The author (Farhad Manjoo) asked the A.I. art generator Midjourney to show him “a small green fellow who has trained Jedi for 800 years.”
Dear Commons Community,
The New York Times columnist, Farhad Manjoo, had a piece yesterday on the issue of artificial intelligence and copyright. He provides a good review of the topic especially in relation to media companies facing serious questions about who owns what when content is generated in whole or in part by AI. Here is an excerpt
“Media and entertainment industries have lately been consumed with questions about how content generated by artificial intelligence systems should be considered under intellectual property law. Last week a federal judge ruled against an attempt to copyright art produced by a machine. In July another federal judge suggested in a hearing that he would most likely dismiss a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by artists against several artificial intelligence art generators. How A.I. might alter the economics of the movie and TV business has become one of the primary issues in the strike by writers and actors in Hollywood. And major news companies — including The Times — are weighing steps to guard the intellectual property that flows from their journalism…
Another question is how we should think about potential infringement by content produced by machines. Current copyright law is designed to protect specific creative works, not a general creative style. But if A.I. can copy an artist well enough to essentially duplicate the artist’s work, could that rise to the level of infringement? In a recent paper, Lemley and his co-authors suggested the following hypothetical: Someone sets up a site that creates “an auto-generated story about Yoda” every time a user visits. If the site charges users for the content, Lemley and colleagues argue, it could infringe Disney’s copyright — even if a human did not create the words and images about Yoda.
Such scenarios may not be hypothetical for long; A.I. generators are very good at creating near-exact copies of many well-known characters. When I asked Midjourney to show me “a small green fellow who has trained Jedi for 800 years,” its output was pretty spot on. (see photo above)
Which raises a related issue: Can the prompts we give A.I. be protected by copyright law? There are already prompt marketplaces, in which people sell the particular incantations they fed to A.I. to produce certain works. Can that really fly?
No doubt these questions are important, but it’s not hard to think of reasonable answers. A.I. probably shouldn’t be allowed to create direct copies of existing works, but it seems wise to allow it the same freedom to remix art that humans enjoy.
I wouldn’t allow the most common prompts to be copyrightable — you can’t claim any creativity in asking an A.I. to draw a cat — but prompts with some level of human inspiration should qualify as protectable work. After all, when I ask Midjourney to make “a cat smoking a pipe photographed on a Civil War battlefield,” I am engaged in at least a certain degree of creative work. The pipe-smoking Civil War cat (see below) was conjured by my human brain. But are such simple strings of keywords — not much more than I would enter into a search engine — enough to qualify as copyrightable creations? At the moment, we don’t really know.”
Copyright is already a contentious legal issue. Add AI generated content and a whole new arena for litigation evolves.
Tony
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