Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work

This may not be the reason he&#x27;s &quot;losing&quot; money here, but I was struck by how much less... impressive that piece is to me now compared to when I first saw it. (Visually impressive; I&#x27;ve always known it was from Midjourney.)<p>When the news first broke about it winning an award, I was like &quot;well damn, I can see why—it&#x27;s visually striking!&quot; But the longer I look at it, and the more LLM-generated images I see in general, the less this one stands out to me. It&#x27;s still pleasing, but seems less unique in both its strengths and flaws: the soft glowing lights, the tasteful muted palette, the random greebled details.<p>And it bothers me that the glowing orb&#x2F;archway in the center has a distinct border around most of its circumference, but the part from 4 to 6 o&#x27;clock is fuzzier and blends into the nearby wall(?) :P

Based on his argument, the human component should and rightfully be copyrightable. In this case, it&#x27;s the prompt or conversation he had with the AI. That should definitely be able to be copyrightable, but I agree that the image itself should not.<p>This is the fundamental problem with AI -- if the government isn&#x27;t willing to protect it, there is fundamentally no market for it. What does that say about the value of the actual AI tools? If the content and images you produce with them can no longer be protected, what value are the tools used to create them?

Dear journalists&#x2F;others: for the love of all that is good, please for f&#x27;s sake stop calling these people &quot;artists&quot;. It reinforces the lie they tell themselves.<p>They are nothing of the sort.<p>They are, at most, and even this is overly generous, someone commissioning a &quot;fake artist&quot; (AI) to make something for them

The schadenfruede is so tasty.

AI art is extremely analogous to photography.<p>As a photographer you did not create the universe you are walking around in, you prompt your camera to look at a certain location and you push a button.

Well, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword.

This artist won a $300 prize at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition 2022. I&#x27;m a bit confused what millions he&#x27;s talking about but in my opinion the best bet for him would&#x27;ve been to commission some artists to create a real painting of his work and strike the iron while hot. Did anybody think that gen AI artwork would be a hot market for long?

looks like the crux is that supposedly ai-generated images don&#x27;t have copyright protections<p>&gt; When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship.<p>&gt; As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.<p>but i think that&#x27;s only if it&#x27;s entirely prompt driven. you could argue that manual edits or additions would allow it to to have copyright?

let me ask midjourney to generate an image of the world&#x27;s smallest violin

It&#x27;s fun to ponder how modern society will evolve if this same mindset is applied to other domains that generative AI is eventually used for, specifically sciences. If AI (art) works cannot be copyrighted, there&#x27;s hope that the same would apply to the other domains and prohibiting AI-generated works from being patented. Imagine AI finding 50 new ways of making insulin that don&#x27;t violate the existing patents...<p>One can dream, right?! This could cripple monopolies and bring more power back to small businesses and individuals, as the capitalistic playing-field is leveled.

Will code generated via LLM be handled the same way, or does this only apply to expressive elements in art?

The irony is so thick that you can eat it with spoon. Is like stealing meat from a market and then arguing that it is his, because he already transformed it into a meat pie, and that&#x27;s his own product now. :)

Y&#x27;all really want to be mad at this but this is one of those tragic cases where the worst person is correct.<p>* AI companies claim that <i>training</i> should not be covered by copyright. This says nothing at all about the model outputs which can still violate copyright.<p>* Curation makes something a copyrightable work. This applies to photographers and machine generated art.<p>The copyright office&#x27;s ruling doesn&#x27;t change that second point although in practice it might raise the bar.

Does this mean that if Hollywood shifts to AI for production that none of it will be copyrightable?

He could sell licenses to use his prompts and make licensees sign an NDA

Me sitting here wishing I had millions to lose in the first place...

what a jackass

The inpainting tool in Photoshop is AI. If you use the inpainting tool, congratulations you&#x27;re an AI artist. Should copyrighted of any images produced with the inpainting tool be ignored?

Millions? His work? Come on now.

lol, leopards, faces

copy ