Technology

"Intellectual property" is a silly concept that only exists because under capitalism massive powerful corporations benefit if they can leverage the legal system to permeantly keep knowledge, innovation, and art behind a paywall, and people in society are dependent on monetary gain to survive.

We should, to the fullest extent of the law, make it such that proper credit is given to people who make things, but calling something "theft" when the person you're "stealing" from literally does not lose anything is asinine.

The argument relies a lot on an analogy to photographers, which misunderstands the nature of photography. A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.

A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won't have a copyright on the photo.

I disagree with this reductionist argument. The article essentially states that because ai generation is the "exploration of latent space," and photography is also fundamentally the "exploration of latent space," that they are equivalent.

It disregards the intention of copywriting. The point isn't to protect the sanctity or spiritual core of art. The purpose is to protect the financial viability of art as a career. It is an acknowledgment that capitalism, if unregulated, would destroy art and make it impossible to pursue.

Ai stands to replace artist in a way which digital and photography never really did. Its not a medium, it is inference. As such, if copywrite was ever good to begin with, it should oppose ai until compromises are made.

The strongest argument against AI art is that it is derivative of the copyrighted art it is based on. A photo of a copyrighted artwork would be similarly difficult to copyright. In this sense, AI art is more akin to music sampling in that it uses original material to make something new -- and to sample music you must ask permission.

This photography analogy is getting more tiresome the more it is repeated. It reduces the extensive work and techniques that photographers do to "using a tool", ignoring we also have tools like photocopiers whose mechanical results are not considered separate artworks, while also trying to pass the act of iterating prompts and selecting results as something much more involved than it actually is. Like many people pointed out already, what is being described is the role of a commissioner or employer. Is Bob Iger an artist because he picked what works are suitable for release? I don't think so.

Fuckingcapitalists

This is the first actually decent article I've read on AI art. It absolutely covers my concerns and fits with my own experiences using the technology. A lot of this is stuff I've been saying, and it's nice to see that I'm not alone here.

AI art is not at all straight-forward and absolutely requires creative input in order to get something usable. Prompt engineering, to me, is itself a type of art. You may at times find that there's something you want AI to generate that it's actually quite good at, like old women playing cards around a table, but usually you're going to be looking for something it struggles with. This is when you need to be creative and inventive with prompts, thinking about things from the perspective of what's probably out there in abundance.

Recently I needed to make some rings for my upcoming Planescape-themed Conan Exiles server. I started out by asking NightCafe for rings and it output a bunch of useless junk. Using my brain, I realized it's probably much more likely that it'll have a reference point for 'wedding band', and then I'll have my ring shape and can work from there. This worked quite nicely and it started producing rings, but it was often shoving them half out of the picture as it tends to do. There are some negative prompts that sometimes help with this, but I have my own technique that I think works better.

My method for framing objects in AI art generators is to surround them with something. If you add 'surrounded by' and some other object that's slightly smaller than the object you need a clean shot of, usually you'll get your image of the whole thing. Which object you pick to surround your target object with makes all the difference.

In this particular case, I first tried to put the ring on a table surrounded by small dogs, but it got caught up in the dogs and forgot to render the ring. Eventually I landed on 'surrounded by berries', and that was the jackpot. I'm guessing this one was a good choice because of Christmas themed ads, because suddenly my pictures were all full of mistletoe blasted with the kind of bokeh you only see in jewelry ads and wedding photos. And within each shot, a nicely centered ring in half-decent focus.

Now this is where I got really lucky. During my 'surrounded by berries' iterations, the generator decided to do something weird. It put a bunch of tiny little purple berries along the outer surface of a ring, standing on its side. It was perfect. I took this iteration and used it as a base, feeding it back into NightCafe and decreasing the noise ratio down to like 20-40% while turning up the prompt weight a little and changing my prompt. Now instead of berries and wedding bands, I go back to my initial search for magic rings encrusted with glowing gems. And in one step, my berries are a gorgeous array of gemstones. A few iterations later, I have a couple of decent rings to bring into GIMP and do some work with.

After pathing out the rings, separating the gems, adjusting the colors, and creating a few iterations with different colored bands and gem stones for my different finalized options, I had my results. A little blurry, okay, but totally fine for an inventory item thumbnail. Looks gorgeous.

Personally, I've dipped my toes into all sorts of art. I write, I take pictures, I sing, I play around with painting, I've made animations, games, mods, videos, weird unpalatable noise music; if it's a method of creative expression I may not be particularly good at it but I've almost certainly tried some version of it. And to me, this feels like creative expression. It feels like art.

Working with AI art feels like trying to collaborate on a project with an alien robot. You're trying to take these presumptions that we have and figure out how to get a workable result from something that fundamentally doesn't understand any of it. It's this really fascinating exercise in exploring this almost dream-like logic that's heavily rooted in media consumption, and weirdly enough your own understanding of media culture can be a way of teasing out what you want.

I don't just go and say 'please give me one rabbit' and get a rabbit. It doesn't feel like handing the project off to another artist with some notes and coming back to see what they made, it feels like an actively creative process. It doesn't feel more creative when I'm editing those images than when I'm digging through this strange robot-logic dreamscape looking for them.

And like, given that I could literally just take a picture one of my own rings and edit that, I don't see how it's less mine via creative output. I bought the ring, I didn't spend an hour digging it out of a morass of nonsense.

Frankly, I care little about law and less about money. I'll make the things I'm inspired to make with the methods I'm inspired to make them with and we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll make something people like, maybe I'll cut my own ear off and die penniless, but the opinions of the copyright office on what legal claims I can make around my work aren't really a primary factor in that or in my decision making when it comes to art.

I do hope they'll read articles like these and talk to folks with similar perspectives and find a better take, though.

Modern copyright sucks balls anyway

The comparison between photography and AI generated images falls flat on its face when you think about it.

A camera requires not only human interaction, but going some place, setting up and having to process the image after the fact.

Contrast that with an AI farm constantly generating and squeezing out copyrightable material while scraping the web for any human made work it can emulate.

In the end what it will mean is that certain companies will be fuzzing the hell out of the copyright system to gain as much intellectual property as possible while diminishing the creative possibility of human beings.

It is in effect just a way to make companies richer and remove creative jobs from the market. Anybody who doesn't see that is naive.

BUT I think that in cases of that image you should be able to apply for copyright. But just automatically getting it, as is the law in many countries? No. That's a really bad idea.

Copyright itself is weird.

That said, a simpler way to handle this would be that the image generator model is a tool. And it doesn't really matter if your input is through a paintbrush or a prompt in an image generator, you're responsible for that piece of content thus you have copyright over it.

You can further couple it with the argument @luciole@beehaw.org used, that AI art is derivative work, and claim that the authors of the works used to train the model shall have partial copyright over it too.

not supernatural beings

If God was real and literally came down and showed up at the copyright office, would they really deny him the rights to all creation?