Trying to take a strong form of OPs position, one obvious line would be the automation and mass reproduction aspects, in addition to how much unique creativity you specifically added to the process.

It gets of course harrier because what happens to experts in the field who are able to do that and then just use this as a boosting tool. Still, I don’t think copyright law has clear bright lines so much, but more guidance that the courts just try to muddle through as best they can. Certainly one can make an argument that just stealing an artists style like this could be considered a copyright violation, just like sampling even a few seconds of someone else’s track can be in music.

Again, not saying these are net good for society, but clearly existing copyright laws do try to take this tack. I think the one thing working against her favor is that a) early days so laws haven’t caught up b) us laws generally favor corporate interests over individuals so she might never get any relief even if deeper pockets start to protect themselves as this becomes a bigger problem for them.

Well think if you took the left side of Mona Lisa and combined it with Van Gog's Starry night? Would that be ok? Of course not.

But if you took 100 paintings from 100 artists and clipped all into small jigsaw pieces then recombined them randomly to create a new picture, that would probably not be considered "derived art".

What matters is how much creativity you put into the process. Does the creative esthetics of the work derive from your efforts, or from those of the existing author's existing art.

But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here.

Consider the history of trademark lawsuits. You can be sued if you create something that somehow resembles an existing trademark, say use the exact same color as Coca-Cola for something similar.

So I think the guiding principle is or should be whether what you create can be confused with the work of some other highly original artist. It doesn't matter if you painted it all, if it looks similar enough that people could confuse it with the original artist's work, you are infringing.

>But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view

What makes you say that? A work is considered derivative with regards to another work, not with an author. If we take your jigsaw example and accept that the final result would not be derivative of any of the works that contributed each individual piece, and then pretend as if in actuality all the sources were from the same artist, what would change that would suddenly make the result derivative from some or all of the original works?

You are probably right there, I was just assuming that courts would consider it a factor if all pieces came from the same author.

As I understand it copyright infringement is not just a pure "crime" in itself. It is about the financial harm caused. I think the word they use is "tort". It is always about violating somebody else's right(s).

Oracle sues Google for Java copyright infringement. It is not just about "Hey here's a copyright infringement ... put Google in jail".

It is about "We lost a billion dollars, because of your infringement". So Oracle claims not just a single copyright infringement of a single work, but billion dollars worth of infringement. It is not black and white, it is quantitative. How much there is of it determines the seriousness of the violation.

I'm not a lawyer of course, don't take my advise.

You can trademark a style, you can't copyright it. IANAL but that is what my corporate IP compliance training tells me. As long as am regurgitating non legal advice, I suspect half mona lisa half starry night might be considered a transformtive work. If a single human artist painted both perfectly onto the same canvas it could be construed as a statement about changes in the culture between the two contexts, so if you do it with Photoshop, it might very well get ruled the same way.

As for the morality of it? I don't like the idea of copilot replacing me, but I don't think it was wrong to make it. I'll eventually have to retrain myself to retrain copilot models I suppose. Or we'll have to decide to care for each other as we all go unemployed.

If you gave the co-pilot the license to copy your code, part of that license is they have to include your license and copyright notice in every derived work they make.

Andy Warhol did something very similar to this with Avril Harrison's computer illustration of Venus. He just used the clone tool to add a third eye then called the result his own work. It even still had her signature on it.

That's kind of hilarious because ALL artists copy/imitate other artist' styles during their learning process before settling into a style all of their own.

The number of people who learned to draw by redrawing/imitating Disney stuff is countless.

The thing people aren't seeing with AI art is that it's the same as mass manufacturing, compare: buying a mass produced knife vs buying a handmade artisanal knife. I think exactly the same thing applies; generating machine made art in a given style vs buying/commissioning an artist.

I think taking someone's work to train an AI is fine, as long as you obtained legal access to the material in the first place. There is no copyright for art styles, if there was we would have no artists because even this artist in question would've started out by imitating other artist' styles.

As an update after taking a closer look at the article rather than the discussion: her art style is 100% inspired by Disney (and a few others) and there is nothing wrong with that.

It seems very strange to use the existing rules of copyright as a defense of the use of this new technology.

The concept of copyright was created in response to the development of the printing press. It was a reaction to a disruptive technology. It was possible to laboriously copy written works before the printing press existed, but the new technology made it incomparably cheaper and faster to do so, and societies reacted by creating new protections for content creators.

