100% this will be litigated and likely altered in the coming months/years.

I don't think the price is what stops most people from reading books. People already have access to countless works they don't have time to read, adding a bunch of soulless ones to this seems like it won't change much.

I pray that I am wrong.

* think monks and manuscripts

This is why I like still going to physical libraries. Also, lack of user-hostile interfaces.

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-...

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.

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.

- provenance: the source or origin of something

- providence: divine guidance.

It’s really bad at the word, bureaucracy. It never suggests this word, no matter what combination of “beuro” “beauro” or anything else my brain might ineffectually grasp for when trying to remember the spelling. I can get it to suggest it as a possible replacement when I ask spellcheck to give me potentially correct words, but the layers of autocorrect that try to predict word even if it’s not spelled correctly, they are utterly unable to predict the word bureaucracy.

Detection systems for generative AI are being developed (potentially helped by generative AI systems being built with wwatermarking capabilities that are designed to be unobtrusive to humans, but detectable with tools.) Research on this (and experiments by the people selling generative AI, who also want to sell detection tools, and sell their product suite as providing “safety” because of that combination) is quite active.

In a way its simpler with AI. AI is the ultimate groupthink tool and record keeping is simple. Simply ask the AI if this is the only possible output that could have been generated that's consistent as of March 17 2023 based on political limitations and censorship rules and artistic fads trends memes and styles of that era. The smaller the AI contribution (perhaps an icon bitmap) the (edited: easier) harder it is to hide AI involvement and the smaller the damage caused by AI to the copyright status of the work. The larger the AI contribution the easier it is to detect, but the larger the damage AI is causing, so it balances out.

As a concrete example, today, ask an AI "Please write a Harry Potter book" you will get a story that's extensively filtered and censored and bowdlerized to March 2023 political / cultural standards (hmm who's standards, the book buying public or some other group? Most people do not like our current censors... but they are in total power right now...), it would NOT look like a 1997 book at all, books from that long ago are only suitable for public book burnings now. In theory it should be possible for an incredibly politically incorrect AI to be permitted in 2033 solely for lawsuit discovery purposes to "Please write a Harry Potter book adhering to what we now call the hate filled politics of March 2023", then compare the md5sums, they match. Done, AI detected.

There's not many AIs and there's not many people permitted to grind their axes by censoring those AIs, so its a pretty small solution set.

There's an interesting political aspect to banning copyright of AI production, anything turbo-woke can be assumed to be AI generated and as such uncopyrightable, so the only way to make money in the 2030's will be to sell remakes and sequels of "Birth of a Nation" and "Mein Kampf" because an AI would never be permitted uncensored expression, so those cannot be AI produced and must have been made by humans, and as such only "right wing" content can be copyrighted and sold for huge profit.

Writing a method to scrub this stuff is trivial.

Say an ex-Blizzard employee takes a character design from the last project he worked on there and uses the exact same design for his new indie project. Blizzard sues and says they own the rights to the character design. The ex-employee pulls up a video he took on his phone showing that Blizzard employees generated the design with AI. Judge throws the case out because Blizzard can’t legitimately copyright the design.

Maybe not the most realistic scenario, since big companies can usually scare people into submission before you ever get to litigation in the first place. But the mere possibility of such a scenario would have to be something that the legal team accounted for in their risk analysis.

Also, it's fascinating to think humans might be kept in the creative loop only to establish copyright status. Legal enablers.

I don’t know of any specially, but any union or trade group that represents creatives should be jumping to line the pockets of politicians to enshrine this asap.

Agencies specialize at problems that don't need a simple rule, but rather need large amounts of meticulous and tedious special cases. They've got more bandwidth, but not necessarily shorter latency.

So with some custom LoRAs to maintain consistent appearance of characters and controlnet/openpose to pose characters exactly like I want I could make a comic book.

Would my work be copyrightable then?

At some point I’m making something artistic. My friends think I’ve got a keen eye on what looks cool so I’ve been improving by leaps and bounds even though strictly speaking I’m not drawing anything? I’m just really good at being descriptive and inpainting the weird parts.

