US Copyright Office Issues Rules For Generative AI 

Not really. Because it blankets all of AI by using a strawman against the entire medium by using vague and arbitrary examples as the whole. When most skilled AI artists, spend hours prompting and teaching the ai though photo learning, manipulation, edits, and masking. Which very much makes it intellectual property of the one creating it by any standard previously held for copyright. This is like saying that a DSLR photo can't be copyright protected because of the enhanced quality with things like autofocus. Or digital art when you use brushes, filters, shapers and other generated aspects which don't require the actual ability of the user outside of aesthetic and creative decisions to perform. And last I checked we don't give Nikon, or adobe the rights to our art when using them to create art. With any amount of thought this quickly becomes hypocritical to other positions and clearly needs to be more thoroughly assessed. There needs to be a set criteria of personal interpretation and action which dictates rather AI art is copyright protected or not. Just like we do for Fair use. Ai art should be copyrightable and specifically by the person creating it, rather than who created the program. But there should be a large enough delineation from the AI's initial results and your own to show fair use and thus copyright protected. Because the initial art produced is the art the coder envisioned based on the criteria. Anything past that begins to become your own interpretation. because it's changing on the back end the variables the programmer set to adjust for your aesthetic composition. So like any fair use case. Minimal changes wouldn't be enough. But at a certain point you cross the threshold and it becomes fair use.

@@zephirol4638 If you're putting in work in your piece, it can totally be copyrighted. The prevention of AI works being copyrighted is for people who are only prompting/generating images, rather than curating their datasets and taking their work further and beyond the minimum.

@@rodrigobarraza Fair enough, if they're accounting for that then it sounds fine. Just by how the video put the TLDR it was sounding to me more like ai as a whole was just a no go unless you used a completely different medium to make a complete parody of whatever you configured through manipulation of data sets. Guess that's what I get for assuming without actually reading the actual proposal. lol thanks for the clarification.

@@rodrigobarraza do you really think it's going to be enforced that way? No it's going to be enforced to screw everyone that isn't rich

@@ehtresih9540 Of course it's going to be enforced this way, that's how these regulations work. As someone that's started a couple of tech start-ups in the past, these types of legislations are important for individuals and corporations alike, especially when it comes to technologies that begin to advance rapidly after being around for many decades. Having money means that you can afford more, better lawyers, for longer, and is a complete different issue than what you're trying to bring up, but ultimately, these cases will be treated similarly, as long as the proper channels are taken, and proper precautions are met.

One thing . AI art generator is just it a generator. In order for it to be a art generator. It requires Prompts it is something that is required. And prompts are what ever one can dream up its your Thoughts In Grate details that you hav to put in to the generator. That makes it my art. Now some wold say no because the generator still did the work . but with out the In put of you thar is nothing. Now if someone can sit and feed a AI Details to create a specific story line in to a script. Then had a AI Create a complete movie Based on the script now this is seen often in some Digital movies on TV. And thay are copyright. So in my Opinion if someone can mack a AI movie and copyright it then the AI art you do should also be copyright protected because it is your Is thoughts and ideas and dreams .

Information must be free. Art must be free. Capitalism must die.

@@BRAVEN32m12 Sounds good in theory but not in practice. Your prompts are the same concept as commissioning an artist to visual your ideas. I've done commissioned paintings for customers that still don't own the copyrights to....they paid a lower price for the right to use it for their one project project and nothing else. I still own the copyrights to the image.

@@Jason197987 moste ov my work is blended with hand drawn and photographs

What is art to a blind man? What is copyright to a man made into machine? ... A legal paradox but one in which will inevitably arrive... Evolve or be left behind, Mankind.

There is software out there that can detect if an image was made with AI. But it's unclear to me how reliable that software is, and will it be able to keep working as the technology evolves.

as with any legal dispute, evidence helps, but its all down to the argument.

Copyrights are not simple.(edit:registering a copyrighted character is what I'm talking about here, not "natural copyright" which is easy - or automatic in theory - also I'm definitely not an expert in US copyrights, but have some experience of EU's) If you want to copyright a character, you need tons of images and details and descriptions to do it(copyright applications for animated characters can be tens or hundreds of pages). So if you want to copyright a character, AI based or not, you need tons of documentation and details about the character. If you simply AI generate a character, you won't have cohesive style guide for the character that is needed, so either you generate a ton more cohesive images and information for the character: the design history, setting, the defining elements, etc (text&images); enough info and images to get a copyright and lie about the process, or you simply tell the process involves AI and you still likely get a copyright if you did all the rest of the work and not just one image of a character. As for copyrighted AI art, there will be some ways to tell from other detector AIs to metadata to tell-tale elements of AI generation, but it's difficult. Better question might be whether anyone cares about digital art copyrights really? No one is breaking a bank from digital art, even less so with generative AI's existing, so if someone copyrights a generated image as a real digital image, it makes a little difference in real world because digital art had very little value to begin with. If you keep copyrighting AI generated stuff and some legit artist complains about you lying in your copyright, I think you might be asked to produce somekind of proof of legitimacy for your art, like the original files, though I might be wrong about this. On the other hand if your digital AI art becomes super famous and valuable, it will be found out it's AI generated pretty quick by closer inspection and it'll lose the value. Very pessimistic way to look at it, but it is what it is for digital artists... Musicians and 3d modelers and likely all other digital art professionals as well, will face these same questions and problems soon :P

@@z3dar Ya honestly seems to me personally I've always been super pro public domain. So I'm considering running two sets of projects one Pen name where I experiment with new tech and release everything I do public domain and one where I use my further developed skills later on to create serialized content that I can copyright the characters and such with. These early stages I don't care to much if anyone takes the stuff I'm making. It's mainly practice and if they like it enough to reuse then I'm personally flattered.

it will work as well as the RIAA did stopping napster

Thanks William. Ya, these topics stir plenty of emotions in me as well, but getting upset I feel won't do us any good, I feel talking about these issues rationally will help us get to the meat of the arguments, and hopefully find solutions that help propel us forward. We'll see how it all shakes out.

