Copyright?

More about Copyright?

I've been thinking about copyright and AI art. A lot of you have a little copyright logo by your name as if that will carry some weight, but the legality around it doesn't seem that simple to me. While some countries appear to recognize copyright on AI art to some extent, I know the US copyright office for one doesn't.

On one hand, AI art relies both on the works and styles of visual artists, and the developers of AI models, and while prompting can be a creative process it doesn't necessarily have to be. You can input ABC with a well tuned model and it can produce something that looks cool (see SDXL models on PlaygroundAI for example), based entirely on the model, which itself is based on other people's work. So do you deserve copyright on that?

On the one hand, copyright for a photo automatically goes to the person who presses the button on the camera, so why would AI art be any different, even if all you're doing generating with a super basic prompt and relying on the model to make it's magic?

And on the third, speaking from first hand experience, there can be a lot more to it than just "nice picture" -> generate -> profit. So that definitely deserves some recognition.

But again, even in that case it's still derived from the work of other artists and the programming of the AI, which we had nothing to do with. And in many cases the prompts are fully or partially based on others anyway.

Then again, photographers didn't design and build their cameras, and in many cases had no role in setting up the scenes they capture either, and learned techniques and principles from photographers who came before them.

There's also the matter of using base image inputs. If you don't own that, but do super creative prompts that takes time and computer resources and it totally changes the base, what then? Conversely, what if you draw the base yourself by hand, but then use a simple AI prompt relying on other artists style (and the model which is trained on their work even without explicitly naming them) -- what then?

It will be interesting to see how the law around this evolves. I believe Stable Diffusion (which DGG uses) is facing a lawsuit over the issue. The outcome could have huge direct implications for DGG, Stable Diffusion, AI art generally, and copyright law precedent.

What do you think?