
Can You Copyright Work Made by Artificial Intelligence? - zdw
https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/why-is-this-interesting-the-ai-copyright
======
rahuldottech
Upon reading the title, the first thing that comes to my mind is: "why not?".

If we treat AI just like any another artist's tool, I don't see why it should
stop the owner/maker of said AI from copyrighting what it comes up with. As
the article point out, as it exists, even AI needs significant human
involvement to actually get something done.

I guess one argument that one might make is that those upon whom the AI is
trained have might have rights to claim authorship, but think about it. If I,
as a human, am inspired by your work, you still don't get rights to _my_ work.
Why should it be any different with the AI I use, as long as the resultant
artwork is sufficiently different from yours?

~~~
baroffoos
Years ago I remember there was an article of someone using brute force to
generate every possible phrase of a certain length so that from that point on
no one could ever claim ownership of one since they had all already been
created.

Also I wonder what defines created. If I create a program that can generate
every possible variation of x, do I get copyright when the program is run or
do the results have to be saved. Or do I get copyright over the output of my
program before it has even run since the result of the program is fixed we can
know it would have resulted in the output even if it was never run. What if I
just make a webserver with unlimited pages and given the correct url is
entered it can output any result at all. That data was available on my website
since it was created so do I have copyright over it?

If we allow the output of programs which were not extensions of the users
input (photoshop, a text editor) than in theory my program that outputs random
numbers now has copyright over every possible work that could ever be created.

~~~
stretchwithme
Creating an intelligible work through a random process takes a really long
time. It took Earth hundreds of millions of years.

~~~
baroffoos
A lot of things that seem to fall under copyright are not particularly
difficult to brute force. Looking at music for example. Most music follows a
set of fairly basic patterns where each part of the music (drum beat, chord
progression) is just a short arrangement of only a few choices. And yet the
copyright system seems to take even a tiny piece of a song as copyrightable.
It would not be difficult or time consuming for a script to generate every
possible 4-6 chord progression and every single kind of melody which is close
enough for copyright (Often these cases use very general terms like "A
descending melody starting at C")

~~~
stretchwithme
I think the intellectual component to randomly generated content is
distinguishing between the good and the bad. And there's a lot of bad.

------
jordigh
Wolfram has been claiming copyright to the output of Alpha for a long time.

[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090518204959409](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090518204959409)

It's a bit weird because Wolfram is not the one solely responsible for Alpha's
output; the user has to give Alpha the right input to produce the right
output, so I don't really know how this could work in court.

~~~
rahuldottech
Think of it this way: I have a black box. You give it some input, it does some
magic, and gives you an output (a piece of "art"). Can I copyright such "art"?

Sure, you triggered the event. But my black box did all the actual work,
right? Similarly, if you say something to your friend and that inspires them
to create a painting. Can you claim ownership to that?

(Food for thought: can you really "copyright" or "own" a mathematical
expression or graph, though? Because that's most of Wolfram Alpha)

~~~
jordigh
The trigger can be really complicated, though, complicated enough to merit the
nontriviality threshold of copyrightability. If anything, Wolfram and the
Alpha user should be coauthors, but Wolfram doesn't seem to think anyone else
has thoughts complex enough to meet the coauthorship threshold.

~~~
umvi
I mean, he was the youngest student ever to get a PhD from Caltech.

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, but did he ever win the Putnam?

------
mensetmanusman
The analogy of a camera works here. (On multiple levels)

A black box with incredible technology manipulating light etc.

The person who pushed the button owns it.

~~~
slimsag
The camera analogy does work, but not in the way you said.

The specific technology, and more importantly the region, determine who
exactly owns the copyright. In the U.S. if you press the shutter button, you
own it. In France, the same is not always true [1]

[1] [https://www.rd.com/advice/travel/eiffel-tower-illegal-
photos...](https://www.rd.com/advice/travel/eiffel-tower-illegal-photos/)

~~~
aidenn0
So in the US, if a professional photogropher puts a camera on a tripod,
composes the image, adjusts the metering, sets up some lighting and then says
"hey, can you push this shutter bulb for me?" Do I own the copyright?