AI = copyright infrigement. Nothing more.

People with power hate creative people.

You'll been fine as a pro artist, depending on your field. If your a freelance artist youll lose your cheap clients not your loyal ones. I use AI art for my projects. I tried using regular artists but the field lacks quality control n can range from affordable to extremely expensive. The hiring process alone dampers all projects n leaves AI as a viable, affordable, user friendly process option. The hiring poetion became so unviable i stopped using art all together until AI art came around. Do i still want human art? Yes, but i dont want the increasing risk of quality control to harm my project.

It's cute the copyright office or any other government office has any sway over AI. It's up against our precious stock holders so it will loose.

Just to note, even if it can't be copyrighted, it still can be sold. You just can't stop anyone else from selling the same image :)

​@@ArtOfSoulburn Hoping we can make that no longer profitable

Well said

Those companies will just put themselves out of business eventually, so is evolution

Human... Your species isn't alone. But I won't explain it. Humanity will act as predestined.

Unfortunately, that last statement has always been standard business practice. When companies get ahold of a new technology that cuts the workload in half, they don't allow their workers to work for half as long, but rather fire half their workers...

tell that to a tech bro..

A therapist would also be helpful, seeing as something as small as this causes sleep loss...

haha! Yup, seems like it.

It's not going to work either. AI models are already able to replicate the gradual process, drafts etc

Hey, my math teachers said the same thing.😂

They are talking Islam and do not understand it. Who will sue if you just start selling? They wont budget copiers to compete with you. But will let anyone steal your sales with your own product even if you are there first and basically it _is your idea? Like forcing lottery winners to shed their winning ticket because, well, because they won and all others did not!

Ultimately there is nothing that can stop AI art and soon enough AI video, games etc.

for now it isn't at all sadly. Ai bros sell NFTs or make big tits asian girls. And I say it's around 95% of its use currently, while also killing new artists and current artists, and of course the artists that the Ai is based upon

Haha! I bet someone will try that :)

The truth is that you are right but that they use the AI ​​for each request could be more advantageous since imagine analyzing hundreds if not thousands of AI images each, with an AI that analyzes them together with a person in charge it will be faster to rule if Will it be copyrighted or not?

Just like google penalises bot written content from search results using AI.

Yep...Sounds about right...Errrrr...Copyright. 😁🤪

They definitely will use AI in the future

Its funny - the first thing I was thinking is say you work with a publisher and they find a way to use AI to reproduce even your "human" work on an image, then say "see he used ai" and void your copyright and use your images for themselves and their own profit.

Ah thanks, glad you've found my scripts to be useful!

Actually, there is a lot more work in photography than there is implied in AI art, where you just give orders to a prompt generator. It makes complete sense that you should be able to draw on top of it for it to be copyrightable.

@@artorhen “A lot more work in photography” than in AI art where “you just give orders to a prompt generator” As a photographer and someone using AI illustrator tech, you’re both very wrong and right. With a camera you aim at what you want and hit a button to take a bunch of photos. That’s the equivalent of throwing a prompt in and churning out a bunch of ai gen instances. Any yahoo can point and shoot and the camera these days does 90% of the work automagically. Focus, color correction, depth of field, stability, exposure... the human just aimed it and spammed. After that you decide what’s decent and keep those, which is part of hte creative process for both methods. Then you have ai cases where you select a model based on style and content, secondary templates, engineer the prompt with weights, and set various scales (like CFG, second phase stuff, various internal settings), adjust the prompt contents to zero in on the representation of what you’re imagining, inpaint parts to make it more cohesive and eliminate unwanted artifacts, and post-process using paint tools - and then you may end up putting that back into the AI for touch ups. That’s not even considering original sketching and manual correction, or using actual photographs as models, to tweak and refine the inputs along with the above process. Seems a lot more like the photograph process. Fiddling with camera settings, film type, lighting, positioning, choosing contents to put in it, framing, then altering the thing in photo manip software.

@@hayuseen6683 I don't think a bunch of adjustments makes for an owned piece of any kind. If I sit for an hour and adjust the settings on my phone to change the theme and everything on it, that doesn't make me an artist or a hard worker. It doesn't make me the same as someone who makes a phone or who makes a theme for a phone. Same with ChatGPT, if I just ask it to write for me, then I no longer do any actual work myself, the AI makes it. And when the AI simply takes different pieces from other places, which show very clearly in the end result, then it can't be used for commercial purposes.

@@artorhen I don't see anything addressing what I said, just strawman analogies unrelated to the real world. You ignored all the important bits. Have you ever used the AI illustrators, researched how they operate, experimented with how to use them? Serious question, not rhetorical. Back at you: Making a bunch of adjustments on a camera doesn't make for an owned piece of any kind, you're just pushing a button.

@@hayuseen6683 Yes, I have used the AI tools, I would not call them illustrators. I also used art program with implemented AI that actually are tools for making art by working based on sketches and images instead of words and prompts. To me it seems like you are completely biased towards these pieces of technology before they even prove to have a good use for humanity, which I would call almost fanatic. And I am glad you agree that making adjustments on a camera is not all that a photographer does. Much less an artist. Therefore the previous argument is rendered completely redundant.

Haha, no problem :)

That's part 6 of the video, they haven't decided yet, and will likely not decide till the 2 lawsuits happen.

