More than 100 days into the writers strike, fears have kept mounting over the possibility of studios deploying generative artificial intelligence to completely pen scripts. But intellectual property law has long said that copyrights are only granted to works created by humans, and that doesn’t look like it’s changing anytime soon.
A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection. The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI. Copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found.
The opinion stressed, “Human authorship is a bedrock requirement.”
The push for protection of works created by AI has been spearheaded by Thaler, chief executive of neural network firm Imagination Engines. In 2018, he listed an AI system, the Creativity Machine, as the sole creator of an artwork called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which was described as “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine.” The Copyright Office denied the application on the grounds that “the nexus between the human mind and creative expression” is a crucial element of protection.
Thaler, who listed himself as the owner of the copyright under the work-for-hire doctrine, sued in a lawsuit contesting the denial and the office’s human authorship requirement. He argued that AI should be acknowledged “as an author where it otherwise meets authorship criteria,” with any ownership vesting in the machine’s owner. His complaint argued that the office’s refusal was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of agency actions. The question presented in the suit was whether a work generated solely by a computer falls under the protection of copyright law.
“In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No,” Howell wrote.
U.S. copyright law, she underscored, “protects only works of human creation” and is “designed to adapt with the times.” There’s been a consistent understanding that human creativity is “at the core of copyrightability, even as that human creativity is channeled through new tools or into new media,” the ruling stated.
While cameras generated a mechanical reproduction of a scene, she explained that it does so only after a human develops a “mental conception” of the photo, which is a product of decisions like where the subject stands, arrangements and lighting, among other choices.
“Human involvement in, and ultimate creative control over, the work at issue was key to the conclusion that the new type of work fell within the bounds of copyright,” Howell wrote.
Various courts have reached the same conclusion. In one of the leading cases on copyright authorship, Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company v. Sarony, the Supreme Court held that there was “no doubt” that protection can be extended to photographs as long as “they are representative of original intellectual conceptions of the author.” The justices exclusively referred to such authors as human, describing them as a class of “persons” and a copyright as the “right of a man to the production of his own genius or intellect.”
In another case, the a federal appeals court said that a photo captured by a monkey can’t be granted a copyright since animals don’t qualify for protection, though the suit was decided on other grounds. Howell cited the ruling in her decision. “Plaintiff can point to no case in which a court has recognized copyright in a work originating with a non-human,” the order, which granted summary judgment in favor of the copyright office, stated.
The judge also explored the purpose of copyright law, which she said is to encourage “human individuals to engage in” creation. Copyrights and patents, she said, were conceived as “forms of property that the government was established to protect, and it was understood that recognizing exclusive rights in that property would further the public good by incentivizing individuals to create and invent.” The ruling continued, “The act of human creation—and how to best encourage human individuals to engage in that creation, and thereby promote science and the useful arts—was thus central to American copyright from its very inception.” Copyright law wasn’t designed to reach non-human actors, Howell said.
The order was delivered as courts weigh the legality of AI companies training their systems on copyrighted works. The suits, filed by artists and artists in California federal court, allege copyright infringement and could result in the firms having to destroy their large language models.
In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.
Well, of course not, because since some diffusion generation are deterministic, that would mean that a specific set of parameters is now copyrighted, so nobody else gets to type in that particular set of numbers into the UI without paying the copyright holder, which of course makes no sense.
Same reason you can’t copyright, say, cooking recipe for a burger.
Food and flavors aren’t copyrightable or patentable because of an explicit exclusion of them. It has nothing to do with “determinism”.No. Recipes are not copyrightable because they’re largely functional things for instructing a process to create a food, which simply is not in the purview of copyright. Specific recipes could very well be patented, depending on the specifics. There are no “explicit exclusions” here.
And still the list of ingredients and food preparation process will not be copyrighted, just the way the specific recipe is written. Anyone could write a simple rephrased version of that recipe which creates the same dish and sell it. Or sell the dish in their restaurant.
I did some research, and you’re right. I guess I was mislead years ago when I “learned” this.
You are generalizing and using the word “some” at the same time.
Yeah, because generation from “a” samplers are not deterministic I think… was trying to find the best way to word that.
Hey, I get to be lazy in my internet commenting too, OK?
Ancestral samplers are deterministic btw, but I think because they build off of the previous step it’s more obvious when the determinism is broken by optimizations.
Interesting. My A1111 SD has been broken after I tried running XL so I haven’t touched it in a while. I’ll go test it sometimes after I reset it.
The only way to bring non-determinism into a computer is to collect physical noise, when you set a seed the computer generates a sequence of numbers (and thus noise) that is statistically indistinguishable from physical noise but actually deterministic. The ancestral samples just add more of that deterministic noise to things.
Of course the whole thing is rather moot because there’s arguments to be had that physics itself is deterministic. Use of physical noise in computers is pretty much limited to situations where you want to make it impossible to guess which seed was used and thus reconstruct the noise, or, differently put: In cryptography.
To make this tangible: Remember good ole SNES games and their “push start” screens? They’d compare when you pressed the button to when the system booted up, then use that value as a seed for all the randomness in the game. As a human it’s practically impossible to hit a particular seed but a computer playing an emulated SNES game can abuse such shenanigans, that’s relevant in the automated speed run community.