So recently there has been a lot of debate on AI-generated art and its copyright. I’ve read a lot of comments recently that made me think of this video and I want to highly encourage everyone to watch it, maybe even watch it again if you already viewed it. Watch it specifically with the question “If an AI did it, would it change anything?”
Right now, AI-generated works aren’t copyrightable. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/ This means you can not copyright the works produced by AI.
I work in games so this is more seemingly relevant to me than maybe it is to you. https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/03/valve-responds-to-claims-it-has-banned-ai-generated-games-from-steam/ Steam has outright said, earlier this month, that it will not publish games on its platform without understanding if the training data has been of images that aren’t public domain.
So right now, common AI is producing works that are potentially copyright-infringing works and are unable to be copyrighted themselves.
So with this information, should copyright exist, and if not, how do you encourage artists and scientists to produce works if they no longer can make a living off of it?
Yeah, in the end, that’s going to come down to what is transformative work and if transformative work can be done solely by a tool.
They are only in the public domain if they are transformative works. Otherwise, they are derived works and subject to the original copyright and thus copyright infringing works.
Sure, everyone has the right to copy it. There are no copyrights given out to one person. At this point, that’s just semantics.
That’s the argument though. LLMs potentially are attempting to put works into the public domain by copying them, creating works based on them, then because it’s not made by a human, placing them in the public domain. If the works an LLM is seen as derived from the training set and the training set is copyrighted content then an LLM is creating copyright infringing works and attempting to place them into the public domain.