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Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

No, it's a Butlerian Jihad[0] argument. The Copyright Office's argument holds even for a fully public domain training set. US copyright law is already speciesist[1] - you can't assign authorship to an animal - so computers are also forbidden from authorship.

[0] In the Dune universe, the "Butlerian Jihad" refers to a legal ban on thinking machines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

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Seems like that only applies if you anthropomorphize the AI and consider it the author, rather than a tool utilized by the artist. I mean, yes, the AI is doing the bulk of the work, but so is photoshop for a lot of digital art.

Photographs can be copyrighted, and all the human did was aim and press a button. Oh, and potentially travel to specific locations, adjust parameters, choose lenses, stage a scene, makeup, wardrobe, lighting, etc. etc. But none of those things are required for the image to be copyrighted

I'm not really sure how this connects to the argument. No one is trying to grant authorship to an algorithm - it would be a ridiculous effort that was never even in the cards. In these copyright disputes, the authorship on AI outputs would be on the person using the AI. Generative AI takes inputs that are provided by a human and transforms it into certain outputs. Legally speaking, I don't see it as different from me getting protection for something I did in Photoshop - trying to somehow give Photoshop authorship would be absurd.

I agree it's not quite the right argument. IANAL, but I think it's more illustrative to remove AI from the example entirely. If you wrote a prompt and gave it to a human artist to draw, would you have joint copyright over the resulting work? If you didn't do anything worthy of copyright, and the AI cannot be granted copyright, then it is not copyrightable.

That said, it seems like a moot point to me. The practical uses of generative AI are not going to be one-and-done prompt-to-image tools. When AI is used more like a brush, the brush strokes the human chooses will still be granted copyright.

Maybe but copyright on a remixed song that samples other artists is really difficult to deal with in terms of rights unless one party owns the rights to all the samples it’s difficult to negotiate and you might not get any royalties. AI art is basically just other people’s work remixed so the same problem applies

This is literally a case of someone making AI art and trying to attribute it to the algorithm.

The Copyright Office wrote their guidance specifically because someone tried to register a comic book they wrote and put AI art in. They specifically credited Midjourney as co-author.

Their guidance would not apply for someone using AI as a tool, but said copyright would be thinner than if you'd drawn everything by hand. Specifically, you don't own any of the things the AI "just came up with". If you just wrote a prompt and grinded out some results, you probably own nothing[0]. If you use shittons of inpainting to control, say, the overall composition, but the AI filled in pixels somewhere, then you probably still own the overall image, but that's only because I'm not sure how you'd separate the two in a way that would let you copy just the AI-generated portion. Or, in the case of the comic book I mentioned earlier, they own the text, characters, and plot of the comic book, but not the artwork.

[0] Yes, you could probably just lie to the Copyright Office. Make sure to never reveal your use of AI to anyone, because there's loads of angry artists who would love to tattle on you.

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