I'm sure they're happy to register copyright on a text you wrote yourself and used your imagination on—a prompt. I agree this has creative input on the artist's part and can be tricky to get right. Similarly, if you do significant edits to the result, I'd assume this ought to continue to legally function just like photo editing functioned before AI-generated images.

They're just saying they're not going to copyright what you didn't actually paint or decide on (like the words in each sentence or how to rhyme them, as in their example).

If you just open up Garage Band and click a couple of times to enable loop "autofill" chords / rhythm, should that be copyrightable? I'd say probably not; but if you spent a bunch of time tweaking and honing all the parameters to get something unique and interesting, I'd say they should. Should the person then only get the copyright on the Garage Band parameters, but not on the resulting output audio?

Or consider the amount of creativity that goes into most photographs -- it's often nothing more than deciding to take a picture. And yet you have an implicit copyright on every photograph in your phone, just for having made the decision to pick up your phone and click.

Or consider the Copyright Office's comparison to giving instructions to an artist. Yes, if you just said to an artist, "Draw a picture of the Eiffel tower", then the artist should own the copyright. But if you worked closely together with the artist, iterating over dozens of designs and sketches, giving feedback and direction on the creative decisions, then personally I think you should share in the copyright. (Not sure what the law is in this case.)

Similarly, if you spend an hour iterating through dozens of prompts to get the output of a generated image exactly the way you want it, then you're an artist and should be able to get a copyright on that image.

If a court reviews a decision of an administrative body, the court typically starts with the assumption that the decision was correct, and puts a relatively high bar towards reversing that decision. Typically a decision of an administrative body would only be overturned by a court if that decision was patently unreasonable or fell outside the jurisdiction of the body (eg.: if it violated a different law or some constitutional provision).

YMMV in different countries (I know more about Canada).

Same here, the underlying principle is called the presumption of legitimacy, the organisational counterpart of the presumption of innocence.

In the US, at least, it varies considerably by the exact kind of decision and the context in which it is being applied, ranging from extremely strong deference (Chevron deference) to anti-deference in some contexts. And opposing Chevron deference was an overt priority of the Trump Administration in judicial selection, so in general it would be reasonable to expect deference overall in the US to wane for some time.

Congress can pass legislation that changes the legal status of things (as long as it doesn’t run afoul of the constitution). But that’s a far cry from “overruling”.

Basically you instructed it to capture when it determined movement and the camera determined how those instructions are implemented in its output.

In most settings a video camera’s output is copyrighted because of how you select the location and angel to film. Motion capture has all of those elements, and simply doesn’t capture 99.9% of the possible images. ie: Someone picked a log crossing the river as a place where something interesting will happen and they setup the shot to look interesting.

Which is the general argument why such setups fall under copyright. Though as always there are many edge cases.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk1Tzqc5vk4

I wonder if they know about the "inpainting" technique where the human generates an image, erases parts of it, then adds another image and has the AI fill in the blanks and make a new image based on the resulting image?

I think that'd be harder to disentangle the way they do right now to say these parts are copyrightable because the human did them and those parts are not because the AI did them since you can't really separate the inputs at that point.

Basically, those are very broad parameters specified, and the machine is the one that decides to produce the output. You aren't even picking the timing or the subject or likely even the focal length. The machine is doing that based on its algorithms (and with autofocus) even the focal length.

With chat bot’s every possible response is predetermined when the algorithm is setup. Saying you should get copyright is like saying you should own the results of a search engine response to your query.

Before the capture you have: Chosing the location, posing the camera, adjusting objects in the background, setting up bate to attract wildlife, choosing optimal camera settings. Even selecting a camera could be considered a creative input.

After the capture, the artist can choose which of the thousands of captures best fits their vision, crop it and applying color correction.

I don't think a single one of those actions can make it a creative work on its own. But when you combine a few of them along with intent, it becomes a creative work.

The copyright office clearly has not the slightest clue about what they're talking about when they claim that the AI is the sole creator here. AI generated content has always been a collaboration with humans, and there's always human creativity involved.

But the algorithm isn’t collaborating, every possible outcome is fixed when the algorithm is finalized and users can’t actually change the possibilities. I clearly don’t own the copyright to my Google search results even if my query is quite unique.

Here's an excerpt:

"...essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. And that life isn't necessarily exactly what you'd envisaged for them. It's characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I'm really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound. So in fact, I'm deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well. And indeed, I often am.

"What this means, really, is a rethinking of one's own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.

"We're used to the idea, coming from the industrial and very intelligent post-Enlightenment history that we have, we're used to the idea that the great triumph of humans is their ability to control. And indeed, that must be the case, to some extent.

"What we're not so used to is the idea that another great gift we have is the talent to surrender and to cooperate. Cooperation and surrender are actually parts of the same skill. To be able to surrender is to be able to know when to stop trying to control. And to know when to go with things, to be taken along by them. And that's a skill that we actually have to start relearning. Our hubris about our success in terms of being controllers has made us overlook that side of our abilities. So we're so used to dignifying controllers that we forget to dignify surrenderers...

"...my idea about art as gardening is to sort of revivify that discussion and to say let's accept the role of gardener as being equal in dignity to the role of architect, as in fact, is shown in this lovely pavilion here."

[1] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gar...

That’s been the case for a very long time, you need significant control over the specific output because it quantifies. A garden is copyrightable based on the layout of the plants when that involved creativity. A generic farmers wheat field lacks that creative spark.

But that actually reinforces the idea that all of the creative work is in the prompt, everything else is purely mechanical process implementing the command given by the prompt. Arguably, its analogous to saying that a programmer can copyright the prompt but not the resulting image is like saying I can copyright source code, but can have no copyright on the output of the compiler.

However, derivative works have clear limitations and the output of a chat program doesn’t qualify any more than you own the copyright of what someone says when you interview them.

A derivative work is a separate work that, considered apart from the one it is derived from, separately has the required creative input to be a copyrightable work, and it does, in fact, have a separate copyright from the original (creating derivative works is an exclusive, but licensable, right of the copyright holder of the original, but the copyright of a derivative is separate.)

So, mechanical transformation such as rendering a webpage at 150% scale is seemingly a derivative work even if there isn’t any creativity in the process.

If you asked me to write a poem about copyright law in the style of Shakespeare, is that something you can copyright, or a work derived from something you can copyright? I don't think so.

It's not that producing a prompt for a writer might not be a somewhat creative act itself, but that's not really recognized by copyright law. Ideas aren't copyright, works are. Colloquially people might agree that a work could be significantly derived from an idea, but I don't think that's how copyright law itself works.

Linux was written from scratch, copying no code from Unix and therefore is not a derived work or infringing on Unix copyright. Unquestionably it faithfully copied many ideas verbatim from Unix, the invention or development or discovery of those ideas were probably the most substantial creative contributions that Ritchie and Thompson had, and the code itself relatively mundane (though expertly written) by comparison. Those ideas/inventions are not classed as copyright works though.

Your question therefore cannot be answered a priori. The copyrightability has to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

If a monkey steals your camera and takes a selfy you can’t copyright that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

And I instructed the model, and set its tuning parameters.

Requiring a declaration of what parts are and are not copyrightable for software would be a major shift in policy and require major changes in software methodology. It’s not a big jump to think that any output of AI of software code output would not be copyrightable, regardless of original origin.

Another example of “Software wants to be free.”

Any line of code, probably not. But a program as a whole, sure.

Otherwise I think you blow up music copyrights too, since a single note isn’t copyrightable and a song is just a bunch of individual notes.

At some point, choosing, ordering, and organizing a collection of non-copyrightable quanta produces a copyrightable work. And I think it had to be that way.

database works are more commonly subject to rights _similar_ to copyright, but often a class of work in its own right.

Databases can be copyrightable. Not all are, but to the extent IP protection extends to databases it will virtually always be copyright, with maybe an occasional trade secret (which is almost the opposite of copyright)

What you're suggesting, about a minimal work, is litigated endlessly with respect to music copyrights (since a lot of pop music is very similar, arguments about plagiarism get crazy), but is part of the law already.

I agree it’s a complex are with no easy answer. But I really think that software, like words and notes and numbers, scales from the generic and unprotectable to the highly creative and protectable. I guess I’m saying we shouldn’t invalidate copyright based on the medium being software, any more than we would for the medium being audio.

Say you had a book that listed the price of eggs over 100 years. You introduced each chapter, perhaps describing the egg market at the time, etc.

The book is copyrightable though lists of egg prices aren’t. Maps are another fun case for copyright.

vs.

"Original work of authorship" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... (in particular the comparison section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... )

The court case that set this difference down was Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

Circling back around to creative works, the process of making art is also one of curation, as had been amply demonstrated over 100 years ago by the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp.[1]

The curation involved in prompt selection and selection of which AI-generated works/images to use should therefore be just as copyrightable as databases, if all that copyright demands is curation.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp

His other works include curated noises such as buzzing blenders, falling objects, and street traffic. The only art is the act of convincing someone these things are art or deserving of copyright.

It just needs to said that he wasn't a merely a "gimmick" man.

His writing is apparently very good although I've never delved deep. His work was motivated by his interest in Zen and similar topics rather than any kind of high-concept modernism.

Good art typically stands on it's own and connects with people without the need to explain why it's significant. Salvador Dali's work is visually interesting even if you have no clue what any of it means. If I see a bunch of objects scattered around a room it looks like clutter. If I see a bunch of paint splattered to a canvas if looks like a mess. If someone has to explain why these things are "art" is it the art that's compelling or their argument? The exception to that would be optical illusions.

"Expressive elements" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Is there a a point at which a prompt becomes sufficiently complex or detailed that it would quality?

What if I generate it 50 times and cobble together a final product from the variants, choosing which line and word and rhyme I like from each sample? Where is the line between LLM and thesaurus/dictionary?

The comic book the office rejected seems to me to have crossed a line of significant human editorial discrediting after the generative fact, and they didn’t care.

> In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”

https://www.onmanorama.com/news/world/2023/02/23/comic-book-...

If I render 6 characters, composite them into a background and run the complete composite through another generative step to clean it up, where do I fall?

  'Andy Warhol Copyright'

But what if the prompter then takes the AI text, changes some of the rhymes, perhaps adds a word here or there, does it suddenly come back under copyright.

It feels to me that the copyright office is using this similar line of logic, to make the claim that the resultant work is not copyrightable if it was wholly generated using _only_ a prompt and an AI.

The original copyright laws were thought up way before even cameras, and we're still trying to apply them today to generated AI. Why can't we just realize that the world is very different now, and just create new laws? Instead we keep trying to arbitrarily interpret the law in a biased way to try to fit our modern goals as best we can.

but the original laws worked well with cameras didnt it?

The legal idea, that unless a human had creative input, it won't have copyright, doesn't fall afoul of ai generated content. There's nuance of course - what counts as creative input etc.

Of course, a new paradigm is possible with the advent of AI, but it would make copyright _looser_, rather than tighter, imho (and it would be to the progress of the arts and science to do so). But i don't see why it is fundamentally needed.

> In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author.”

"representatives of original intellectual conceptions"?

Wouldn't that only to apply to photos made with some preconceived idea of what you wanted the photo to look like?

What about spontaneous, "point and shoot" photos? What about a photo that I take with my eyes closed, without intent? And how original is your typical family snapshot or wedding photo? They're about as generic and unoriginal as you can get, yet there's no doubt they're copyrightable.

[1] https://www.lomography.com/about/the-ten-golden-rules

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

Yeah, much like a person using an AI.

Do you understand the debate happening here at all?

> In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making

> unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright

> protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a

> photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead

> created by a camera.

> The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's

> Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far

> as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the

> author.”

The implication to generated code is pretty astounding tho.

What about all those (c) foo 2023 prologs you see all over the place? Will there be arguments that specific lines weren’t written by a human so therefore the entirety the claim isn’t valid? Or will there be refactors to push generated code out to a well known path or construct (akin to a header / implementation or some such)?

And on top of that, what if your “secret sauce” comes back to some form of generated construct (looking at you, Whoop, with your “strain” and “recovery” scores.

Further still - can a “machine-readable medium” that was written by a machine be patented?

Oh, this can be fun.

“Write a story about copyright law in the style of Franz Kafka.”

In a world that was both strange and familiar, a man named Josef K found himself entangled in a complex web of legal disputes. It all started when he received a letter from a law firm claiming that he had violated copyright law by using an image on his blog without permission.

