this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Does my camera own my art, and not me?
No, because there's a fundemental difference between a tool that functions directly as a consequence of what you do, and an independent thing that acts based on your instruction.
When you take a photo, you have a direct hand in making it - when you direct an AI to make art, it is the one making the art, you just choose what it makes.
It's as silly as asking if your paintbrush owns your art as a response to being told that you can't claim copyright over art you don't own.
you control the seed, control the prompt — you can get the "AI" to produce the very same image if you want. so yes, you do have
That's like saying you can control the sun for a photo because you can predict where it will be at a given time.
The fact that an AI can be deterministic, in that the same "seeds" will generate the same images, doesn't at all invalidate my point that it is still the one interpreting the "seeds" and doing the actual image generation.
You're the one gatekeeping work. Don't make a dumb argument against your own dumb argument.
If the argument against AI is that it's too little work, then Photography neesds to step it's fucking game up.
If the argument against AI is that irrelevant companies get to profit off of others' work, then say that. Don't make stupid arguments.
Edit: Do I have direct control of the LLMs that Samsung uses to sharpen the photos on my phone? Do I not still own them? You're yelling at clouds.
I think it's very hard to make the argument that photography is "real art" AND that the output of a diffusion model is never.
I think you're getting things mixed up here...
I'm not arguing the output of an AI cannot ever be art, there are beautiful AI works out there, just as there are beautiful photos out there.
What I am arguing is you can't claim it to be your art.
Prompting isn't enough of a creative element to take ownership over the art an AI outputs, especially if you don't own the training data used for the AI. As such, you cannot (nor should you be able to) claim copyright over it.
If an artist takes requests and happens to pick your's, you don't automatically own the final piece just because they happened to use your prompt. The artist owns it, unless you pay them for that right.
In the case of AI art, the work would become public domain, since AI cannot copyright their works (much like non-human animals).
To what degree do you consider AI involvement to be the deal-breaker. My phone uses something arbitrarily akin to generative AI to sharpen photos. If I take a photo with my phone of something novel, should I be able to copywrite that photo?
If I use an AI generated image and spend 24 hours manually tweaking and modifying it, do I have a right to copywrite?
If I use an LLM to synthesize an idea that I then use to organically create art, is it lesser art?
It all seems so arbitrary at this point. It's like a typist in 2005 arguing that digital word processors shouldn't be used to create copywritable art, as it takes significantly less work.
In one sentence, when you're editing the AI's work rather than the AI editing your's, you can't claim the original work as your's.
This being an example if the former... The AI is sharpening your photo that you took.
Assuming it was transformative enough, I'm sure you could copyright your derivative work, but you couldn't then directly copyright what the AI generated.
No, because like an artist taking requests, the AI is providing the prompt. You'd be the one drawing the art piece, putting in the majority of the creative effort.
Excuse my French, but how in the flying fuck is that the same thing?
Whether you write a document on a typewriter or keyboard, you're still the one directly deciding what words go on that page, and in what order. Every creative decision it is possible to make, you make.
When an AI writes for you based on prompts, you decide almost none of that. You give it a synopsis and it writes the whole script, essay, whatever for you.
There's a huge difference between those things! How is it so hard to grasp that?
What I said was hyperbole, but it isn't invalid. You're claiming direct control over an independent process simply because it happens to be deterministic for any unique set of prompts.
But honestly, my arguement isn't that complicated...
When you take a photo, you're the one taking the photo. You physically go to the location, you frame the shot, you're the one who has to make sure the lighting is right, even that the camera is set properly.
When you draw a art, whether paint or digital, you're the one doing each and every brushstroke, deciding each and every detail as you draw.
There's a clear human creative element not just deciding what to photograph/draw, but in how every part of it is done.
There's a reason most people hire a photographer for special occasions like weddings, and not just Bob down the road with his IPhone - good photography takes skill.
Whereas for AI art, all you're doing is providing instruction to the AI, that then goes on to make all these decisions. It connects the dots between your prompts, it decides where everything goes, what brushstrokes to make. It draws the art, it generates the image.
That is a valid argument, and one I actually have made before. If you don't own your training data, then how can you possibly claim ownership of anything that comes out of the AI, since it's not just inspired by that data, it is working/pulling directly from that data. But, that is not the argument I'm making.
Now that is a stupid arguement. Having an AI sharpen an image you already took and own is not the same as having it generate the entire image for you by instruction and then claiming that as your own.
You could transform that AI work into something you own and claim copyright over that transformative work, but the original work the AI made isn't your's to claim.
By your definition, you could copyright a screenshot from Google streetview without doing anything transformative to it because you prompted Google where to take you, and decided where to screenshot.
Does Photoshop or any digital art not count? I don't have to have the skill to draw a perfect circle?
So we should artificially handicap the art at the expense of the lesser abled?
Same as clicking a button on a camera at something that just happens to be beautiful. Does it matter if someone next to me is using the same ISO or exposure?
I don't have to realize the complexity of lighting, shaders, or materials to render a scene in Unreal. I get to utilize the processes that pioneers before me discovered.
I understand the frustrations, but this seems stifling in the same way that cotton-gin-phobes, typewriter-phobes, and computer-phobes wpuld have stifled the ability of the average joe to accomplish something.
Did you read what I said or just start typing the moment you saw brushstroke?
"When you draw a art, whether paint or digital, you're the one doing each and every brushstroke, deciding each and every detail as you draw."
Of course digital art counts. While there are more tools for digital artists, ultimately they're still the ones drawing the art.
You could say this for literally anything gate-kept by requiring decent skill.
If you want to profit from a creative work you should have to make that work yourself. It's not difficult.
Is this meant to be your gotcha?
The fact that two people chose to photograph the same thing with the same settings doesn't actually matter in my argument because each person still made the creative decisions behind their photographs. Each one chose those settings, even if they chose the same ones.
You can have art classes full of people painting the same thing, but they're all still their own works.
It's the fact that those people did the work and made the creative decisions that matters, not the what they chose to point that creativity at.
Guess what, that's why developers have to acknowledge Epic and their engine in any games they male with it, and why they have to pay royalties to Epic (over a certain amount of sales) - because the engine was their art!
You may not need to understand the exact lighting, shaders, etc. required to render the game, but you still made the creative decision to as to where light sources would be.
Just because the engine has AI powered tools, doesn't mean the engine just makes the game for you, you have to build it. The reason you even own the game is because you made those creative decisions.
If the AI tools just made the game, you wouldn't own it because you didn't make the game, you just provided the inspiration. At best you can claim copyright over that inspiration.
The person who wrote the Witcher books doesn't own the Witcher games, CD Projekt Red does, because they made the game.
The person that wrote the Metro series doesn't own the Metro games, 4A Games does, because they made the game.
Both pay royalties to their respective inspirations, because those inspirations are the works the writers own, not the derivative works. Just in the same way the developers don't now own the works they derived their games from.
No offence, but the fact that you're making those comparisons shows you clearly do not.
You're can act like I'm out here arguing against the democratisation of art, but that's not what I'm arguing against.
If you want to use an art AI to make you some cool art, go ahead and do that.
You want to use AI art as the basis of a creation you want to make, sure.
But to claim an AI art piece as your own and to then claim copyright over it as though you made it is wrong. That is what I'm arguing against.
AI art is art, but in its raw form, it isn't anybody's to own because nobody made it, AI did.