No, according to Beryl Howell, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court
Can’t say I entirely agree. I’ve seen plenty of low effort AI, but I’ve also seen AI that clearly had work put into it, probably a custom LoRA or checkpoint, extensive inpainting and touchups, etc, where they were using AI as a tool to create something new.
What are your thoughts? Does art generated by AI deserve copyright protection?
In her decision, Judge Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work that was “absent any guiding human hand,” adding that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.”
It seems like AI art is un-copyright-able if it’s fully generated by AI.
She wrote that this would create “challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary” to copyright AI-created art, noting that AI models are often trained on pre-existing work.
There are so many ways to create AI art. Does small edits in photo editor count? How about inpainting? What about drawing a rough composition to be used as a guide? AI currently evolves very fast, it’s gonna take a while to enforce it.
What are your thoughts? Does art generated by AI deserve copyright protection?
I’m not sure honestly. Copyright in the current state is abused thoroughly by big corporations to stifle creativity and minimize competition. Just look at how Monster Energy tried to copyright “monster” word and sued everyone who used that word. Maybe if it’s not beaten to death, I’d be more inclined towards “yes”. After all, copyright was made to help creators profit their work.
Even if it were copyrightable, AI art is going to become so abundant that it will be too worthless to enforce copyright law over.
The world’s copyright system is broken, so nothing should be copyrightable.
I like the GPL, though. Could that work without copyright?
The GPL, as a copyleft license, uses copyright law for enforcement. You could potentially try to use contract law and offer access to the software contingent on a license agreement with terms similar to the GPL (adding an extra wall to access the software), but this would require a complete rewrite at the very least, and there are plenty of legally-undefined situations that would be introduced by doing so.