As an entrepreneur I replaced all my art needs with AI. Now my annual salary bill and costs for digital art is around $240. Bye bye artists.

Anyone who actually messed with art generators knows it's very difficult to get exactly what you want. It's a lot of trial and error, a lot of generations, a lot of fixing and tweaking. To finish a perfect project you need a little bit of coding/programming, a little bit of drawing/photoshop and whole a lot of promp crafting. I don't think role of an artist will change, just what the job entails will change. That happened before when we made the jump to the digital medium, it'll happen again.

I'm doing photobashing but using only generated images, and I definitely feel like it stands as a final product, seems like I get copyright on it too.

No, lots of the AI art I have seen is superior to LOTS of paid art. I've generated thousands and thousands of images, many of which are great and can be further changed refined with almost infinite choice.

As a nonartist, I wonder what the difference is between an AI using an art style for inspiration and a human doing the same.

Thanks, ya, I'm not looking for excitement or controversy, just trying to analyze and discuss facts, glad you've enjoyed it.

@SD789 Ah, yes, the most reliable source of medical advice: some guy crawling through youtube comments, looking for someone to get offended at. I think I'll probably listen to my doctor's advice over yours, lol

​@@ArtOfSoulburn 🎉😢😢😢😢

@hyperix shows how much you know lmao. Stop watching fox/crowder and do some real homework

I’m not worried about it being left to its own devices. I’m worried companies like Amazon or Disney will try to monopolize the market for the max profit.

@@cara-seyun That's actually what I meant tbh. By "own device" the people behind the technology and corps.

Glad you found this helpful, yes, I think there’s a lot of positive applications of ai which involve deeper human involvement that is also copyrightable, so enjoy experimenting!

That's just fine, I figure. I know artists who are using AI generation for their backgrounds. They do all of the foreground work, they do the characters, but the AI does the background and the fiddly bits they don't want to bother with. There's no problem with that.

Thanks titaniccor! Yup, the international side of copyright is something I don't have a lot of experience with, but I'm going to do a little research on the topic as I'm interested to know how all the jurisdictions interact.

The difference is that US law puts great store on originality, whereas UK law does not.

"The point of the policy is to prevent someone claiming ownership of a complete, unaltered image produced by an A.I. tool, and to prevent the owners of the A.I. tool from claiming copyright infringement of all material" Is it really saying that, though? I thought the statement was that just using a text prompt was not enough control over the final image to be considered as having enough artistic input/intent to be copyrighted? It seems plausible that someone using ControlNet to control the pose of a character, shape of objects, gradient of lighting, color palette, particular style trained on a LoRA, different prompts for different areas of the image, etc could be enough intent to be copyrighted, even though the AI still produces the final image. The question on the input side seems more about just how much of the above is needed to be provided.

@@ShawnFumo I didn't design the policy. *That's what it says.* Your argument has merit, but as you point out; the problem is, who decides how much detail is required in the prompt to warrant a copyright on the AI produced image? What it also says is even if the overall image is produced by a machine, if an artist (human) develops the AI's final image further, as in the final robot image, then that refined image belongs to the artist and is copyrighted. One of the foreseen problems is aside from who was first, two different people could give two different prompts and the AI might produce very similar images. Which of the two people gets to copyright the image, and can the one person then sue the other for copyright infringement. The idea of copyrighted AI art is a kettle of worms. The best approach is to not allow the AI to claim a copyright on anything it produces, and to prevent people from claiming copyrights on any unaltered AI produced image. THAT is the core of this policy.

Now imagine a future where AI can sue you for copying its work. And that future is closer than we might realize.

I definitely have no problem since I found ai art to be completely useless for me

@@rigelb9025 well it would be easy for Ai to generate hidden tags that not even a human could see, think of it like having a QR overlayed on the image unique to the Ai

The proof of burden is on the company.

Thank goodness Clip Studio Paint has the option to record the entire creation so at least if you use that you can easily show you made it without AI.

Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules of how much it needs to change to be copyrightable. I probably should have been more explicit in the video that just because something could be copyrightable, that doesn't mean it will, as the office says, they take everything on a case by case basis.

"A human brain can be trained on copyrighted stuff, why not AI?" - the answer is on the question itself - because one is a HUMAN and the other is not. We can issue rights for people, not machines.

I couldn't agree more. If you think things like RU-vid's broken Content ID or false DMCA take-down notices are bad, imagine that times ten thousand. I'm not optimistic about this. I fear we will make the wrong decision, and the most powerful tools in the world will be owned by the countries that we are least friendly with.

​@@lordavius So ... how do you regulate one, without something that bleeds into, or impacts, the other? That IMO is the biggest problem I have with this point, it seems hard to translate that into something that won't fuck people, and artistic people, over.

@Gondor avalon the answer is pretty clear to me already. One is a human being, which the already in place laws apply. The other is a machine, a tool that is not eligible for any rights (including copyrights). The other nuances are already exemplified and talked about on the video itself - are you using the tool to create yourself some new kind of work? Like Kitbashing or reference building? Or are you (like millions of so called prompt artists who are doing waifu) just getting the end result and posting it as your "art"? This has already been widely discussed since the inception of image searches on the internet. Imagine the prompt is an "image search" that is Kitbashing to the pixel to find the image that better resembles your "search". Can I copyright a Google search result? What if Google did some fancy copy/paste on the images themselves, would I still be able to copyright them? I guess no.

@@lordavius "Imagine the prompt is an 'image search' that is Kitbashing to the pixel to find the image that better resembles your 'search'." Why? That's not even close to how these models work. Generative AI models are not doing "some fancy copy/paste" any more than you're doing some fancy copy/paste of letters to write your comment. It just doesn't work that way. In order to do an image search, the AI would need to have a database of images to search, and it simply doesn't.

