Technically, I’ve personally infringed an artist’s copyright by cropping a work I commissioned from them to use as an icon. However, the vast majority of artists don’t typw enforce this aspect of their IP rights, due to a lack of resources and also because it would shred their reputation and kill their business.
Explicit transfer/licensure of copyright can be negotiated, but the most artists charge an extremely hefty fee for transferring the full copyright, often double or triple the price of the work itself. Most individual commissioners don’t bother as a result, but commercial organizations looking to reuse the commissioned work must negotiate a license for the work in order to avoid a nasty infringement lawsuit.
The way your response was worded came across as saying that the default arrangement is the commissioner receiving the copyright for the art unless otherwise specified, not the artist. My apologies if I misinterpreted your post.
This isnt always the case. Tattoos for example, are commissioned and paid for but the actual copyright often resides with the artist not the person that paid for the work.
That’s only with the artist’s agreement though isn’t it? Usually because you’re paying them. In this case the artist isn’t a person so can’t grant you the copyright (I think)
It’s actually gotten significantly easier, which makes this artist’s work even more impressive. There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month, and sure, I can just take the first thing midjouney throws at me and be satisfied with 80% accuracy, or I can work and rework, each generation with diminishing returns, until I get to 98% accuracy and just accept that it’s not capable of 100% yet.
There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month
… you’ve never actually made art, have you? The sort of stuff that you enter into contests takes months to make, from the actual painting to rough sketches to reference gathering, and that’s just the basics
Clicking a button a thousand times isn’t really comparable
I’m not at all disagreeing with the overall sentiment here, but having given it a go, I will say AI image generation is a very tedious endeavor many times.
It’s not just clicking a button. It’s closer to trying to Google some very specific, but hard to find medical problem. You constantly tweak and retweak your search terms, both learning from what has been output so far and as you think of new ways to stop it from giving you crap you don’t want. And each time you hit search the process takes forever, anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours.
I don’t really feel like this constitutes skill, but it does represent a certain amount of brute force stubbornness to try to get AI image generation to do what you want.
Ok using your Google analogy - there’s a reason why “librarian” is a job and “Googler” isn’t. One requires years of skill and practice to interpret a request and find the right information and do all sorts of things, and the other is someone kinda bashing keys to make Google give them what they want. You wouldn’t put them in remotely the same class
Maybe if you spent some of that time you spend tweaking settings on midjourney practicing art, you’d make something worthwhile and not just generated content slop. :)
Look, if I train a monkey to draw art, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting art is, I don’t own that art, the monkey does.
As non-human animals cannot copyright their works, it then thusly defaults to the public domain.
The same applies to AI. You train it to make the art you want, but you’re not the one making the art, the AI is. There’s no human element in the creation itself, just like with the monkey.
You can edit or make changes as you like to the art, and you own those, but you don’t own the art because the monkey/AI drew it.
No, because there’s a fundemental difference between a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do, and an independent thing that acts based on your instruction.
When you take a photo, you have a direct hand in making it - when you direct an AI to make art, it is the one making the art, you just choose what it makes.
It’s as silly as asking if your paintbrush owns your art as a response to being told that you can’t claim copyright over art you don’t own.
That’s like saying you can control the sun for a photo because you can predict where it will be at a given time.
The fact that an AI can be deterministic, in that the same “seeds” will generate the same images, doesn’t at all invalidate my point that it is still the one interpreting the “seeds” and doing the actual image generation.
If those people have ever tried actually using image generation software they will know that there is significant human authorship required to make something that isn’t remotely dogshit. The most important skill in visual art is not how to draw something but knowing what to draw.
Then why does all AI need to harvest the work of millions of artists in order to create one mediocre painting? Millions upon millions of hours of blood sweat and tears is hidden behind that algorithm. Thousands of people starting to draw when they are 5 and never stopping in order to get as good as they are.
All big AI services refuse to disclose the training set they use and those that we know anything about absolutely uses copyrighted material from artist that didn’t consent to be part of the training set.
This is what fuels my contempt for AI. People that uses literal billions of dollars of stolen time and talent and then pretend that actually having ideas is the important bit.
I mean, I agree that the developers of these AI tools need to be made to be more ethical in how they use stuff for training, but it is worth noting that that’s kind of also how humans learn. Every human artist learns, in part, by absorbing the wealth of prior art that they experience. Copying existing pieces is even a common way to practice.
Yeah, that shrug you did about how it would be nice if AI didn’t steal art is part of the problem. Shrugging and saying joink doesn’t work when you want to copyright stuff.