We are now at the threshold of a new disruptive technology that is likely to bring about profound economic changes in the arts. It makes no sense to me to take the old rules and try to use them to justify this disruptive technology, when the old rules were initially created in response to a different disruptive technology.

It seems uncontroversial that this new generative technology is built on the backs of human artists. It only functions by drawing from their works. Is it so unconceivable that we might need a totally new set of protections for those human artists?

You raise some interesting points.

> The concept of copyright was created in response to the development of the printing press. It was a reaction to a disruptive technology.

Absolutely, one of the major factors was that it allowed individuals to benefit directly off someone elses work without having made substantial changes. The protection was intended for the original works it self and derivatives too close to the original content.

> We are now at the threshold of a new disruptive technology that is likely to bring about profound economic changes in the arts.

This already happened with photography taking over portraits and tracing, the response wasn't to outright ban it, or really prevent it either. When technology made photography more accessible, to the point it was going to be disruptive to professionals in the field, the response again wasn't to outright ban it, or really prevent it either. This is despite the fact that it has litterally destroyed a significant amount of jobs to achieve conviniences that we now all enjoy.

I feel like the AI issue is a parallel to above situation. People are now given better tools to generate/create art themselves and as long as it isn't blatant copies, derivatives too close to the original content, it probably should be have similar rules in my opinion.

> It only functions by drawing from their works.

You can train AI models by taking photos and then vectorizing/toonifying/paintify etc. depending on what you're aiming for with various wildly available non-AI filters. Stylistic ideas are possible to implement into these filters, I have some experience having done so with making plugins for processing my photos. So, that isn't even a strict requirement for generation. So, even in the case where you ban AI from learning from people made art (even in the situation where they would allow it), there are ways to still train the AI models regardless to achieve a similar result.

There is another problem that hasn't been discussed, enforcement is going to be a very interesting problem considering how international borders for information/data are virtually non-existent now and it's becoming relatively difficult to even distinguish if a piece was generated by an AI or by a person. The economic changes are likely coming in regardless from my point of view. It's going to be either people are using it illegally if banned regardless or people using it legally if it isn't -- I just do not see this changing either way.

It is true that generative ai technology is often trained on human artists' work. But how is that different from human artists taking inspiration/learning and adapting the style of other human artists? I suppose the argument is that humans should get special treatment in the copyright domain?

I wonder if it is possible to get a machine to learn a style without input. Likely a room full of typewriter monkeys searching for Shakespeare scenario, but a human would still be involved in the loop to "confirm" the desired style - which is technically a creative decision in itself.

Which I guess shows the true nature: machines could generate stuff for machines without any external input. But we built them, so we've tasked machines to generate stuff for humans. And therein lies the answer I guess.

I 100% believe machines can be creative. Creativity isn't something unique to humans or to living things. For me it's a concept.

>It is true that generative ai technology is often trained on human artists' work. But how is that different from human artists taking inspiration/learning and adapting the style of other human artists?

It's different in the same way that making a copy of a book by hand, where it might take weeks or months to make a single copy, is different than making a copy with a printing press in a few minutes. It was the technological development of the latter process which lead to the concept of copyright being created in the first place.

There is a fundamental difference between a human being taking years to acquire artistic skill, then using that artistic skill to create individual works inspired by other artists, vs. using a generative AI system to "learn" a particular artist's style in a minutes or hours, then create infinite iterations of that style nearly instantly.

There's a tendency for people in tech to search out broad, overarching, universal principles that can be applied to all behavior. But sometimes, simply being able to do something tens of thousands of times faster or tens of thousands of times more cheaply is enough of a difference to require new rules, new moral frameworks, new modes of thinking.

"The computer is just doing what a human could do" simply isn't a compelling enough argument, any more than "the printing press is just doing what a scribe could do" would be.

> Taking someone's work to train an AI is fine, as long as you obtained legal access to the material

That is the big question here, what kind of legal access does Copilot etc. have to the training materials. When they use the training material they must copy it to their computer. According to most open source licenses they then also have to retain the copyright notice to wherever they copy it. But now it seems that Copilot skips that part. It copies everything else but not the copyright notice.

>But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here.

If I look at 100 paintings by Pablo Picasso and then paint a new one in his style, did I commit copyright infringement?

That's a good question. My immediate answer would tend to be no.

But consider you produced a comic-book about Mickey Mouse where the character Mickey Mouse looked exactly like the one in the several Disney books and movies. You would probably get sued. Right?