An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
Hmmm. This comment made me realize that these ai images have something in common with collages. If I make a collage, do I have to include all the magazine publishers I used as authors?
Not defending the AI art here. Imo, with image generating models the mechanisms of creation are so far removed from the “artist” prompter that I don’t see it any differently than somebody paying an actual artist to paint something with a particular description of what to paint. I guess that could still make them something like a director if they’re involved enough? Which is still an artist?
I dunno. I have my opinions on this in a “I know it when I see it” kind of way, but it frustrates me that there isn’t an airtight definition of art or artist. All of this is really subjective
if you make a magazine collage you’ve already paid all the magazine authors for their work by buying the magazine. I know its not perfect, but at least in a collage situation there is some form of monetary trail going back to the artists.
If the AI company were to license their training data this would be an almost perfect metaphor. But the problem is we’ve let them weasel in without monetary attribution.
It comes down to how transformative the work is. They look at things like how much of the existing work you used and how much creative changes were made.
So grabbing your 9 favorite paintings and putting them in 3x3 grid is not going to give you fair use.
Cutting out sections of faces from different works and stitching them together into a franken face could give you enough for fair use if you made it different enough.
I don’t know how collages work, but samplers do pay every single artist they are sampling for their use of the song.