~~~
mantap
If they composed the image then they would own the copyright. Copyright of
photographs comes from creative expression not pushing the shutter button. The
exception would be if the subject was moving, e.g. at a sporting event and
pushing the shutter button at a given moment had a creative component.

------
dctoedt
Here's an early legal analysis by one of the pioneers in this field, Cal Law
professor (and Macarthur Fellow) Pamela Samuelson: _Allocating Ownership
Rights in Computer-Generated Works_ (1986) [0]

[0]
[https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...](https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2067&amp;context=facpubs)

------
rzimmerman
There's a good Star Trek Voyager episode that deals with this:
[https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Photons_Be_Free](https://memory-
alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Photons_Be_Free)

In this case the holographic doctor writes a novel and there's confusion about
who owns the property rights to his work. There was a fascinating panel at
Comic Con a few years ago where some prominent lawyers discussed Star Trek
episodes like this and specifically brought up the monkey selfie as precedent.

I don't have any answers but it's a good episode.

Edit: The episode is [https://memory-
alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Author,_Author_(episode...](https://memory-
alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Author,_Author_\(episode\))

~~~
jedberg
That episode annoys me because they're supposed to live in a post-scarcity
society in which copyright no longer exists.

~~~
dariusj18
Seems to me, in a post scarcity society, attribution would be even more
important.

~~~
aidenn0
Attribution is important, but the episode centers around the question of
whether or not the AI can demand that the publisher pull the novel from the
market, which is copyright, not just attribution.

------
otakucode
People are allowed to copyright things that they used tools to create.
"Artificial Intelligence" is a tool. The first word should be a big hint. Just
like if you trained an AI to murder people it would be a weapon, it can be a
paintbrush or a typewriter.

This does promise to be more interesting, though. Humans, especially when it
comes to art, are extremely (maybe even biologically) invested in the
incorrect idea of 'essentialism'. People believe that objects have their
history somehow attached to them. It's the reason the Ship of Theseus riddle
perplexes people. If you replace every piece of a ship over time, is it still
the same ship? It's a nonsensical question. It's a ship. There is no such
thing as some separate identity which sets it apart as "the same" from one
point in time to another. The fiction we invent to make the world make sense
to us might be unavoidable in our minds, but it is nonetheless fiction. And
when it comes to art, the fiction of something being "human made" as opposed
to "AI made" will definitely play a large role in the future. At least as
large a role as whether the Mona Lisa is "an original" or "a forgery". This
notion that an objects history can have meaning itself, separate from the
atoms and molecules of the object itself, is largely where the "value" of art
lies, certainly in collectible artworks and "originals".

------
gordondavidf
Scanning the title I quickly thought "Duh of course you can". But the
complications of that have been eating at me for an hour now.

I can imagine of world of horrible patent trolls who have AI generating "art"
constantly just so they can claim the work for themselves when a human artist
creates something similar.

Thinking much further into the future: what will be really freaky is when
society decides that only the AI has the right to copyright the AI's work.

~~~
sandov
> I can imagine of world of horrible patent trolls who have AI generating
> "art" constantly just so they can claim the work for themselves when a human
> artist creates something similar.

You can do the same thing without AI.

For example: You can create all possible combinations of colored pixels in a
grid of 800X600 with trivial code. Then you can publish all those combinations
into a GitHub repo and now you own practically all art possible in a 800x600
grid.

As a bonus: you're now infringing the copyright of everyone who has ever
created an 800x600 bitmap image.

Copyright is just incompatible with technology.

~~~
icebraining
Unlike patents, the origin of the work is important for copyright
infringement. In theory, two people who independently come up with the exact
same image are not infringing on each other's copyright.

Of course, this ends up being a matter of likelihood. And if you generate all
those combinations, but happen to select one in particular that is just like a
pre-existing picture, the courts won't believe that was by accident. But the
collection itself probably won't be infringing.

------
carapace
Old AI joke:

Q: What's AI?

A: When the computer wakes up and asks, "What's in it for me?"

------
vadansky
I'm much more interested in the copyright Details for something like Waifu
Labs ([https://waifulabs.com](https://waifulabs.com))

It's an AI model trained from a booru which is basically a collection of
"pirated" images people scrape from artist's pages/twitters/etc.

How is selling the output from the model as pillows legal?

To follow up on this, it kinda feels like "laundering". That is if I want to
use a photographer's photo on my product landing page I have to pay him. But
if I run it though a NN so that it spits out images that look exactly like
his, I don't have to pay him anymore?