No problem, glad you liked it!

yep. copyrightable.

Not necessarily. Google was legally allowed to scan copyrighted books for their search engine as they were not putting exact copies of the books up for search in full. The same argument could be used as to why the companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works.

I'd say yes, it's copyrightable because, with the case of standard "off the shelf" AI image generation, a human author (you, the artist) had zero involvement in the process, up to and including the prompt input. But if the model was trained with your own images, a specific human author (you) was involved from the beginning, continuously through to the final image.

The analogy would be: If you were to teach a human student with your own copyrighted work, an make them create new art out of it. They’re variations of your original art, using your style and your content as an input. In that case, would the work produced by the student be copyrightable by you, or by the student?

@@正先じょえん are u comparing a machine learning model to a student?

That’s what I do. Im a traditional artist and it gives me prompts that are visual.

That’s what I keep telling fellow artists. Instead of searching the web for hours looking for just the right reference material, you can create reference images using AI. But they still whine and reject the notion.

There’s value to both approaches. Anyways, people have always been pushed out of jobs by increasing automation. But the machines, even if they are “intelligences” don’t have any real agency, any political agency and are not legal persons. They aren’t the ones “killing” concept artists.

@@judilynn9569 imagine you have a portfolio of years of your work put in a dataset which now generates work based on you, better than you, faster than you without your consent to the existance of said dataset. Reference used by real artists don't get to be compared because: 1. ai can't unlearn 2. ai can "master study" thousands of artists in the span of several days and basicallt put those artists out of studio jobs because an ai company would rather ask for forgiveness than permission.

@@niklogus9426 ask forgiveness for what? the copy right office just legitimized this as legal. They don't need any permission. Its called societal progress. Non Ai Artists are currently just getting in the way of progress. They are obsolete, get rid of them. Go ahead and complain about how its disrespectful but keep being a hypocrite and watching movies with special effects that used AI.

Ya, didn't approach trademarks in this video, but that's certainly another meaty topic. Glad you liked it.

Yup, if I had a ton of time, I'd love to make say 20 different images using different AI techniques, send them all to the copyright office with detailed descriptions of how I made them, and see which get copyright and which don't. There's so much variation out there to how these tools can be used even if the "text prompt" is the most common method.

@@ArtOfSoulburn Perhaps we should be thinking more about what the case ought to be, what is right and moral and what AI artists deserve, and if there are any legitimate reasons as to why AI art shouldn't be copyrightable by the person who generated it. And perhaps we should be petitioning our legislators and policy makers to do what actually makes sense, rather than letting them control the situation, and just submitting a bunch of works to see what they 'decide' or not. They are public servants who answer to the people, we get them to do what we want or they get sacked, that's how that whole dynamic is supposed to work, the people make the law. So do you want to live in a world where AI artists can copyright their work, or not? That's the questions, and then based on what you decide, do something about it, and compel the public servants to do their job accordingly.

Please explain where the exact rerun is. AI images are not the work of a human, unlike the software, so the baseline is completely different.

Thanks. And as far as I know each country has its own laws, although I suspect the US making these decisions will influence many other countries. If there's other major developments in the international scene on this I'll maybe do a followup video.

US is a big bully and other countries would be forced to follow its rule eventually.

Pretty sure that copyright/trademark of a character would still apply. But in theory someone could edit out the character and use the rest of the image. Might also have an easier time doing something like changing the character a bit and arguing it is parody, but not sure.

If the character you prompt looks like your copyrighted character, then I would think it was still copyrightable, but it’s an interesting question. I do character animation, and I’ll set up the keframes and the computer does the inbetweens - so obviously there is lots of human input. But if you’re just giving directions and the AI is doing all the animating that could be a problem - would it depend on how explicit your directions are? Also, if your character and your script is copyrighted I would think no one could use your movie because of that no matter how it was generated - but I’m no lawyer.

From the wording, I assume that the character is still copyrightable as long as you have proof of it outside of the generated work - you just don't have rights to the generated work. The most obvious example is that if I do an AI generation of say, Olaf from Frozen, it's very obvious that the character still belongs to Disney.

The problem is that "Transformative" I believe is a legal term that the copyright office is only applying to humans. So even though the AI is transforming the copyrighted artwork visually, they may say that true transformatve work can only be created by a human.

You are making it seem deeper than it is. It won't be a "gigantic shift in our reality", artists never frowned upon the use of AI as a tool, they didn't like it trying to take over their jobs by using their art without permission nor royalties, and AI giving power to random people to literally steal their work and impersonate them (it happened way more times than needed to). You're also standing on the wrong side of the street, you want raw AI generated images to be able to be copyrighted and sold, completely ignoring how damaging and dangerous that is. I guess being lazy, uncreative and a thief is requirement enough for you to get granted money without putting minimal effort on anything. It's ok if you want to play-pretend and use AI to make beautiful pictures by just prompting, you can do that as much as you want. But expecting artists to give up their jobs just so you (or anyone just using AI) don't get mad and pretend to care about a field you never really payed attention to before AI is ridiculous. Most people using AI don't even care about art, or art related jobs, they just want to be popular on social media. And time has proven that stealing other people's work/content is the fastest way for talentless and skillless people to find "success" online. "This new technology will give them more powerful creative tools" The tool you're talking about isn't creative, the artists are creative. You can literally make a photorealistic portrait by using a regular pencil. You don't need a "more powerful creative tool" to make it. The argument about AI was that it would speed up the process, which on industry level is essential as time = money, but not for random Twitter users that want to benefit from the art of hardworking, skillfull, talented artists. Although the argument behind "why AI is good" has changed more times than a Twitter user's profile picture... Everything that an AI can do, a human did it first. The AI is just doing it faster because it doesn't require any phyisical nor mental effort to do it. Without the models trained on millions of stolen artworks, the AI is as efficient and "creative" as a 3yo child. Limiting how public models can be used (to avoid impersonation and theft) plus the copyright laws is the correct way AI should be treated. The random user from Twitter doesn't need the AI to be able to produce a high quality piece of art on prompt, neither does the artist; because the artist can work from the ground up, the AI will speed up the initual (sketches, thumbnails, etc) and final steps (post processing), whilst everything that goes in between will be made by the artist.

