Human artists derive their inspiration and styles from a large set of copyrighted works, but they are free to produce new art despite of that. Art would have developed much slower and be much poorer if, for example, Impressionism or Cubism had been entangled in long ownership confrontations in courts.
Then there's the fact that humanity has been able to develop and share art and literary works for thousands of years without the modern copyright system.
It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit. Maybe not remove it completely, but perhaps influence people to create wider definitions for "fair use", and undo the extensions that Disney lobbyists have created.
That is a very apropos reference. If you're familiar with Cubism, you know that there's Picasso, and then there's Braque. The one is an art celebrity beyond almost any other, and the other isn't.
But they developed Cubism in parallel. There were periods where their work was almost indistinguishable. "Houses at l'Estaque", the trope namer for Cubism thanks to the remarks of a critic, was in fact by Braque.
You can generate infinite recognizable Basquiat from an AI, but is it Basquiat? No, of course not, because Basquiat's style operates within the context of a specific individual human making a point about expectations and the interface between his race and his artistic boldness and audacity as experienced by his wealthy audience. Making an AI 'ape' (!) his art style is itself quite the artistic statement, but it's not the same thing in the slightest.
You can generate infinite Rothko as 512x512 squares, but if you don't understand how the gallery hangings work and their ability to fill your entire visual field with first carefully chosen color, and then a great deal of detail at the threshold of perception of distinctions between color shades meant to further drive home the reaction to the basic color's moods, what you generate is basically arbitrary and nothing. Rothko isn't 'just a random color', Rothko is about giving you a feeling through means that aren't normal or representational, and the unusualness of this (reasonably successful) effort is what gave the work its valuation.
Ownership of the experience by a particular artist isn't the point. Rothko isn't solely celebrity worship and speculation. Picasso isn't all of Cubism. Art is things other than property of particular artists.
What makes it awkward is the great ease by which AI can blindly and unhelpfully wear the mask of an artist, such as Basquiat, to the detriment of art. It's HOW you use the tools, and it's possible to abuse such tools.
> You can generate infinite recognizable Basquiat from an AI, but is it Basquiat? No, of course not, because Basquiat's style operates within the context of a specific individual human making a point about expectations and the interface between his race and his artistic boldness and audacity as experienced by his wealthy audience.
I'm not sure how I feel about this - I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. For me, AI-generated Basquiat is not Basquiat simply because he had no ownership or agency in the process of its creation.
It feels like an overly romantic notion that art requires specific historical/cultural context at the moment of its creation to be valid.
If I could hypothetically pay Basquiat $100 to put his own work into a stable diffusion model that created a Basquiat-esque work, that's still a Basquiat. If I could pay him to draw a circle with a pencil, that's his work - and if I used it in an AI model, then it's not.
It's about who held the paintbrush, or who delegated holding the paintbrush, not a retrospectively applied critical theory.
On reflection, I'm going to say 'nope'. Because it's Basquiat, I'm pretty sure you couldn't get him to make a model of himself (maybe he would, and call it 'samo'?). I don't think you could pay him to draw a circle with a pencil: I think he'd have been offended and angry. And so that is not 'his work'. It trips over what makes him Basquiat, so doing these things is not Basquiat (though it's very, very Warhol).
Even more than that, you couldn't do Rothko that way: the man would be beyond offended and would not deal with you at all. But by contrast, you ABSOLUTELY are doing a Warhol if you train an AI on him and have it generate infinite works, and furthermore I think he'd be absolutely delighted at the notion, and would love exploring the unexplored conceptual space inside the neural net.
In a sense, an AI Warhol is megaWarhol, an unexplored level of Warholiness that wasn't attainable within his lifetime.
Context and intent matter. All of modern art ended up exploring these questions AS the artform itself, so boiling it down to 'did a specific person make a mark on a thing' won't work here.
This seems to me to confuse agency with interpretation - romanticising the life and character of the artist after their heyday and death, talking about what they would have done.
Any drawing Basquiat did is a piece of art by Basquiat, whether or not it fits into the narrative of a book/thesis/lecture/exhibition. The circle metaphor isn't important - replace it with anything else. Artists regularly throw their own work away. Some of this is saved and celebrated posthumously, some never sees the light of day in accordance with their wishes. Scraps that fell on Picasso's floor sell for huge amounts of money.
