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?
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.