Human learns by assimilating other people work and working it into their own style, yes. That means that the AI is the human in this and the AI owns the artistic works. Since AI does not yet have the right to own copyrights, any works produced by that AI is not copyrightable.
That is if you accept that AI and humans learn art in the same way. I don’t personally think that is analogous but it doesn’t matter for this discussion.
There’s a reason I said “they should be made to be more ethical” and not just “they should be more ethical”. I know that they aren’t going to do it themselves and I’ll support well-written regulations on them.
Isn’t it what almost your entire comment was about?
The argument was basically “that is how humans learn too”. I accepted that analogy because it doesn’t change my conclusion that AI can’t be copyrighted. Had the discussion been about something else I wouldn’t have accepted that argument.
To play devil’s advocate: What about artists that use assistants, is using AI not the same as using an assistant?
The difference is a human artist can then make new unique art and contribute to the craft so it can advance and they can make a living off it. AI made art isn’t unique, it’s a collage of other art. To get art from AI you have to feed it prompts of things it’s seen before. So when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.
My point is that this description literally applies just as much to humans. Humans are also trained on vast quantities of things they’ve seen before and meanings associated with them.
This is genuinely a misunderstanding of how these programs work.
Because the only art anyone has ever done is when someone else paid them for it? There are a lot of art forms that generally aren’t commercially viable, and it’s very odd to insist that commercial viability is what advances an art form.
I do actually get regularly paid for a kind of work that is threatened by these things (although in my case it’s LLMs, not images). For the time being I can out-perform ChatGPT and the like, but I don’t expect that that will last forever. Either I’ll end up incorporating it or I’ll need to find something else to do. But I’m not going to stop doing my hobby versions of it.
Technology kills jobs all the time. We don’t have many human calculators these days. If the work has value beyond the financial, people will keep doing it.
Human brains don’t have perfect recollection. Every time we retell a story or remember a memory or picture an image in our head it is distorted with our own imperfections.
When I prompt an AI to create an image it samples the images it learned from with perfect recollection.
AI does not learn the same way humans do.
This is incorrect actually. The models these AIs run from by definition have imperfect recall otherwise they would be ENORMOUS. No, that’s actually exactly the opposite of how these work.
They train a statistically weighted model to predict outputs based on inputs. It has no actual image data stored internally, it can’t.
This is incorrect actually. The models these AIs run from by definition have perfect recall and that is why they require ENORMOUS resources to run and why ChatGPT became less effective when the resources it was allocated were reduced.
-ChatGPT
No, they take exponentially increasing resources as a consequence of having imperfect recall. Smaller models have “worse” recall. They’ve been trained with smaller datasets (or pruned more).
As you increase the size of the model (number of “neurons” that can be weighted) you increase the ability of that model to retain and use information. But that information isn’t retained in the same form as it was input. A model trained on the English language (an LLM, like ChatGPT) does not know every possible word, nor does it actually know ANY words.
All ChatGPT knows is what characters are statistically likely to go after another in a long sequence. With enough neurons and layers combined with large amounts of processing power and time for training, this results in a weighted model which is many orders of magnitude smaller than the dataset it was trained on.
Since the model weighting itself is smaller than the input dataset, it is literally impossible for the model to have perfect recall of the input dataset. So by definition, these models have imperfect recall.
I’m pretty sure that the way they constantly fuck up hands is a solid demonstration that these AI tools do not have a perfect recollection
The reason they fuck up hands is because hands are usually moving during pictures and have many different configurations compared to any other body part.
So when these image AIs refer back to all the pictures of hands they’ve been fed and use them to create an ‘average approximation’ of what a hand looks like they include the motion blur from some of their samples, a middle finger sticking up from another sample or extra fingers from the sample pictures of people holding hands etc and mismatch them together even when it doesn’t fit in the picture being created.
The AI doesn’t know what a hand is. It is just mixing together samples from its perfect recollection.
What? No
How many pictures do you see online where the hands are in motion, or even blurred?
Hands are usually behind objects when they hold something and can indeed have tons of variations and configurations. Even human artists fuck up all the time or just not draw them at all.
AI don’t combine samples. If they did they wouldn’t be able to generate new pictures of whatever subject you want in a specific style you want and then have multiple variations of that picture.
It isn’t a copy and paste, it is interpreting the drawing and modifying it based upon the prompt.
In which case the machine would get the copyright (which legally they can’t now), not the prompter.
