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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

People might not be honest. But large organizations, oh boy. There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable. If the Copyright office's view on this stands, there will be no great disruption of the employability of creatives.

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> There’s zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable.

Sure, but Disney will just not release the intermediate products that are the direct outputs of pure prompting, and make sure they are doing at least enough beyond that before they release anything that the whole is covered by copyright.

It will be interesting to see what position large software companies take on this. They also won't want to run the risk of losing copyright in their software, when programmers use AI assistants. Likely there's less risk here, at least at the moment, because you still need to do a lot of manual work above what AI does for you. But how close are we to the point where the corporate lawyers start to get nervous?

True. Though I wonder what will happen when someone sells a wildly successful novel to a publisher for millions of dollars, and then it turns out that it was composed by an AI.

Reid Hoffman just published a book written with gpt4 [0] so it’s not even a hypothetical.

He made it available as a free ebook but it’s also for sale on Amazon.

I wonder if people remove his portions and just retain the ai portion if they can distribute it freely.

[0] https://greylock.com/greymatter/amplifying-humanity-through-...

Lawsuits and headlines :)

Well, if joe doe can now make a picture that rivals Pixar’s and it’s a commercial success, that puts a lot of pressure on Pixar & Co to reduce costs. Doesn’t matter whether joe doe gets rich with this or not.

On the other hand, you can bet big companies like Disney will lobby hard for copyright to extend to AI generated works. And it wouldn't be the first time Disney has influenced copyright law.

Why can’t the Disney creatives simply lie and use the AI to ideate and produce drafts that they touch up and pass off as their own? Seems totally rational.

The way this will work in practice is that Disney will be strongly incentivized to disclose the AI generated parts, for fear it might lose the entirety of their copyright on that work if their human authorship is not properly delineated.

> There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable.

Surely you can see how easy it is around this? Even if it was a "prompt" that originated the design of a Disney character, they wouldn't try to get a copyright on that.

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