An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
Ah, I remember this image. It received some kind of award or something and created a stir when it was revealed to be AI gen. I can see why that would be incentive to want copyright.
I play with AI image generation all the time. No way do I see that as my work, there’s no skill other than positive and negative prompts, maybe feeding it a a starter image set or something.
Where it might be more concerning is if you use AI gen to create an 2D example of something, then an artist creates a 3D physical representation of the thing. Who owns it? AI famously is not good at creating “whole” things, but one can certainly interpret that image to make a whole of it.
That douche punched a sentence into a computer and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become.
Dude just pointed a camera, pressed click and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become. We could take that train of thought all the way to “if you’re not grinding up your own pigments and painting on cave walls you’re not really an artist”.
AI is a tool. I don’t have an issue with someone using AI and calling themselves an artist, as long as they’ve generated the AI model based on their own previous art. You teach a machine to mimic your brush strokes and color palette and then the machine spits out images as you taught it. I don’t see an issue there because you might as well have painted them yourself, it just saves time to have AI do most (if not all) of the work.
Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?
Ahh yes, the camera bullshit. Here we go…
Yes a photographer is an artist. They need to know light diffusion, locational effects, distance and magnification, aperture, shutter speed, and have a subject prepped and able to take direction. They also have to have an insane understanding of post process editing.
They don’t simply type a sentence into a computer and get beautiful photographs.
A child can produce the exact same image by simply typing the exact same sentence into a computer.
A child cannot be given a camera and be tasked to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer- and succeed.
So stop with this bullshit comparison. It’s apples and oranges.
Did you read the rest of the comment or did you stop after the first sentence?
I didn’t need to. The moment photography was brought up as a comparison, that’s all I needed to know.
AI is not art. Period.
Super interesting. The guy claims is wasn’t just ai, that he performed alterations as well. If that’s true but he still gets shot down it might pave the way for AI being much more shunned in the world out of IP concerns on the output side rather than the training data.
You can’t copyright that music, game, book, screenplay or video because AI made some contribution.
Nah, that won’t work. As soon as corporations get involved they’ll carve out exemptions for themselves.
AI Prompt User is complaining people stealing their artwork? Well that’s new.
“”“Artist”“”
My thoughts exactly.
You have to be the creator of the work in order to copyright it. He didn’t create the work. If the wind organized the leaves into a beautiful pattern, he couldn’t copyright the leaves either.
Couldn’t you take a picture of the leaves and copyright that?
Weirdly enough the monkey selfie probably establishes some precedence here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
You could copyright a photograph of that leaf pattern though, couldn’t you?
but its just a photocopy of the leaves, not the actual leaves. And to photograph something, you capture it according to your will. What will be the light situation, from which angle, at what focal length,… so many options.
This is getting weird.
If I would generate an image with an AI and then take a photo of it, I could copyright the photo, even if the underlying art is not copyrightable, just like the leaves?
So, in an hypothetical way, I could hold a copyright on the photo of the image, but not on the image itself.
So if someone would find the model, seed, inference engine and prompt they could theoretically redo the image and use it, but until then they would be unable to use my photo for it?
So I would have a copyright to it through obscurity, trying to make it unfeasible to replicate?
This does sound bananas, which - to be fair - is pretty in line with my general impression of copyright laws.
The painting “This is not a pipe” sort of touches on this very topic. A picture is not the thing pictured much like a photo of an AI image is not that image.
Fun mind teasers!
Copyright covers your creative expression.
For example, you draw a superhero named “LemmyMan” and post it online. All of your creative choices are protected. If someone made another LemmyMan with a different caption, they would be violating your copyright because you created everything about LemmyMan, not just the caption in your drawing.
Now suppose you take a photo of Mount Everest. Mount Everest is not your creation, but the choices of lighting, foreground, and perspective are. Someone could not copy your exact photo, but they could take a different photo of Mount Everest making different creative choices.
The same is true of taking a photo of work in the public domain, like the Mona Lisa. If you make no creative addition to the Mona Lisa in your photo, then you have no copyright at all. If you put some creativity into your photo, like some interesting lighting, then those creative elements are protected. But anyone else could still take a photo of the Mona Lisa with different lighting, the subject itself is not under copyright.
Now suppose you tell an AI, “Draw me a superhero”, and it outputs ChatMan. If you make no further creative additions, then you have no copyright at all. But suppose you add a caption to it. Then the caption is your creative expression, so that is protected. But the rest of ChatMan is not, it’s in the public domain just like the Mona Lisa. Anyone else can make their own version of ChatMan that’s exactly the same minus your caption, because the underlying subject is not protected.
It’s human expression that is protected by copyright. Creative height is the bar.
If you’ve done nothing but press a button there’s often no copyright. Photography involves things like selection of motive, framing, etc. If you just photograph a motive which itself doesn’t have copyright, then what you added through your choices is what you may have copyright of. Using another’s scan of a public domain book might be considered fair use, for example (not much extra expression added by just scanning)
Independent creation is indeed a thing in copyright law. Multiple people photographing the same sunset won’t infringe each other’s copyright, at least not if you don’t intentionally try to copy another’s expression, like actively replicating their framing and edits and more.
Doesn’t modern art include works that are simply paint streaks left on canvas from someone quickly swinging a brush with paint on it at a distance?
Why is the phrase used by an AI prompt not considered more effort than that? The former requires no thought, only movement. The latter requires an understanding of language, critical thinking and the ability to envision an end result that isn’t just a paint splatter.
