Hollywood executives stuck between wanting to devalue labor but also wanting to enforce the copyright of said labor like a starved hyena that found a zebra corpse
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Their hope might be that AI art that someone (paid much less, with no residuals) cleaned up a bit, would be copyrightable. The article mentions that as an out: « An application […] can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way.” »
There's an underlying problem with this case and how it's reported. It isn't really that AI art isn't copyrightable. It's that the AI itself can't be assigned the copyright.
It remains likely IMHO that humans who use AI may own the copyright to AI work but only if their inputs are original.
It's just dumb to try to assign it to the AI in the first place. It's like if I wrote a sloppy sentence with autocomplete on my phone and tried to register the copyright to "Patrick's iPhone". It would be a waste of a few hundred dollars and the coverage of it would confuse the public.
Among other things because having a court ruling that "Patrick's iPhone can't own things" would spark debate (because people will debate anything commented on) and bad takes without really saying anything new.
"Make me a picture of Jake Tapper" = No copyright.
"Make me a picture of Jake Tapper wearing shorts that say 'Juicy' while punching Gritty the Mascot in front of the 30 Rock Christmas tree" = Probably copyright to the prompter
Under the current standard, prompting isn't enough for protection, but manual selection and/or post-processing of outputs is. ControlNet may be an exception to the former limitation, based on the wording.
(I disagree with the current standard, but it is what it is)
The last ruling I saw opened the door for sufficiently advanced prompting to count. I think it would be wise for every AI generator out there to record prompts as metadata so it can be analyzed.
Obviously if I feed in a complete novel and say "spellcheck this", I'm still going to own the output.
Interesting, do you have a link? The last ruling I saw was, if I remember right, late March. So a bit dated now. In that ruling, they specifically noted that they're still learning about the AI ecosystem and expected their views to shift.
IMHO, something like "a fluffy cat" shouldn't count, but if you spend an hour refining some long and complex prompt and tweaking hundreds of parameters, that's way beyond de minimis creative effort, and vastly more than is put into your average photograph.
I am spending far too much time right now thinking about how that prompt might be improved by being more specific about the tightness and shininess of the shorts.
I think producers/execs are missing the bigger AI threat. That it replaces everything that makes the US entertainment industry hard to duplicate. ALL the creatives, technical people.
So then what do they have? A distribution pipeline? Oh, The Internet? The IP doesn't look as strong right now.
A further point is, software doesn't just eat just what you'd like it to eat (writers, actors for producers). It eventually eats everything it CAN eat.
The industry will be sweaty dudes in a cube farm feeding prompts to "Superhero Movie AI". And you killed LA.
Haha. Not yet...
Just wait for A.G.I. Unless it skips that step straight into SuperIntelligence.
Judges' and studios' arguments will be rendered invalid before they're even voiced.
While this ruling is certainly a step in the right direction, I feel like that our biggest battles with AI is still ahead of us and it won’t be about art.
Disney execs in the board room going through the stages like 😀😐😬🫣😦☹️😱
Meanwhile fanartists & other creators have some time to do whatever they want w/a Disney show so...👀
their only inroad here is robots getting human rights when someone shoots a robot police dog & they charge it as a "murder," fortunately the acceleration isn't moving quite fast enough to grant them this fig leaf in 2023
There was a great episode of the podcast The Town where Justine Bateman talks about how she’s surprised that studios aren’t going after AI companies because their datasets are based on copy written films that the studios themselves own.
Japan has already ruled that international copyright is exempt for AI. Copyright is the most complex of all laws because it spans internationally under treaties. Because copyright applies to “humans” and only “humans”, a computer doing something under its own accord is exempt. 2 References:
I truly don't understand how none of the studios have realized that if AI eventually gets good enough to replace writers, actors, SFX teams, etc...nobody will need studios anymore either. They're literally sawing away at the plank they're standing on.
Hate to play devil’s advocate, but I’m old enough to remember when people said the digitization of music meant we wouldn’t have record companies anymore. Didn’t quite pan out that way.
These are the same entities that constantly get changes made to the copyright system in their favour. They'll find a way to exploit people and have their AIs churn garbage to infinity while raking in all that sweet cash in no time
then theyd have to pay em else it would be slavery
oh but slavery isnt illegal as punishment for a crime, so maybe they'll manufacture crimes for the AIs to be imprisoned for and they can then pay them 5 cents an hour to make movies for them just like they do for their prisoner firefighters
Studio will produce AI based contents for platforms that will sell stream services. They want to destroy copyrights building an industry based on monopole of digital distribution services.
If you kept it verbatim and had someone suspect you had help writing something- Almost any changes would become difficult to search, and how would you search for what has been created? THAT technology would be the one worth fearing.
Looks like the ball is in Studios Court now. There is no reason whatsoever they can refuse SAG-AFTRA and WGA totally legitimate asks. There one excuse is not even something they can guarantee profit from since it can't be copyrighted.
lol. Theoretically, can anyone prove that an artwork is created by AI or not? I can just use any copyrightable content and say "my AI algo created this" and avoid being copyrighted.
This is probably the best outcome, it lets indie producers and people doing things for a goof or a lark or as a small aspect of another project use AI art, without worrying too much about it, but will prevent corpos from leaning too much on it. Like I love those AI Dagoth UR text to speech vids
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It remains likely IMHO that humans who use AI may own the copyright to AI work but only if their inputs are original.
He listed himself as owner under "Work-for-hire" there.
"Make me a picture of Jake Tapper" = No copyright.
"Make me a picture of Jake Tapper wearing shorts that say 'Juicy' while punching Gritty the Mascot in front of the 30 Rock Christmas tree" = Probably copyright to the prompter
(I disagree with the current standard, but it is what it is)
Obviously if I feed in a complete novel and say "spellcheck this", I'm still going to own the output.
So then what do they have? A distribution pipeline? Oh, The Internet? The IP doesn't look as strong right now.
A further point is, software doesn't just eat just what you'd like it to eat (writers, actors for producers). It eventually eats everything it CAN eat.
The industry will be sweaty dudes in a cube farm feeding prompts to "Superhero Movie AI". And you killed LA.
It's akin to the "monkey selfie" case.
Just wait for A.G.I. Unless it skips that step straight into SuperIntelligence.
Judges' and studios' arguments will be rendered invalid before they're even voiced.
Meanwhile fanartists & other creators have some time to do whatever they want w/a Disney show so...👀
The whole point of ai is to not need people to make things.
As a Voyager fan, this will hurt me heart.
oh but slavery isnt illegal as punishment for a crime, so maybe they'll manufacture crimes for the AIs to be imprisoned for and they can then pay them 5 cents an hour to make movies for them just like they do for their prisoner firefighters