Interesting POV. Appreciated it. Whether people agree with the new rules or not, I think one thing is certain: this is just a preview of some serious issues coming soon. I could see the process getting really complicated and specific to each individual case.
While my view is that it's a step forward for trying to create some type of framework, two main issues come to mind:
1. This will probably be irrelevant in like 6 months due to the fast pace of development.
2. Who the hell will want to go through this process of documentation when we don't even know what it looks like. (Screenshots?)
I was watching a video with Stephen Fry and Brian Eno over the weekend. Fry said pretty much what you're saying... "In a year, anything we say on this stage will be so outdated as to be laughable." He compared the place we're "in" now to the marshland in northern England -- a pool of soggy grass and water that is the literal mouth of the Thames. "Here's where we're standing today."
Actually... I think I'm going to post that now. Thanks for the inspiration.
Hey Fred. I did a deep dive on this over at https://hightechcreative.substack.com/p/copyright-ruling-on-ai-generated recently, covering it from the point of view of people looking to gain copyright on something they had created with A.I. - on that front, the ruling was reasonably good - progressive even. They reasoned some things out far more logically than I had expected.
You were pretty much bang on most of your points there with regards to what is copyrightable and what isn't, which I thought made a lot of sense. There are people who would like to see things generated with just a prompt and no other work copyrightable but honestly I think this makes a decent balancing of it (though there are some issues in their assumptions I work through in the article).
I hadn't considered too closely the idea of people being harmed by digital replica's, could you expand on this? Are you talking primarily about people stealing the "style" of a painting or writing? If so, that's unlikely to be something solved as it was already both possible and perfectly legal to do that - copyright intentionally doesn't protect ideas or abstract things like styles, only exact works. A.I. makes it easier to do this, but it doesn't make it possible - It always was.
You were right to focus on the concern about how we tell something is A.I. generated though. For all the people patting themselves on the back about how they can "detect A.I." because they've seen a few people churn out really crappy writing with it, both A.I. art and writing can be quite good and are getting better, it's already possible for it to be impossible to tell in some cases and this will only become more-so.
The problem though is even worse when looked at from the other side. Consider the problem of enforcing your copyright now. Say you create a piece of art and discover someone has plastered it on t-shirts and mugs and is making a tidy profit selling it.
If you try and stop them and they claim that they are perfectly entitled to because you generated the art and thus can't copyright it, now the burden of proof is on you to show you have the rights you're trying to assert - and that isn't always going to be an easy thing to do. Someone could easily bleed you badly in court costs dragging that fight out, and if it's a corporation ripping you off rather than just some regular person?
Technology moves faster than law, as always, we're going to need some careful thought around this one because the answers aren't going to be obvious.
Thanks for this really thoughtful comment. Couple of thoughts: The really hard question with digital replicas are lifelike likenesses. IF you’re an actor or voice actor, AI can recreate your physical presence or voice with minimal input. You put your finger on the other huge problem — just out and out copying. (The painter Robert Indiana famously did not copyright his “LOVE” painting and it became ubiquitous in the 70s.)
The screnario you bring up at the end captures the problem perfectly —- let’s say you generate an hilarious image using Midjourney, for example. Do you create an NFT (OY! Remember that craze?)? How do you protect the copyright? Is it “digital art?” AND… what about the imagery / tropes / memes that AI used to help create your work?
My biggest worry matches your last point — this technology is moving at lightning pace. We don’t have the intellectual firepower in our legislative bodies right now to keep up with what’s happening. We’re in pirate’s waters for now.
It's going to be difficult for a while, definitely. I'm less worried about the Midjourney example - if the sum total of creative effort is purely prompting with no other manipulation, even if you re-prompted a lot, do you really need the copyright?
One of the things I was impressed by in the Copyright Office's decision was their acknowledgement of the creativity inherent in pretty much everything beyond pure prompting, which was more than I expected them to notice. Inpainting for example - it's a major technique used by AI artists and I believe Midjourney even supports it now under a different name (my experimenting has been almost entirely with local models).
Essentially it involves selecting a portion of the image and regenerating just that portion with a different prompt. You could use it to add or alter details or repair faults - when experimenting with earlier Stable Diffiusion models which often messed up hands for instance I was able to use manual editing to roughly repair sections and then inpainting to rework the section and make it look like a natural part of the artwork. Or, as example of additional detail, you could select an area of a bed and prompt the model to add a cat sleeping.
The copyright decision specifically calls out this sort of technique as something that would render the work at least partially copyrightable. Whilst they claim prompting alone isn't enough as there is too much variation, too much left to the model's decision, this is far more targeted and controlled and meets their standard for "human driven creativity". Likewise they were willing to grant copyright on comics where all the images were AI generated, but the script was written by the author and the panels laid out by hand, recognising that the whole represented much more than just AI generation. In some ways you could look at that as granting copyright on collage art or something similar.
These examples give me hope from the perspective of a creative who enjoys the possibilities opened by A.I. I'm far less hopeful about the rest. Proving copyright will now be a massive mess, judges will likely favour corporates over individual just from lack of any sort of ability to make an impartial judgement. (Justice may be blind, but she's a bit of a gold digger too). And as far as the law keeping up... well, they just repealed net neutrality across the U.S., so either they _still_ don't understand the technology issues we were debating and arguing almost fifteen years ago or, worse, they no longer care to even pretend to have the citizen's best interests at heart.