I agree. Well, that is assuming there’s no human editing of the results of the AI tool afterwards. There was heaps of it in the piece referenced in the article, and there usually is if you want to get something actually good. The piece referenced was entered in to a photomanipulation and editing category too, which seems like it’s very much in keeping with the spirit of the competition. But the reason I said that was because the comment I was replying to wasn’t about who has the copyright of the tool’s output, it was about the value of the output and tools in general
The tools are valuable for sure.
Where the law is on copyright it looks like we’re figuring out. For now I’m glad to see rulings like this as it will, hopefully, take some of the wind out of Hollywood studios and aide union negotiations.
If there was, then the artist should have discussed those heaps of human editing that went into the creation of this piece of art, and he would have been granted a copyright.
The fact that he refused to disclose what - if anything - was done after the AI spit out the result is what resulted in him not being granted copyright.
He did? This article mentions it only briefly, but he talked about it more when it was first getting attention for winning the competition. Is this something he did in the court case that you’ve read elsewhere?
But also, if you used Midjourney at the time that the image was made, you’ll know that you did not get an image like that straight out of it
Copyright just isn’t compatible with AI, we need to abolish it.
If a picture gets generated, who is the owner? The one writing the prompt? The AI that generated it? The researchers that created the AI? The artist on which the picture is based?
How about none of them? It is a picture, a piece of information. It doesn’t need an owner.
Can we get UBI before we start abolishing people’s income though?
What? Humans don’t learn to paint by looking at paintings, most people learn by just painting. Humans can also draw art without having ever seen any. AI on the other hand can only draw from other people’s works, it has no creativity of its own.
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Artists. Famously part of the ruling class.
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Jesus, you AI people are idiots.
See ya in 10 years, friend. We’ll revisit this conversation.
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I don’t hate ai assisted technologies. I just think it’s hilarious that you’ve been ranting and raving about how artists are the true ruling class and ai is our how we break the chains of their oppression.
You see these technologies as somehow a means of democratizing all creative endeavors. I see these technologies, as they stand, as just the latest in the attempts of those who own the tech and data to siphon even more control, autonomy, and wealth from the rest of us
But yeah dude, have fun typing in prompts and feeling like you did something cool.
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You’re making a lot of declarative statements about what I think and why I might think those things without me ever having stated any of those things.
You’re fabricating these hallucinatory talking points, which you’re ineffectually arguing against, in your own head.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
It is funny how that “one mediocre painting” won the award while the human art did not.
If I took a few hours to make an impressive AI generated price of art, that’s still %0.0001 the amount of time an actual a real artist would’ve spent developing the skill and then taking the time to make the peice. I get to skip all that because AI stole the real artists’ works.
What about photographers?
I don’t think “amount of work” is a good measurement for copyright, if you scribble something in 2 seconds on a piece of paper you still own the copyright, even if it’s not a great piece of art.
I’m pretty specifically trying to bring to mind the time it takes to hone the skill. Photography is similar in that it takes many many hours to get to the point where you can produce a good work of art.
If an artist (or photographer) spends a couple hours on a peice, that’s not the actual amount of time needed. It takes years to reach the point where they can make art in a few hours. That’s what people are upset about, that’s why nobody cares about “it took me hours to generate a good peice!”, because it takes an artist 10,000 hours.
What AI art is doing is distilling that 10,000 hours (per artist) into a training set of 99% stolen works to allow someone with zero skill to produce a work of art in a few hours.
What’s most problematic isn’t who the copyright of the AI generated age belongs to, it’s that artists who own their own works are having it stolen to be used in a commercial product. Go to any AI image generator, and you’ll see “premium” options you can pay for. That product, that option to pay, only exists on the backs of artists who did not give licensing for their works, and did not get paid to provide the training data.
People have made millions off of photographs despite having zero training and only casually snapping the photo. You can get lucky, or the subject of your photo might be especially interesting or rare (such as from a newsworthy event).
I think we need something more nuanced than ‘effort input’
Photographers must have downvoted you. You don’t have to be skilled to take a really good photo. You do have to be skilled to it regularly, though.
The law is about human expression, not human work. That which a human expressed (with creative height) is protected, all else is not
So if I tell someone else to draw something, who gets the copyright?
Depends on your agreement.
I think by default if there’s no contract saying otherwise, the copyright stays with the original artist.
I would argue that the artist produces the copyright and transfers it to you. If the artist isn’t human and cant produce copyrights then it cant sell it to you. A lot of argumentation here is that we should treat AI like we treat a human artist. That is an insane line to go down because that would make any AI work effectively slavery.
