That's an over-generalization, based on the ruling in the specific "Zarya of the Dawn" case. It doesn't necessarily apply to every case. It's determined on a case-by-case basis. See:

U.S. Copyright Office says some AI-assisted works may be copyrighted | Reuters

In other news, water is wet, and the sky is fucking blue!

Lol. This is an excerpt from the 1970 spoken-word piece Whitey on the Moon by hall-of-famer Gil Scott-Heron. It's one of the most famous and well-respected poems of the "space age". It's unfortunately still topical today, with white billionaires in a pissing match to see which can get their rocket-powered cocks up first, while regular folks are becoming homeless by the thousands every day because their rent has doubled. Think you can work at Bezos' Amazon warehouse and afford basic food and shelter, let alone health care? Good luck. Some people might say that the idea of a moon base, with a Rolls Royce nuclear reactor, sounds a bit hard to swallow, under the circumstances.

I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon

*not as good

They knew. The F is way on the other side of the keyboard from the P...

It's still click-baity though. The US Copyright Office did not say "AI-Generated Images Do Not Qualify For Copyright Protection". It said that in this particular case, there wasn't enough evidence of creative authorship on the part of Kris Kashtanova in producing the images, so they could not register the copyright. That doesn't necessarily apply to all images generated by or with an AI model.

It does mean that people can't copyright something they made with a simple prompt that in itself wouldn't qualify for copyright, so I guess that's "news". It seems obvious to me, but perhaps not to some of the people calling themselves "AI artists". Now they know. But it's not a general decision, not even a court decision.

They knew.

It's not gonna stay away from you though...

No, because plagiarism is when you copy something verbatim, without creating your own authentic interpretation and expression. All art has elements of borrowing, but it's inventiveness, imagination, and some originality, that makes it art and not plagiarism.

The question is whether a machine is capable of inventiveness, imagination, originality, thinking, feeling, etc., or not, since those things have generally been acknowledged throughout history as being necessary elements of art. Wind and rain may carve patterns that are as beautiful as the most beautiful painting, but we don't call it art. Some people believe, or want to believe, that computers are capable of those things, and so we should call the patterns they produce, original, creative art. Others think that those things are not actually necessary, and we should call it art anyway. Personally, I think it's neither art nor plagiarism, but something else, that we don't have words for yet, and we're not sure how to deal with. It's a necessary discussion to work it out, but trying to fit dramatically new things into old categories is usually less successful than creating new categories.

>> A computer absolutely can not create original work.

> Why not?

> Or rather, if a computer can't, what is the reason that a human could instead?

It's a question of the word "original". Water makes beautiful patterns in the sand below it, wind creates intricate patterns on the water. But we don't usually use the phrase "original work" to talk about things like that. Its meaning is related to the concept of invention, something that takes a will, a desire, imagination, intentional work, skill, and a process that involves being conscious of the aesthetics of what's being produced. I think that some animals are capable of it too, to some extent. But things produced by inanimate forces just don't fit into the category by that name. It doesn't mean they're not beautiful, and they have been the inspiration for countless artworks. But they're not called original artworks in themselves. There are different words for that.

On the other hand, people use tools and media to make art, and an artist using a computer can certainly create original work, if it involves the elements mentioned above. Also, processes of chance have been extremely important in the art of the past century. Much of the "output" of John Cage's work for example, is based on randomness. And I don't think the US Copyright Office is a particularly good judge of that. They might refuse to register a copyright on the music created, when musicians played notes that were produced by fish in a tank with a musical staff painted on it. Nevertheless, that piece is considered a very important and original work in the history of avant-garde art and music.

One of the best examples is artist Harold Cohen's AARON, a software project started in 1972, that produces physical paintings, spanning over four decades. The artist himself doesn't claim that the sofware is "creative", though the paintings have been displayed in many important galleries, and the overall work is considered very significant and influential in the history of art and AI. In 1994, Cohen asked: "If what AARON is making is not art, what is it exactly, and in what ways, other than its origin, does it differ from the 'real thing?' If it is not thinking, what exactly is it doing?"[1]

It comes down to the nature of the work. Someone who writes "an astronaut riding a horse"... it's so low-effort that it's difficult to call it original art, even though it's become somewhat iconic. But I don't think at all that its impossible to use AI image generators in a process that does produce original, creative art works, or at least, in a way that the deep and thoughtful investigation of the questions, as in Cohen's work, is clearly the original work of an artist.

Whenever someone says "this is a fact which nobody can argue", it almost always turns out to be arguable.

The idea that "there is nothing new under the sun" is itself a tired, old idea from the Bible. It represents an ancient view that everything in life and the world is just a cycle that repeats. It leaves no room for progress or innovation.

Original creativity is an essential ingredient in art. Maybe nothing is one hundred percent original, but it's still important to talk about whether, and to what extent, an artist's work brings something original to life. If something is one hundred percent a remix of old ideas, then it's not good art.