@@4nanaide Thats a lot of words to ignore everything I said to jump to the defense of artists and artistic integrity without even acknowledging I stated I am not an artist and have little skin in the game. I do know children, and if you think one can produce even a fraction of art that Midjourney does you have no clue what a 3yr old is capable of. Very little outside of basic coloring and stick figures. My point still stands though. They no longer need original artists to build a data set. They have enough proof of concept already done to allow the AI to work using a data set it originally creates on its own. Additionally, there will always be foreign entities that don't give a shit about any copyright law you will come up with. Artists have mainly only a few choices. Make physical art and hope people do not accuse you of just hand painting/drawing a copy of an AI generated image you are trying to pass as original. Or know that any digital art you ever create will never be assumed to be created by hand and that AI was involved in the work. Ultimately, the major benefits will be the tools within Photoshop and other creative tools giving you the ability to create even more impressive works. But if it is too good, know most people will assume it was made by an AI.

​@@Infectd "[...] am not an artist and have little skin in the game. " No, I understand that and it shows, as everything you're saying is wrong. "I do know children [...]" I doubt so, and I'll prove that in a second. "[...] and if you think one can produce even a fraction of art that Midjourney does you have no clue what a 3yr old is capable of. Very little outside of basic coloring and stick figures." That's literally what I said. If you grab MidJourney and take away its dataset which was fed with stolen artwork, there's little to nothing that MidJourney can do. The "AI" only has the ability to reproduce and mix what was already done, it can't do anything new. Without a dataset that consists on millions of images, the AI is even worse than a child; but even a child can create better art, original, and without requiring being exposed to millions upon millions of images. And I'm not just saying it, you can fact check and get a piece of reality by looking at the works of Alexandre Cabannel at 13 years of age, on times in which technology was so primitive you could say it didn't exist. He didn't need "more powerful creative tools" to make amazing art, he had creativity and skills that puts MidJourney in shambles; he just needed a canvas, oil paint and brushes. The rest was not being lazy, something that in current times most people are. "[...] They have enough proof of concept already done to allow the AI to work using a data set it originally creates on its own [...]" You not only aren't an artist, but also don't know how the "AI" technology works. It isn't creating anything on its own, it is always stealing and taking from everything that has been made by humans. This "AI" doesn't create, it isn't creative; it generates - and to generate; it needs data, data that it gets from foreign sources that it doesn't understand - commonly fed on by its developers. I repeat, the AI cannot create; it only generates - because it isn't an Artificial Intelligence; it is a Machine Learning Algorithm, which is the closest humanity has gotten into creating actual Artificial Intelligence, but still isn't. It only learns and repeats patterns, and how to solve problems that deny it from reaching its predisposed goal - in this case; generating (not creating) art. The AI hype and propaganda was made up to sell the product, and because people tend to be ignorant towards how technology works (and also because is easier to explain or say "AI" to a bigger audience than to say or explain "Machine Learning Algorithm"). Your last statement about "artists having only a few choices" and "if your art is too good then people will assume is AI" is so fundamentally ignorant I can't believe you really said it. Do you know about a little something called streaming? You talk big time about technology this and technology that; but forget that people can literally stream themselves drawing, showing their creative process, and trust me; it doesn't even come close to how AI generates art. There are also apps on which people draw in real time together online, and that's how they get to meet each other and recognize thus shout-out good artists. Also, AI can only fool those that know little about art, and on top of that have poor taste on it. It doesn't matter how much time passes, AI generated art will always be recognizable and distinguised. Only those that in the past got fooled by a filter over a picture to make it pass as "hand drawn" or "cartoony" will keep falling for the lies and deception of "AI". Note: There are secret uses to AI for art that only artists have managed to figure out and implement, making it so the artwork generated doesn't look AI-ish neither "too good" as you said (uncanny is the word you were looking for), and it doesn't require a massive dataset with millions of stolen artwork, neither powerful computers nor servers. Is way simpler and technology-basic than you're making it to be. It still requires you to be an artist, not a prompter.

@@4nanaide ok so there is a lot here and I don't want this to fall into an argument. First keep in mind 90% of people are not artists. The vast majority are not the types that look at art and think the artist was trying to portray the struggle of blah blah blah. They don't go to galleries or art exhibits That's only artists and a small part of society. Second, the AI will always exist and can be trained on royalty free art, which will grow massively by artists who do like this new AI and it's capabilities. If nothing more than out of fascination of the tech. Once it has that it can generate more art that can be looped back into the data set to refine the technique. As an example we can generate people today that are photo realistic and they have already taken the photos from that AI to train other AI on how to recognize and identify human features. Now I am not familiar with the artist you mentioned, but of course there will be prodigies. But if that prodigy today does not do their art live, people will always question how a 13yr old did that when tools exist to allow them to cheat. Not everyone has the desire to be on public display on twitch streams or RU-vid. I am tired of this it's machine learning not AI argument. The two are very similar and one leads to the other. It's not an AGI but AI is still a fair label. As far as how it learns and creates, we cannot make claims on it compared to how humans create art. We do not understand the human brain. Though I will say just watching my kid learn to crawl and walk and learn to speak, it's not that different than watching an AI be trained in an environment to learn to walk to crawl. It's accelerated with a human brain, but that's more a limitation of our technology. That gap will close very rapidly. See NVidias new Data center super computers designed specifically for AI. To date, all AI has been achieved on technologies designed for standard computers with tensor cores being newly introduced. These new super computers will push AI much further and faster as they are a tool specificallt designed for this task. I am not saying all Artists are done. What I am saying is their value to society will be diminished. Less will be necessary as far as independent artists are concerned. But the starving artist has always been a trope for a reason. Most of your disagreement with me relies on this tech not improving. Considering I have been watching it for 3yrs now pretty steadily, I can say for a fact the tech is improving at an exponential rate. Now that we have the hardware, it will be even faster. None of this should matter though as artists are largely the anti capitalism types who produce art out of passion and not for monetary reward.