Hahaha, hahaha, no. That is absolutely NOT the default arrangement. Unless otherwise negotiated in the contract, the artist retains the copyright for the produced work and is free to use it as they please, including putting it in their portfolio, making further edits to the work, reusing it for other purposes, etc. The commissioner gets a copy of the finished product, but by default has few rights to use it themselves. Technically, I’ve personally infringed an artist’s copyright by cropping a work I commissioned from them to use as an icon. However, the vast majority of artists don’t typw enforce this aspect of their IP rights, due to a lack of resources and also because it would shred their reputation and kill their business.
Explicit transfer/licensure of copyright can be negotiated, but the most artists charge an extremely hefty fee for transferring the full copyright, often double or triple the price of the work itself. Most individual commissioners don’t bother as a result, but commercial organizations looking to reuse the commissioned work must negotiate a license for the work in order to avoid a nasty infringement lawsuit.
I don’t know where the “Hahaha, hahaha, no” comes in. Everything I said is supported by what you said. What part of my comment isn’t true?
The way your response was worded came across as saying that the default arrangement is the commissioner receiving the copyright for the art unless otherwise specified, not the artist. My apologies if I misinterpreted your post.
If someone is doing work for you, you get the copyright. That’s how it always worked
This isnt always the case. Tattoos for example, are commissioned and paid for but the actual copyright often resides with the artist not the person that paid for the work.
Yes, the artist must agree that copyright transfer is part of the agreement. By default ownership is with the artist.
That’s only with the artist’s agreement though isn’t it? Usually because you’re paying them. In this case the artist isn’t a person so can’t grant you the copyright (I think)
Yes, in practice this would be a contract with the artist deciding whether the copyright is transferred or not.
Because by default, if you commission someone to draw something for you, they keep the copyright.
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Then it’s public domain according to cases so far.
It’s actually gotten significantly easier, which makes this artist’s work even more impressive. There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month, and sure, I can just take the first thing midjouney throws at me and be satisfied with 80% accuracy, or I can work and rework, each generation with diminishing returns, until I get to 98% accuracy and just accept that it’s not capable of 100% yet.
… you’ve never actually made art, have you? The sort of stuff that you enter into contests takes months to make, from the actual painting to rough sketches to reference gathering, and that’s just the basics
Clicking a button a thousand times isn’t really comparable
I’m not at all disagreeing with the overall sentiment here, but having given it a go, I will say AI image generation is a very tedious endeavor many times.
It’s not just clicking a button. It’s closer to trying to Google some very specific, but hard to find medical problem. You constantly tweak and retweak your search terms, both learning from what has been output so far and as you think of new ways to stop it from giving you crap you don’t want. And each time you hit search the process takes forever, anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours.
I don’t really feel like this constitutes skill, but it does represent a certain amount of brute force stubbornness to try to get AI image generation to do what you want.
Ok using your Google analogy - there’s a reason why “librarian” is a job and “Googler” isn’t. One requires years of skill and practice to interpret a request and find the right information and do all sorts of things, and the other is someone kinda bashing keys to make Google give them what they want. You wouldn’t put them in remotely the same class
Software Engineers have entered the chat
I assume you’re joking, but I’m software and I would not classify these the same.
I drew a pony when I was 6? Does that count? Or does gatekeeping art go that far?
Maybe if you spent some of that time you spend tweaking settings on midjourney practicing art, you’d make something worthwhile and not just generated content slop. :)
Yeah, or I could continue doing what I enjoy in the way that I enjoy it, and you can fuck off with your judgemental comments.
Enjoy adding negative value to the world
You making up a To-Do list of things you’ll try to accomplish today?
Look, if I train a monkey to draw art, no matter how good my instructions or the resulting art is, I don’t own that art, the monkey does.
As non-human animals cannot copyright their works, it then thusly defaults to the public domain.
The same applies to AI. You train it to make the art you want, but you’re not the one making the art, the AI is. There’s no human element in the creation itself, just like with the monkey.
You can edit or make changes as you like to the art, and you own those, but you don’t own the art because the monkey/AI drew it.
Does my camera own my art, and not me?
No, because there’s a fundemental difference between a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do, and an independent thing that acts based on your instruction.
When you take a photo, you have a direct hand in making it - when you direct an AI to make art, it is the one making the art, you just choose what it makes.
It’s as silly as asking if your paintbrush owns your art as a response to being told that you can’t claim copyright over art you don’t own.
you control the seed, control the prompt — you can get the “AI” to produce the very same image if you want. so yes, you do have
That’s like saying you can control the sun for a photo because you can predict where it will be at a given time.
The fact that an AI can be deterministic, in that the same “seeds” will generate the same images, doesn’t at all invalidate my point that it is still the one interpreting the “seeds” and doing the actual image generation.