Yes, but this week it's back with an even more outrageous click-baity title, so we get to argue about it all over again.

I guess all it takes is an art student who's leaning into the self-promotion, and some "news" sites like Vice, PopSci, etc., that really want you to click on their links.

I mean, he has some other work that's not bad, and it got me to look at his website, so mission accomplished I guess. But it did leave me with the feeling that it's a bit narcissistic to hype something that's such a well-known, decades-old shtick, without acknowledging that. Maybe it's a useful quality in an artist... but it's not a necessary one.

No, it wasn't that. And I don't think it was Adam Harvey. I'm thinking it was around 2006 or so, but I could be off by a bit. It was really the same, an art project with bright infrared LEDs that washed out the face on nighttime surveillance cameras. But he may not have invented it. The guy who did the hoodie says in another post that he read about the idea in a William Gibson novel.

This is supposed to be an art project. The guy seems to be getting a lot of press for it right now. But it's a really old idea. I remember seeing another artist/hacker do the same thing many years ago, can't remember the name. It goes back at least 15 years. There are lots of other versions of it around too, youtube diy videos, even companies selling baseball hats with LEDs for the purpose.

It's an error. They've obviously listed the price in Danish Kroner, but with a euro sign by mistake. That didn't occur to you? The actual price in euros if you convert it from Kroner is about €12.73 for Pro and €58.16 for Pro+. Maybe you want to delete this post.

Username checks out. Maybe cut down on the coffee.

This seems like a really low-quality post.

> The models don’t come with buttons that do anything. They are tools capable only of what the software developers permit to enter the models and what users request.

If you prompt an AI with "Mickey Mouse" - no more effort than clicking a button - you'll get an image of Mickey Mouse that violates intellectual property laws. The image, or the instructions for producing it, is contained inside the model, because many copyrighted images were digitally copied into the training system by the organization that created the model. It's just not remotely the same thing as someone using the paintbrush tool in Photoshop to draw a picture of Mickey Mouse themselves.

> If we go down the road of regulating training and capacity to do x, you’ll have to file lawsuits against every artist on behalf of every copyright holder over the IP inside the artist’s head.

I don't think you have a grasp of copyright law. That is a tired and debunked argument. Humans are allowed to look at things, and remember them. Humans are not allowed to make copies of things using a machine - including loading digital copies into a computer to train an AI model - unless it's covered by a fair use exemption. Humans are not the same as machines, in the law, or in reality.

> These cases are going to fall apart

I don't think they will. Especially for the image-generating AIs, it's going to be difficult to prove fair use in the training, if the output is used to compete economically with artists or image owners like Getty, whose works have been scanned in, and affect the market for that work. That's one of the four major requirements for fair use.

Adobe doesn't ship Photoshop with a button that produces an image of Mickey Mouse. They would be sued by Disney. The AI models do. They are not the same. It seems unlikely that Disney will find it "not worth chasing"; they spend millions defending their intellectual property.

If I remember your face, does my brain contain your face? Can your face be found anywhere inside my brain? Or has my brain created a sort of close-fit formula, embodied in connections of neurons, that can reproduce it to a certain degree of precision? If the latter, does that mean that I haven't memorized your face, even though I can draw a pretty good picture of it?

I think pretty much everyone would have to agree that the brain - the original neural network - can memorize and reproduce images, though never 100% exactly. That's literally what we mean by the word memorize: to create a representation of something in a biological neural network in a way that it can be recalled and reproduced.

Can those pictures be found somewhere inside the brain, can you open a skull and point to them? Or is it just a function of neuronal connections that outputs such a picture? Is there "a difference between memorizing and pattern recreation"? It sounds like a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" sort of question that's not worth spending a lot of time on.

I don't think anyone should be surprised that an artificial neural network can exhibit a similar kind of behaviour, and that for convenience we would call it by the same word: "memorizing". I'm not saying that every single image is memorized, any more than I have memorized every image I've ever seen. But I do remember some very well - especially if I've seen them many times.

Some say that AIs "learn" from the images they "see", but somehow they refuse to say that they "memorize" too. If they're going to make such anthropomorphic analogies, it seems a bit selective, if not hypocritical.

The extent to which something is memorized, or the differences in qualities and how it takes place in an artificial vs. organic neural network, is certainly something to be discussed. But if you want to argue that it's not truly memorizing, like the argument that ANNs don't have true intelligence, well, ok... but that's also a kind of "no true Scotsman" argument that's a bit meaningless.

The test for copyright infringment is whether it's "substantially similar", not "exactly the same".

The paper explains what the ones at the top were from. It's using Stable Diffusion 1.4. See page 7: Case Study: Stable Diffusion, page 14: C. Stable Diffusion settings, and page 15 for the prompts and match captions. Sorry, the rest of your comment is incomprehensible to me...