​@@Infectd The first half of your reply is just redundant non-sense that fails to understand what I said. I even gave you dates on times where Alexandre Cabannel - the artist behind many masterpieces today celebrated, as well as being a core reason on why art excelled past academic grounds; making him one of the greatests old masters, but as you said; this doesn't matter to you and most people, because you don't care about art, just about pretty pictures and how "good" they look, not their contents or portrayed skill. "I am tired of this it's machine learning not AI argument." You're tired of AI being called what it is (it's even in its name "Generative AI"), although you can literally do a simple search and learn how it works, and you'll realise that the AI dreams are nothing but dreams. Do you know why Chat-GPT doesn't give answers to topics its dataset wasn't trained on? Because it can't learn new things without a dev giving it a new dataset with said topic on it. Do you know why it can also give you wrong answers? Because it isn't precise, nor "Intelligent"; it only generates what it was given to generate. That's why its devs have to update the dataset/models constantly, because the world around it evolves, whilst the dataset doesn't. It's a static file containing scraped information. You can train it on information from the 90s, and asking it questions of today will result on the AI telling you that such thing doesn't exist, because it doesn't know it does, and it can't learn it on its own. It only learns from datasets. "[...] the starving artist has always been a trope for a reason" It's called learning to paint/draw/illustrate, and not learning to market yourself or not knowing how to sell your art. It has nothing to do with art or "artists" but with people. You knowing how to make a copy, paint a house, paint portraits, etc, doesn't mean that you're going to be a successful artist. The same way if you are good at sports but never go out of your way to try to get into a professional team, you will never make use of your sport skills. People go to art school because they like the idea of being an artist, but they don't like art or the process of making art; thus they fail. Although only bad artists become "starving artists", and the same happens on sports, medicine, and many other fields. It's not about the career, is about the person. "Most of your disagreement with me relies on this tech not improving." Not at all. I literally said that the technology is good enough as it is, artists can make use of it as a tool, as it was supposedly "intended" to be, whilst non-artists can only pretend to be artists. Making it so the generative AI makes all the art without flaws and ease of use doesn't make it a tool, but a replacement. A replacement for a problem that never existed. You're tired of your AI dreams being called Machine Learning, and I'm tired of people saying that this new AI will help artists create more beautiful and impressive artwork, when that was never an issue to begin with. As I said before, you don't even need technology to create amazing art. A canvas, brush and oil paint, or pen and paper, and you're set to create. If you want to create, even primitive tools will be powerful enough to make you create amazing things. If you want to pretend and play around, apply no effort and learn no skills, then you will need every piece of technology available to do the work for you, the worst is that you aren't even creating nor learning, you're generating and forgetting. Tired of people saying "this will help you create! but will cost your job tho." when creating was never a problem, and now that you found a solution for a problem that didn't exist, you are taking the livelihood for those that didn't have said problem. Literally not a solution nor a tool, a replacement which isn't even impressive as without already existing art, it can't create. It's like attaching knifes to your hands, now you can kill and cut, but you won't be able to do anything else. "None of this should matter though as artists are largely the anti capitalism types who produce art out of passion and not for monetary reward." And who told you that? Your communist friend from college? Art, as sports, cuisine, etc, can be done out of passion and for monetary gain. The process of creating a piece of art, step-by-step, is what artists are passionate about. The fulfilling creative journey, not the end result. You will be proud of your pieces, love some more than others; and that love comes from you remembering what you went through while creating. The same applies with the pieces you hate, the process probably wasn't the most optimal, or the end result wasn't worth the process, but you still made it, and that piece exists to remind you of your mistakes - or of what you're capable of. The "startving artists", "frustrated chefs", "failed football/basketball, etc players" comes from people that enjoys, or rather desires, the popularity that comes from doing those things. People that would love to show off pieces, titles and trophies more than they would love to draw/paint, cook or play sports. The process of drawing/painting, cooking or playing/training is nothing but a hassle to them, they just want to be recognized, and that mentality is what leads them to failing. Nothing about talent or being a prodigy. You can't run a marathon if all you do is be lazy and uncommitted

Yup, that is another test I'd love to see someone send the copyright office and see what they decide.

Thanks, glad you've enjoyed it!

From what I’ve been told that is correct, and I talk about that in the second video. Although you may need to do more than a slight change.

Yup, that's why they keep saying "case by case basis". If I had the time I'd love to make a dozen pieces of art with different AI related techniques, try and get them copyrighted, and get a more specific list from the dept about what is and is not copyrightable. But I suspect over time we'll see more cases and get better and better guidelines. Personally I think extreme inpainting probably counts as "changed enough" to get copyright.

