So recently there has been a lot of debate on AI-generated art and its copyright. I’ve read a lot of comments recently that made me think of this video and I want to highly encourage everyone to watch it, maybe even watch it again if you already viewed it. Watch it specifically with the question “If an AI did it, would it change anything?”
Right now, AI-generated works aren’t copyrightable. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/ This means you can not copyright the works produced by AI.
I work in games so this is more seemingly relevant to me than maybe it is to you. https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/03/valve-responds-to-claims-it-has-banned-ai-generated-games-from-steam/ Steam has outright said, earlier this month, that it will not publish games on its platform without understanding if the training data has been of images that aren’t public domain.
So right now, common AI is producing works that are potentially copyright-infringing works and are unable to be copyrighted themselves.
So with this information, should copyright exist, and if not, how do you encourage artists and scientists to produce works if they no longer can make a living off of it?
A lot of people misunderstand the purpose and implementation of copyright.
To make things even more confusing, most people only understand the US version of copyright. The US has worked really hard to get the rest if the world to align their copyright law with the US, but they’re all subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, different, even before you get to the different legal systems used to interpret and implement copyright law.
The first thing is: copyright is about the right of a human creator to control how a copy of their work is made available (publicly in some countries, any in others) for a limited time. In some places that right can be temporarily or permanently assigned or sold to someone else.
So when it comes to AI, one group argues that unless the rights holder licenses the work to be part of a training set, it’s not allowed to be part of a training set.
Another group says that it doesn’t matter; if the human creating the training set got the work legitimately, they can use it to train a model.
The models themselves do not contain any copyrighted material and so are outside the discussion.
Copyright is flexible; for music, we have different copyright rules for recording, reproducing, and performing music for personal or public consumption, with different copyright for music and lyrics and associated video.
This could also be applied to AI, with training models being a new “recipient” of copyrighted content. We could enshrine in law how this can be done legally. But so far, we haven’t, so it falls back to “is this fair use?” and “are different copyright permissions needed when a human is not consuming the work?”
The end bit, that AI created works aren’t copyrightable, is already settled. However, any work a human does to tweak or select AI generated content, if it is itself creative, is copyrightable.
So yes, copyright should exist. People need to re-learn what it actually is though, and additions may be required to the laws in order to enable AI generated art to promote valuable skills and knowledge.