The U.S. Copyright Office has again rejected copyright protection for art created using artificial intelligence, denying a request by artist Jason M. Allen for a copyright covering an award-winning image he created with the generative AI system Midjourney.
Good
They totally should have used the image as the story photo
I don’t know why they didn’t! It’s not like it’s copyrighted …
So, if he didn’t tell he used AI it’s probably copyrightable, but just because he revealed, it’s not?
Hell yeah.
At some point this is going to start bumping up against things like procedurally generated assets and adding filters or rendering textures in images. There’s some point between adding programmed randomness to art and bringing an image back and forth between AI generation and adjustments on the one hand and traditional techniques on the other that our line has wider implications.
Personally, I suspect it probably has more to do with how the person submitting the copyright frames the issue than with any real line in the technology. Nobody’s getting bent out of shape about shitty rendered Photoshop clouds because they aren’t making the same claims.
It would be interesting to see someone try to register a copyright for an image created using fairly common filters and rendering techniques and frame it as AI generation obfuscated by specific technical technology that brings the idea to mind without actually misrepresenting it as stable diffusion or whatever.
Copyright is incompatible with AI, and they know it. If an image gets generated, who can be seen as the owner?
-
The person who wrote the prompt?
-
The AI who used its knowledge to generate the image?
-
The researcher who developed the AI?
-
The multiple artists on which the work is based?
Those Copyright Offices are on the precipice of being deemed useless. This is one of their final struggles to stay relevant.
Or the novelty of AI-created art will wear off and we’ll go on with our lives.
-