Interesting POV. Appreciated it. Whether people agree with the new rules or not, I think one thing is certain: this is just a preview of some serious issues coming soon. I could see the process getting really complicated and specific to each individual case.
While my view is that it's a step forward for trying to create some type of framework, two main issues come to mind:
1. This will probably be irrelevant in like 6 months due to the fast pace of development.
2. Who the hell will want to go through this process of documentation when we don't even know what it looks like. (Screenshots?)
And lastly, just look at the new stuff from Omnihuman: https://omnihuman-1.com/
These are totally uncharted waters..
I was watching a video with Stephen Fry and Brian Eno over the weekend. Fry said pretty much what you're saying... "In a year, anything we say on this stage will be so outdated as to be laughable." He compared the place we're "in" now to the marshland in northern England -- a pool of soggy grass and water that is the literal mouth of the Thames. "Here's where we're standing today."
Actually... I think I'm going to post that now. Thanks for the inspiration.
Hey Fred. I did a deep dive on this over at https://hightechcreative.substack.com/p/copyright-ruling-on-ai-generated recently, covering it from the point of view of people looking to gain copyright on something they had created with A.I. - on that front, the ruling was reasonably good - progressive even. They reasoned some things out far more logically than I had expected.
You were pretty much bang on most of your points there with regards to what is copyrightable and what isn't, which I thought made a lot of sense. There are people who would like to see things generated with just a prompt and no other work copyrightable but honestly I think this makes a decent balancing of it (though there are some issues in their assumptions I work through in the article).
I hadn't considered too closely the idea of people being harmed by digital replica's, could you expand on this? Are you talking primarily about people stealing the "style" of a painting or writing? If so, that's unlikely to be something solved as it was already both possible and perfectly legal to do that - copyright intentionally doesn't protect ideas or abstract things like styles, only exact works. A.I. makes it easier to do this, but it doesn't make it possible - It always was.
You were right to focus on the concern about how we tell something is A.I. generated though. For all the people patting themselves on the back about how they can "detect A.I." because they've seen a few people churn out really crappy writing with it, both A.I. art and writing can be quite good and are getting better, it's already possible for it to be impossible to tell in some cases and this will only become more-so.
The problem though is even worse when looked at from the other side. Consider the problem of enforcing your copyright now. Say you create a piece of art and discover someone has plastered it on t-shirts and mugs and is making a tidy profit selling it.
If you try and stop them and they claim that they are perfectly entitled to because you generated the art and thus can't copyright it, now the burden of proof is on you to show you have the rights you're trying to assert - and that isn't always going to be an easy thing to do. Someone could easily bleed you badly in court costs dragging that fight out, and if it's a corporation ripping you off rather than just some regular person?
Technology moves faster than law, as always, we're going to need some careful thought around this one because the answers aren't going to be obvious.
Thanks for this really thoughtful comment. Couple of thoughts: The really hard question with digital replicas are lifelike likenesses. IF you’re an actor or voice actor, AI can recreate your physical presence or voice with minimal input. You put your finger on the other huge problem — just out and out copying. (The painter Robert Indiana famously did not copyright his “LOVE” painting and it became ubiquitous in the 70s.)
The screnario you bring up at the end captures the problem perfectly —- let’s say you generate an hilarious image using Midjourney, for example. Do you create an NFT (OY! Remember that craze?)? How do you protect the copyright? Is it “digital art?” AND… what about the imagery / tropes / memes that AI used to help create your work?
My biggest worry matches your last point — this technology is moving at lightning pace. We don’t have the intellectual firepower in our legislative bodies right now to keep up with what’s happening. We’re in pirate’s waters for now.
It's going to be difficult for a while, definitely. I'm less worried about the Midjourney example - if the sum total of creative effort is purely prompting with no other manipulation, even if you re-prompted a lot, do you really need the copyright?
One of the things I was impressed by in the Copyright Office's decision was their acknowledgement of the creativity inherent in pretty much everything beyond pure prompting, which was more than I expected them to notice. Inpainting for example - it's a major technique used by AI artists and I believe Midjourney even supports it now under a different name (my experimenting has been almost entirely with local models).
Essentially it involves selecting a portion of the image and regenerating just that portion with a different prompt. You could use it to add or alter details or repair faults - when experimenting with earlier Stable Diffiusion models which often messed up hands for instance I was able to use manual editing to roughly repair sections and then inpainting to rework the section and make it look like a natural part of the artwork. Or, as example of additional detail, you could select an area of a bed and prompt the model to add a cat sleeping.
The copyright decision specifically calls out this sort of technique as something that would render the work at least partially copyrightable. Whilst they claim prompting alone isn't enough as there is too much variation, too much left to the model's decision, this is far more targeted and controlled and meets their standard for "human driven creativity". Likewise they were willing to grant copyright on comics where all the images were AI generated, but the script was written by the author and the panels laid out by hand, recognising that the whole represented much more than just AI generation. In some ways you could look at that as granting copyright on collage art or something similar.
These examples give me hope from the perspective of a creative who enjoys the possibilities opened by A.I. I'm far less hopeful about the rest. Proving copyright will now be a massive mess, judges will likely favour corporates over individual just from lack of any sort of ability to make an impartial judgement. (Justice may be blind, but she's a bit of a gold digger too). And as far as the law keeping up... well, they just repealed net neutrality across the U.S., so either they _still_ don't understand the technology issues we were debating and arguing almost fifteen years ago or, worse, they no longer care to even pretend to have the citizen's best interests at heart.