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?
There are tools that are being used to attempt to detect if a piece of work is AI-generated. If those tools say something was, it’s then on you to prove that you hand-created it. Even some artists are already having issues because things “look” AI-generated. The onus is on the creator to prove they have the copyright when dealing with copyright infringement.
So realistically, if you make some AI-generated content, I steal it, what do you do? How do you stop me from using your content?
Whose content is it? What human person holds the copyright?
In that case, if it’s AI-generated content using a training set from the public domain, the content is generated initially as public domain. Adding changes to that, the changes are not public domain. So you’d have to prove that you changed it and that your work on the AI content was transformative, not derivative. But that’s my point, in that case, there is no one that holds the copyright.
Whoever claims the copyright first, holds it.
The only difference is that up to now there was a very low chance of “collisions” between two humans creating the exact same piece of art at the same time, while now a piece of AI art can be fully replicated given a model, a prompt, and a seed… but in practice, there is still a very low chance of two people randomly happening to use exactly the same model, prompt, and seed… so we’re back to square one: whoever claims it first, holds it.
Just remember to claim your
AI generatedhuman-made art before someone else does.Claiming it doesn’t make it so.
Right now, it kind of does. Like if you took someone else’s work and claimed it as your own: unless they can prove it’s theirs, first one to claim it gets to own the copyright.
Unfair? You bet. There’s things like SafeCreative that has been running for many years (I used to be part of a precursor to that) or even register it as an NFT to have a proof of precedence.
Even if there were tools that can dictate what is AI-generated and what not, they’d have to rely on a pattern, or on an artifact from AI-generated imagery (which, as far as I know, does not exist), and that is what can be used as proof, not the result of the tool itself being used.
The requirement of proof is on the one making the lawsuit. So if you generate AI content and I steal it, you must prove you own the copyright. With AI-generated content, you do not own the copyright. I can take it without issue.
But then, it begs the question, how would you prove it’s an AI work? For all anyone knows, it’s my art, I made it, it’s undistinguishable from what I could make. What the court will see is, I submitted that art in the Internet, you take that, I sue you for copyright, you argue it’s an AI work, and the Court will request you to prove it really is an AI work, and perhaps launching an investigation on me to see whether I really made the AI artwork.