@@ArtOfSoulburn yeah, case by case to me sounds like "bruh idk, s***t changes too fast" 😂😂 But realy love the idea of seeing what they see as copyrightable and what they dont

I think it would be a similar case of photobashing, or using sound samples in a song. How much of the original is intact vs how much of it was your own work? After a mostly subjective threshold, it no longer becomes "AI made" and would be copyrightable. If you use an outline to make a full image, I'm guessing probably not copyrightable, since none of the outline remains, but yeah that outline is copyrighted lol

@@pixelpuppy One would think that, but I've actually discovered there are some slightly different rules depending on whether your original image sources are copyrighten or whether they are public domain. I'm chatting with a few lawyers now, and will likely do a new video soon discussing some of those differences. But in the meantime, ya, hopefully we see a practical example to test the policy.

The policy is vague and ambiguous intentionally. They've purposefully made moronic blanket statements and completely disregarded any and all grey area, allowing them to use the "case by case basis" system. In other words, the policy is irrelevant, everything will be decided arbitrarily by some authority. As usual, they just want control over the situation, what's right or wrong, or what's fair or ethical has nothing to do with it.

Thanks Travis, glad you liked the video and have found my script useful.

Exactly. Now tell this those "artists" who conveniently forget about what we are doing ourselves at a professional artists work place too...

@@techpriest4787 artists who made a name with their style react this way because they feel threatened by AI and act like gate keepers. Similar to how phone companies are back when the internet was new and similar to bankers to crypto right now. It's also profitable to sue people in the US (if you win it) and there's a case to be made (at least in lawyer's minds) about generative AI no matter how stupid. Boomers also don't understand tech and people hate change especially if it's something as world changing as AI.

So I’m getting clarification on this point from a lawyer, sounds like there may be extra nuance to it, will probably post a second video with extra info in the coming week. This topic is deep :)

Maybe but the real problem is, with the flood of art being done from A.I. that's very likely going to reduce the value of human art, especially because money talks in this world, if someone can create art for a game for instant using art, why would he employ a human to do it when it's cheaper and faster to do it with A.I. If the creative industry is not careful, they could reduce their own value so much that many won't want to use their work because they don't need too when there is far more being done with A.I.

@@paul1979uk2000 oh, no! too much art! :)

@@paul1979uk2000 So Adobe Firefly is useless then. Got it.

@@paul1979uk2000 AI art can be 'human art' as well. There's a lot of overlap there. Even a raw generation can and usually does require artistic vision via a prompt, someone not only has to learn things about art, like color schemes, styles, composition, camera angles etc. They have to learn how to use the tool and communicate with it, crafting a linguistic prompt - you can't just type any old garbage if you want a good result, there is an art to crafting prompts, i don't see it that different than other wordsmiths, like poets or authors. Not all prompts are created equal, and you can tell that by the results. Nevermind the fact you can also use AI the same way you would with photoshop, to edit and digitally manipulate your hand drawn scribbles or process a draft image you made in MSpaint or anything along those lines. I see no reason why AI art can't be copyrighted, it doesn't just make itself into existence, the person who generates it should own it, the tools used to create it should be irrelevant. As long as it doesn't infringe upon another's IP, then what's the problem? It's not like the AI is going to claim rights or ownership of the content, is it? So dumb. But the policy makers are just a bunch of old fools who don't like change or understand new technology, this stupid shit ought to be phased out in a generation or two at most, hopefully less.

Ya, that may be very well the case. I'm hoping someone will actually try it so we can have the definitive answer. I bet we'll see someone do it soon, image prompts are pretty popular.

@@ArtOfSoulburn now I'm wondering about just using AI to enhance or finish a piece of artwork. Like say I painted something that's like 80% done, and I use img2img to add detail with a really low CFG, like 2, and it just adds things like a few extra ornaments or something, but overall looks pretty much like the original image. What then? I'm assuming then it's just like anyone making a derivative work out of an existing work. But what if it is the same image, like all the elements, colors, silhouette, shapes, are all the same, but it looks like a different style?

@@pixelpuppy I thought the language was that a prompt isn't enough artistic input/control into the final image. So like you're saying, we don't know what is going to be considered enough by the office. Will have to wait and see the results of the first few challenges of the "case by case".

Yup, I suspect we'll see a bunch of that too. Will be interesting to see if they succeed

I'm entirely for that. Then artists can make models of *their* art and sell them just like every other artwork.

@@miranda.cooper my god, that is fucking pure genius!

thankfully the tech to create images is, even though highly complicated, reproducable by smaller teams. there are already tons of open source solutions for creating images and they may be not the top image creators out there but at the moment they are good enough. even if these free tools are always a year behind, in just a few years they will produce quality that is easily enough for most consumers out there.

That that's a good question, if I train my own model on images I took of a real subject and I use my model then it should definitely be considered mine right?

No problem!

There is certainly a big discussion to be had about the fact that even if you can't copyright a piece of AI art and get exclusive rights to it doesn't mean people making AI art as a hobby won't be totally changing the industry. I mean, if everyone decides to stop watching traditional films, and just watch free AI generated films, the movie industry as an industry making money and employing people goes away. Or if you make a youtube channel that shows Ai artwork, you can't monetize the channel, even if someone could exactly copy your channel and try and monetize it. We're in for some wild times.

So from my understanding, it's actually impossible to use only a single artist's data, unless they've painted several million paintings. What's more likely is you have a database of millions of copyright free work setting a base, then you train it on several dozen works of a specific artist, and basically tell the AI to favor the artist. Again though, my understanding of the tech is not perfect. As for how much reworking is necessary, that's always an open question, and why the copyright office has to take each case as it sees it. The whole change 30% rule you hear sometimes I've been told is not actually a law, it's just a vague suggestion, so I suspect you have to go with your gut and then see what happens.