~~~
rahuldottech
I'd say it is no different than me looking at a lot of manga illustrations and
then coming up with my own. There's no doubt that I was heavily inspired by
what media I consumed, and learnt from it. Does that mean I don't own rights
to what I make?

~~~
aidenn0
It's a question of whether or not what is emitted is mechanically derived from
the source. With waifu labs, there is user input, but a similar tool could be
setup to deterministically generate images from the input, and that is
arguably purely a derivative of the inputs, though there is still some
creativity in determining how to process the inputs and construct the NN &c.

Now some philosophers will argue that human creativity is purely a derivative
of the inputs, but copyright law certainly does not consider it to be so.

------
GlenTheMachine
A related, but possibly simpler-to-answer question: can you copyright work
created by computer search techniques?

Many years ago my roommate in grad school wanted to participate in RoboCup.
The problem was that my university had no RoboCup team. So my roommate, who
was doing his doctorate on genetic algorithms, arranged to borrow time on the
university mainframe on Sunday nights from 1 AM to 4 AM, got the RoboCup
virtual simulator running on it, and set up a GA to evolve a set of strategies
for a team. All by himself.

He came in third. It was an astounding achievement. Clearly, he deserved the
award and all the credit and glory associated therewith.

~~~
aidenn0
IANAL, but my understanding is that as long as there is any meaningful human
input, then it's copyrightable in the US. If you see something and say "that
looks cool" point your phone at it and take a snapshot, you own the copyright.
This is something found entirely through natural phenomena, but your
recognition and framing of it count for copyright.

------
suyash
This is a tricky question as in the case for creating work using AI, there are
multiple people involved, specially in case of Deep Learning:

1\. Those who provided the Dataset 2\. Those who created the Model 3\. Users
who use that Model to create their own work

Who owns the final product, it's debatable, good thing with software code is
that for for #1 and #2 it will depend on the license.

------
shmerl
So, the question should be, can artificial mind be treated as human mind in
regards to copyright? I don't think we are there yet. Such kind of artificial
mind wasn't created yet.

Theoretically though, I don't see why it shouldn't, if it can be created.

In regards to creativity of the artificial mind, see also The Cyberiad by
Stanislaw Lem.

~~~
rahuldottech
That's not really the question being asked, we all know that we're not there
yet. We aren't asking "can AI own IP?", rather, "who (as in: which person or
entity) owns the IP developed by AI, if anyone?"

~~~
shmerl
The answer to that should be related to the above. If it's something created
by the artificial mind comparable to human, then that mind should own it,
regardless of who created the mind itself. If it's not on that level, then no
one should own it, like it's now the case with animals.

Creators of the artificial author shouldn't get any copyrights on those works
in either case.

~~~
WilliamEdward
Copyright only exists to stop humans from being upset over their work being
appropriated. The AI, no matter how much you program it to pretend to care,
can never be sentient enough to actually care, therefore they do not deserve
rights like this.

AI are tools and no matter how close they get to humanity it would be
dangerous to consider them human.

~~~
shmerl
_> Copyright only exists to stop humans from being upset over their work being
appropriated._

That's not the intention of it. You can read the definition. It's to
incentivize creativity. Otherwise it shouldn't even apply.

 _> The AI, no matter how much you program it to pretend to care, can never be
sentient enough to actually care_

It's more or less what I said as well, i.e. if it's not comparable to human,
it shouldn't be applied.

------
Zardoz84
It's the case of "Author, Author" ->
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author,_Author_(Star_Trek:_Voy...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author,_Author_\(Star_Trek:_Voyager\))

------
stretchwithme
Why not? You can hire a human to make something for you and you can own the
copyright to that work. You certainly are financing the creation of a work
made by an AI.

And an AI isn't a person, legal or otherwise.

