Matthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.”

Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted::Matthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.”

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
    7•1 year ago

    It goes from the same idea that if you saw someone else’s art and made your own art, the copyright of the new art would be yours, and not the one who inspired you.

    We’ve seen edge cases in the music industry (Ray Parker Jr.‘s Ghostbusters vs. Huey Lewis and the News’ Hip To Be Square I Want a New Drug ) though in most cases in music, artists routinely borrow each other’s elements.

    The problem is that AI generative art still requires effort from the programmer (the one who prompted the AI) and went through process of telling it what to do, curating the output, running it back through the AI again to add new elements. If that process is sufficiently long, then it warrants copyright. If that process is insufficiently long, then it challenges the copyrightable merits of artists who make quick art.

    In my opinion (removed from the whole AI controversy) is that intellectual property law has been long abused, not by artists and creators but by publishers and studio owners who have used their landlord-esque positions to take control of most art, and then extend their IP rights while denying the public a robust public domain.

    And they are the ones that are going to ultimately be hurt by the death of IP laws. Artists will still do art, but for the sake of expression, and then it’s a matter of the rest of society making sure they’re not exhausted by their day-job (which, according to the strikers in Hollywood, they totally are).

    • @SmoothLiquidationEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      In my opinion (removed from the whole AI controversy) is that intellectual property law has been long abused, not by artists and creators but by publishers and studio owners who have used their landlord-esque positions to take control of most art, and then extend their IP rights while denying the public a robust public domain.

      The idea that a strong public domain is beneficial to all culture has been lost. Now we have huge court cases because two different songs use a similar progression of notes. The point of copyright should be to motivate people to create more art, not prevent people from doing it.

      Take the whole Under Pressure/Vanilla Ice fiasco. Nobody listening to “Ice Ice Baby” is going to then say to themselves “great, now I never have to listen to Queen again”. They are both very different songs in different genres, that use the same guitar riff.

      I understand why selling pirate DVD’s should be illegal, for recently made movies that are still under print, but transforming a work should not be infringement.

    • @CoggyMcFeeEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      It was I Want a New Drug, not It’s Hip to Be Square

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      I will shamelessly recycle my comment up the thread:

      The modern western conception of art (around which the current legal and economic systems were constructed) is really opposite to the idea that the current AI tools (OR the programmer that used them) should deserve any copyright.

      Why ? The concept of art (the modern western one) is that an Art piece is composed of :

      • 1 An Idea
      • 2 A form that is given to that idea by a human artist.

      The idea can be given by others, to be constructed by an artist. That is usually a Patron (from where Patreon invented its name) , in spanish Mecenas, that pays the work and directs what idea and even general form it will take (the social practice is called Mecenazgo in spanish, since english has no equivalent word, i will use that ). Example: The Sistine Chapel, which was conceptualized (and paid) by the Catholic Church, including themes and general style, and was given to italian artists like Michelangelo to give the final form, which they drew themselves, with the approval of the church authorities at the end.

      The current Ai tools work exacly like the Mecenazgo:

      • the human person (programmer or not) gives an input (textual, or other), the AI goes brrrrrr, and gives back an image. the person can take ir, or re-iterate the cycle with further inputs until satisfaction.
      • This is really analogous with how art production ocurred in the Mecenazgo: The human input is the step 1 (an idea), the AI does the step 2 (give form to the idea). The further inputs by humans is analogous to the rough drafts the artist had to give the Mecenas first, the Mecenas described in more details and specifications what themes and forms he wanted, and that repeated until the Mecenas was satisfied with the final form the artist gave back.

      The current copyright legal and economic system gives the intellectual property to the ARTIST, that made the step 2, and NOT to the Mecenas of the step 1. Because the Mecenas only had ideas, and the one who made what is considered artistic work, that deserves the legal privilege of IP, is the artist. If all someone did was tell the AI what to draw (i.e. gave an idea, general theme and general form), then the person is only acting as the Mecenas. The MACHINE is doing the artistic work, and since the machine is not a human that deserves the legal privilege, ir should be considered non copyrighted or public domain, just like the picture some monkey took of itself some years ago.

      This was not always nor everywhere the social interpretation of WHO is the agent that actually made the art. Before the Renaissance, the western societies considered the Mecenas of step 1 the TRUE ARTIST, because he-she had the idea, and the person that gave form to the idea was considered a low level construction worker like stonemasons, that did not even have its name recorded. If you are wiilling to go back there, we would have to fundamentally change our interpretation of art , artists and rewrite the Sistine Chapel as created by the Catholic Church , and michelangelo is irrelevant.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
        1•1 year ago

        The whole matter of copyright and art behind agency is not about the art itself, but money. And most artists lose their copyright (contracting to the institution that hired them) even before they completed their work.

        So the controversy is not about art, it’s about money, and those who have the money, the capitalists, are eager to remove humans if they can substitute them with machines.

        Now as the recent movie Tár points out, art tends to also be a victim of great man theory, the notion that a single person is responsible for art which often has multiple figures involved in its creation (It’s why Tár opens with its full credits rather than posting them all in the end. Generative AI engines only make more clear that art is a compilation of many elements assembled to create a final result.

        Now for anarcho-pinko-commies like me, we see us coming to a critical mass where we’re going to have to confront the failure of our work-for-compensation system that we use to keep people alive (and justify keeping them only barely alive enough to do more work for billionaire vanity projects), because as the Twilight Zone episode The Brain Center at Whipples ( Wikipedia article ) shows us, we all will be replaced as soon as upper management can figure out how. (And that includes upper management.)

        We’ve watched as Hollywood movies, games and music are more and more informed by profit. They’ve all been moving away from high-risk experimental concept art and towards content as product, hence we have perpetual sequels and cinematic universes and merchandise tie-ins. Verity Bitchie’s consumerist critique of Harry Potter ( on YouTube ) breaks down how paramount recognized the market interoperability of Harry Potter even before Philospher’s Stone was published for instance noting that 👓🗲 << everyone knows what this represents.

        Art is not a celebration of humanity, but expression and beauty, and if AI could produce a fuckton of free art (it can’t, but if it could) then that would benefit a public that has long been denied a global public domain… except if only rich people have access to it, which they’re trying to do right now.

        And they’re already looking to secure prioritized access to a lot of things like clean air and water, so what we should be focused on is not that AI is going to replace artists, but that artists (and everyone else) are on the verge of starving.

        And yes, I’m used to people not giving much of a fuck until they’re feeling in jeopardy themselves (and then half of them want to kill the Jews over it), so I’m not expecting this to go anywhere yet.