Because in a Jackson Pollock painting, the artist was in complete control of his paintbrush as it swung through the air. Not to mention the choice of brush, the amount of paint, the color, etc. If there is a blue streak in the upper left, it’s because Pollock wanted a blue streak in the upper left.
An AI prompt is more like handing your camera to a passerby in Paris and saying, “Please take a photo of me with the Eiffel Tower in the background”. If your belt is visible in the photo, it’s because the passerby wanted it there. That’s why the passerby, not you, has a copyright over the result.
Your first paragraph is just nonsense. Please go try to swing a paintbrush and get every drop exactly where you want. It’s not possible. It’s literally why pollock painted that way.
No they weren’t. Their brush was being influenced by every piece they had seen before. None of those arguments are any different than the resin was in control of the prompt when they requested the image. This is nothing more than human/biological exceptionalism.
If I made an image in photoshop, the computer made it, I just directed it.
How is AI different?
And that’s why I make art completely without instruction or man made tools. I actually independently developed cellphones and English purely to dunk on people on the internet.
We could explain it to you, but you’re not interested in understanding.
Fun idea: let him copyright his prompt, if he’s so particular about his “creativity.”
because it was an expression of his creativity.
yeaaaah no chief, that ain’t it.
“put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
This is an Onion article, right? No one can be this deliberately and hilariously ironically. Fuck AI, and fuck these techbros.
This is stupid and I hope he gets his butt handed to him, but:
A federal judge agreed with the Office and contrasted AI images to photography, which also uses a processor to capture images, but it is the human that decides on the elements of the picture, unlike AI imagery where the computer decides on the picture elements.
Journey outside the world of API models (like Midjourney) and you can use imagegen tools where " the human that decides on the elements of the picture"
It can be anything from area prompting (kinda drawing bounding boxes where you want things to go) to controlnet/ipadapter models using some other image as reference, to the “creator” making a sketch and the AI “coloring it in” or fleshing it out, to an artist making a worthy standalone painting and letting the AI “touch it up” or change the style (for instance, to turn a digital painting or a pencil sketch to something resembling a physical painting, watercolor, whatever).
The later is already done in photoshop (just not as well) and is generally not placed into the AI bin.
In other words, this argument isn’t going to hold up, as the line is very blurry. Legislators and courts are going to have to come up with something more solid.
The rule is already human expression in fixed form, of creative height. So you have to demonstrate that you the human made notable contributions to the final output.
I’m sure that an argument can be made that the final output can’t be generated without the human-created prompt. Generative AI doesn’t output images on its own without a seed/prompt, much like a canvas doesn’t paint itself and a camera doesn’t open the shutter on its own.
How old is that judge that they think digital photography is the only possibility to capture an image? 15?
boo fucking hoo. If you want to copyright your painting, learn to fucking paint.
It also sucks and is just another shitty AI generated image full of weird nonsense.
Just because he duped a bunch of idiot judges doesn’t mean his art or his arguments have any merit.
Can’t be that shirty if it won an art competition.
I keep saying dude could have just painted it over by now. Is he just stupid. Just paint the picture you already have it.
I’m glad you posted this here, because there’s obviously a lot of controversy about this.
I like it, it’s more interesting to me than most of the boring “original” paintings people try to sell at art shows and online, and almost all of the stuff I’ve seen on people’s walls in their homes. Not another triptych with 4 circles and a triangle, or a lone tree on a grassy hill, or a bowl of fruit and a wine bottle.
Most AI art haters only hate it after they’ve learned it’s made by AI. In reality it’s next to impossible to tell a well made AI art from human made digital art for example. Ofcourse everyone claims they can immediately tell the difference but even they know they’re kidding themselves. It’s gatekeeping, pure and simple.
There’s plenty of really good AI art and generating it is not as simple as they often make it to be.
Exactly. People already enjoy AI-assisted art in many other forms and they don’t even realize it. When they find out, will they stop enjoying it? They don’t seem to have stopped enjoying autotuned or computer-generated music, or CGI movies, or practically every artistic photograph made in the past 30 years. It’s an arbitrary line in the sand.
Hate the artist, not the art. Hence, hate the AI, not the AI-generated art.
AI is not an artist any more than a paint brush is. Neither can generate anything on their own. They’re tools.
Gatekeeping? Nah, it’s not as it’s quite easy for AI Bros to pick up a pencil. Nobody, except disabilities, stops them.
And yeah AI slop has become so well that rabid people are accusing actual artists that their art was made by AI. But why is that? Certainly not because their previous art was trained on…
Fuck AI. It is used to replace actual humans and human creativity.
Meh this looks very AI generated to me. Most of what’s going on in the picture makes no sense.
That could be said of much art from cave paintings to modern art, but the important part is that art is subjective. The main issue I have with the people complaining about AI generated art is, they only seem upset about it after they find out it’s AI generated. If you really have the ability to see the difference, maybe you should be judging these contests. The judges had absolutely no idea until it was pointed out to them. If that bothers people, they shouldn’t place any value in that competition.
People enjoy paintings with modern pigments and canvases and synthetic brushes as art, autotuned music (and other post-recording fixes) as art, photographs that use filters and image/color/artifact-correcting software as art, and I see no difference in prompt-tuned AI-generated art. It’s a technology that makes it easier for the artist to arrive at their desired result, and it has the ability to inspire emotions and thoughts in the viewers, in the same way.
I’m guessing there is art you enjoy that I might not, but I am happy you have that available to you. It’s funny to me that people are so strongly against something so innocuous. In that it inspires such strong emotions, it’s arguably more artistic than the hand-painted submissions the judges found lacking.
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