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Opinion: The Copyright Office is making a mistake on AI-generated art (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've generally been against giving AI works copyright, but this article presented what I felt were compelling arguments for why I might be wrong. What do you think?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

if two people use the same prompt, do they get the same result?

Usually part of the prompt includes a very large random number that is impossible to guess - so two people cannot use the same prompt. And therefore will get different outputs.

There are some tools that let you specify a fixed number instead of a random one, and in that case yes the output would be the same. But that's not the norm.

Also the prompt is usually very complex. For example if you were to use Stable Diffusion to generate comic book images... you'd normally use a prompt that is close to ten gigabytes in size. Sure, it might include the words "cat sits on a hill looking over the sunset" but it also includes gigabytes of data that tells the model what style of drawing to do. You might also be happy with the cat sitting on the hill, but not the sunset, and can select the sunset in the image and have it draw that again with a different prompt, leaving the cat and hill untouched from the previous prompt.

I've been working on and off for the last month on a single image. AI doesn't mean the human does no work at all - especially if you want a specific result.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But there is nothing about the person themselves that affects the outcome of the prompt.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There absolutely is. It's their process of developing a prompt.

Compare it to painting a picture by hand versus paint-by-number. Okay, sure. Technically you can go out and get a paint-by-number Starry Night for $20 and paint something approximating it yourself. That doesn't mean that you can paint it by hand, or even that you can now create your own paint-by-number canvass, it just means that someone gave you instructions on where to put paint with brush to get something similar. Obviously you're not copying the brush strokes and the exact amount and type of paint used in each one, so it's probably not like an excellent forgery, but we could apply the same idea to 'traditional' digital art and it would be.

Record my keystrokes and mouse movements while I make something and repeat them and you'll get the same thing.

There is a world of difference between being able to take someone else's progress in prompt development and throw it into a generator and being able to develop that prompt in the first place.

It's the process of selection, iteration, and gradual prompt adjustment that actually constitutes the creative process of using AI art, as well as the actual traditional art techniques that go into modifying the input or creating a base to alter your images from.