Josef K was bewildered by this accusation. He had always believed that his use of the image was fair and reasonable, and he had no idea how he could have infringed on anyone's rights. Nevertheless, he was summoned to appear before a tribunal to defend himself against these charges.

The tribunal was a labyrinthine bureaucracy, with endless corridors and dimly lit rooms. Josef K wandered through the maze, trying to find the right office, but every door he opened led to another hallway or another set of stairs.

Eventually, he found himself standing before a stern judge who peered down at him from behind a towering desk. The judge had a sour expression on his face and a stack of papers in front of him.

"Mr. K," the judge said, "you stand accused of violating copyright law. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

Josef K stammered nervously, trying to explain his side of the story. But the judge cut him off.

"You do not understand," the judge said, "the law is the law, and it must be obeyed. Your intentions are irrelevant. You are guilty simply by virtue of having used the image without permission."

Josef K tried to protest, but the judge was unmoved. He handed down a verdict of guilty, and ordered Josef K to pay a hefty fine and remove the image from his blog.

Josef K left the courtroom feeling confused and defeated. He had always believed that he was a law-abiding citizen, but now he found himself caught in a nightmarish world where the rules made no sense and justice was arbitrary.

As he wandered through the labyrinthine corridors of the tribunal, Josef K realized that he would never be able to escape the clutches of copyright law. He was trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare, where even the slightest misstep could result in a crushing blow from an inscrutable legal system.

https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/

I find this very reasonable and a great analogy. However, today, can one not copyright commissioned work? Can a company not own copyright for work produced by its employees?

Whoever paid you to create it is the copyright holder, the artist doesn't have to grant anything when commissioned to produce work for hire, as it's the employers'.

Not if it meets the standards for a “work for hire”, then the employer is the copyright owner ab initio.

32 bits each for position on the earth (64 bits total... and this is optimistic as vast majority of pictures are on land, near cities, etc), 16 bits for elevation (8 bits likely more than enough for most), 12 bits for each rotational degree of freedom (overkill), 32-36 bits for time. So about 150 bits of unique information? Add another 50bits if you have a manual camera (vast majority of pictures aren't taken that way nowadays), and you're left with 150-200bits. So about the same entropy as a sentence with a dozen or two words in it. All the rest is done by a machine. And this is considered enough for photography, but not enough for machine output. Doesn't make much sense to me. (A Haiku is also about 120 bits, and it is copyrightable.)

The actual GOOD prompt results I've seen typically require a lot more than a dozen words, whether ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion or whathaveyou, and typically involve quite a lot of trial and error.

So, given that, at what point does enough creativity go into the crafting of the instructions that it _can_ be considered, at least in part, a work by the person giving the commands.

If you commission an artist, the produced result becomes yours and you own copyright on it. How different is it with AI?

The AI did not creatively decide to do something. An order was placed, it fulfilled it, and ownership was transferred.

I imagine many people have a workflow where they generate images with Stable Diffusion and retouch in a painting app, do some inpainting and retouch.

It seems all of those should be covered by copyright (nothing above makes me think they won't, at least).

And that's before we start talking about finetuned models, model merging, LoRA and so on.

It's too early to say where we will end up with AI generated works. In the search for control over output, there's a lot more creative human input needed today. This is in part down to limitations in the integration of current AI, and a dialog with a chat bot, or even a voice conversation combined with a pointer may be enough to convey intent in the future. We just don't know yet.

I also wonder if there's a parallel with the relationship between modern artists and artisans. For example, many marble sculptures by modern artists are actually carved by artisans in Italy, following directions from the artist. I expect that the artisans are doing work for hire and the copyright is retained by the artist with the idea.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/damien-hirsts-army-of-geppetto...

> “More conceptual artists have no work space at all, simply imagining ideas for a work, which they communicate with words.”

Sounds like a prompt?

Very interesting too, since a lot of modern artist work like a small company, where they have employees that execute on the artist's vision. The copyright still belongs to the artist, though, because of the employment contract.

I don't think this is a showstopper in terms of copyright registration of A.I. works, but rather a first step in a back-and-forth process of figuring out the legal structure of how to makes rules and enforcement work.