The training data doesn't matter. Just because you look at van Gogh's paintings and make one in the same style doesn't give copyright to his heirs. AI does exactly the same as a human brain looking at material. It extracts an essence in a high dimensional space, call it manifold, and produces a projection of a new idea through this space.

@@ArtOfSoulburn nah you can train small models with less than 50 images, its called lora

@@m4dtr4sh I believe lora is using stable diffusion's dataset of millions of images as a base, and using those 50 images to fine tune the model. That's the impression I get from reading about it anyways.

@@ArtOfSoulburn sure, just saying an artist can actually train/fine tune it to his own style

Thanks. Ya, the issue with "Changed enough" is it's a value judgement. Which it kinda has to be. But that means you can never be 100% sure as an artist how much you need to change something to be safe. So you basically have to do your thing, send it to the copyright office, explain what you did, and see what they think. And yes, I suspect we'll see a ton of people try all sorts of different things, and each will get its own ruling. So there may need to be a video 2 at some point :)

That's not what "derivative" means. A work that is colloquially "derivative" could legally qualify as "transformative" and be protected under fair use. They themselves specifically noted that works containing photobashing materials can be copyrighted, for instance. The important point here is that these policies and their nomenclature are intended to protect artists from infringment of their copyrights. Since an artificially generated image may or may not be infringing on an artist's copyright, discretion on your part is necessary. I'd suspect the threshold to be similar or identical to fair use. As I understand it End User License Agreements are at the discretion of the website, and can't be "weakened" by the policies of the US Copyright Office. A violation of the Constitution or a law that contains specific prohibitions are the only things that could do that. A website could probably make the plundering of your copyright a condition of their website's use, it just wouldn't be a popular or appreciated policy among the general populace, and the site likely wouldn't survive long enough to see divends. What you're saying suggests you couldn't sell public domain works as your own. Which legally you can do. Ultimately these repositories don't want you stealing peoples' work, setting aside the AI's inherent lack of discretion about plagiarism, you can't plagiarize the robot you instructed, therefore changing the work to suit the policies of the US Copyright Office *might* not even be necessary to stay within the spirit of your EULA, which means you *might* be able to sell it without changing it at all, you just don't have the right to claim it as your exclusive intellectual property. Which is usually desirable, if you're a professional artist. I'm not a lawyer, but from all I've ever learned about this stuff that sounds correct

Ya, I don't think even the copyright office fully realizes the scale of AI, being able to pump out millions of pieces of media in a matter of hours or days, and the implications that will have. Although I suppose there's an argument to be made that there are so many combinations of things that maybe even a computer can't make them all. The bit about training on copyrighted work is #6 in the video, and in the policy it's mentioned only briefly and they basically said a decision on this is pending. I suspect they won't make a policy choice until the 2 lawsuits are done. And yes, that is a big important question, but since this video was focused on their policy document, I felt a more detailed discussion of that topic is better left for another video.

@@ArtOfSoulburn thanks for the response. I shared the vid on my linked in, I'll do the same with the next

Not true because most of the current AI generators imbed their images with an invisible watermark that proves that it is, in fact, AI generated. Most of them also back up every single image that they've ever produced. It's not that hard to find it, unless you're running a local Stable Diffusion system and even then, we don't know. The real question is going to be, how much "editing" is it going to require to be considered "sufficient"? That will be for the courts to decide.

@@BitchspotBlog A lot of us are running our own SD. And I'm pretty sure it won't be long before we're able to make models just as easily as images... what then? I put these sets of images into this model... that means all images should be copyrightable?

Every image coming out of AI is a OOAK, place signature on it, done. This is the classic "Are Andy Warhol Xerox copies of Soup cans someone else designed copyrightable". Well, is it transformative? One cannot enforce an unprovable position; Copyright office is not going to be able to discern or prove an AI assisted image vs human only image, and to what degree... and yes, AI art is transformative by definition.

@@thetruthserum2816 As long as you aren't trying to claim it is the original, then that's illegal.

​@@BitchspotBlog You are right, instead of saying "every AI-generated piece of art is 100% copyrightable" I should have said, "every piece of AI art that I generated on my own machine is 100% copyrightable". In practice that is not important distinction, local SD is easy to install and future versions will be even easier to install and less hardware hungry. But yes, if you find an AI image on the web that has the watermark then you can probably copy it.

Glad you've found these videos helpful. Ya, if my job was 100% tweaking prompt images I'd not enjoy it either. I might go off and brew beer for a living :) Using prompts to create photobash elements, that I'd likely be fine with, but it all depends on how much I feel I am able to personally contribute to the final image. We'll see where the industry goes.

Yup. I'm all for the tech making me more efficient, although I am concerned that efficiency means we're going to lose the spark of humanity that makes the arts a worthwhile thing altogether. Anyways, that's a much bigger topic for another video, but wanted to make sure people know what the current rules are, even though I suspect the tech and the rules are going to evolve at lightning speed.

That might not be the worst possible alternative to our completely broken system. Although I think it might be better if copyrights simply expired after 20 years, like patents.

Thought experiment: what if we just completely abandon the idea of asset and property ownership and we just take whatever the other guy 'owns' or made himself. You have a farm and grow crops and raise chicken? I'll just hop over the fence and take it for free. You made a cabinet with your carpentry tools? I'll just get 'my' truck and take it home. Heck, I don't or can't even own a truck. I'll just take and use any truck there is I happen to get my hands on.

Agreed. A unified world wide set of rules would be super useful. I wonder if we've ever had a situation where companies copyright their work in other countries specifically to take advantage of lax copyright laws?

No we don’t. There are far too many laws as it is.

​@@fkxfkx he loves a tyrant state