Does everything he did fit the "brand" that some art historians have labelled him with, or the "brand" that auction houses promote to increase value, or the "brand" which a fashion label licenses for t-shirts? No, but I suspect this is probably what you are talking about ie. a "classic" Basquiat™ with certificate of authenticity?
Human artists cannot produce thousands of works in a few hours.
This arguments come up in every thread, and I'm baffled that people don't think the scale matters.
You may also be observed in public areas by police, but it would be an orwellian dystopia to have millions of cameras in spaces analyzing everyone's behavior in public.
Scale matters.
(But I'm indeed in favor of weaker copyright laws! But preferably to take power away from the copyright monopolies than the individual artists who barely get by with their profits)
> It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit
Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no.
What I expect instead is artists being sued by a big tech company for copyright violations because that big tech company used the artist Public Domain image for training their copyrighted AI and as a result it created a copyrighted copy of the original artist's image.
My bet is that big corporations won’t risk suing anyone over a supposed copyright on generated images,as there is a good chance that a court ends up stating that all AI generated images are in fact public domain (no author, not from the original intent and idea of a human)
You can already see the quite strange and toned down language they use on their sites. (And for some the revealing reversal from we licence to you to you licence to us)
Some smaller AI companies might believe they own a clear cut copyright and sue, but it would make sense that they would either be thrown out or loose
So, the US Copyright Office will already refuse to issue a copyright for text-prompt-generated AI art, at least if you try a stunt like naming the artist to be the AI program itself.
However, even if an image is not copyrightable, it can still infringe copyright. For example, mechanical reproductions of images are not copyrightable in the US[0] - which is why you even can have public domain imagery on the web. However, if I scan a copyrighted image into my computer, that doesn't launder the copyright away, and I can still be sued for having that image on my website.
Likewise, if I ask an AI to give me someone else's copyrighted work[1], it will happily regurgitate its training set and do that, and that's infringement. This is separate from the question of training the AI itself; even if that is fair use[2], that does nothing for the people using the AI because fair use is not transitive. If I, say, take every YouTube video essay and review on a particular movie and just clip out and re-edit all the movie clips in those reviews, that doesn't make my re-edit fair use. You cannot "reach through" a fair use to infringe copyright.
[0] In Europe there's a concept of neighboring rights, where instead of issuing you a full copyright you get 20 years of ownership instead. This is intended for things like databases and the like. This also applies to images; copyright over there distinguishes between artistic photography (full copyright) and other kinds of photography (20 years neighboring right only). This is also why Wikimedia Commons has a hilarious amount of Italian photos from the 80s in a special PD-Italy category.
[1] Which is not too difficult to do
[2] My current guess is that it is fair use, because the AI can generate novel works if you give it novel input.
> So, the US Copyright Office will already refuse to issue a copyright for text-prompt-generated AI art, at least if you try a stunt like naming the artist to be the AI program itself.
That’s because only humans can own copyrights. People can and have registered copyrights for Midjourney outputs.
> Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no.
There's certainly arguments to be made in this direction, for example corporations tending to have the most money they can afford to spend on lobbying to get their way, but the attitude of "it hasn't been good up 'til now so it definitely can't ever be good" is pretty defeatist and would imply that positive change is impossible in any area.
In this situation, it would seem like the suit would end up at "comparing the timestamp at which the public domain and copyrighted versions were published", wouldn't it ?
There is nothing that the generative AI can do in this process that's legally different from copy pasting the image, editing it a bit by hand, and somehow claiming intellectual property of the _initial_ image, no ?
In theory yes, in practice you have to pay your legal expanses in US even if you win the case. Which means you can bankrupt because a big company thought you infringed on their rights even if you didn't. Simply because you can't afford the costs.
Doesn't your argument in the first paragraph assume that the methods by which humans derive new works from past experiences is equivalent to the way statistical models iteratively remove noise from images based on a set of abstract features derived from an input prompt?
That seems to be the core of the issue, and a much more interesting conversation to have. So why do I keep seeing a version of your first paragraph everywhere and not an explanation on why the assumption can be made?
Then there's the fact that humanity has been able to develop and share art and literary works for thousands of years without the modern copyright system.
It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit. Maybe not remove it completely, but perhaps influence people to create wider definitions for "fair use", and undo the extensions that Disney lobbyists have created.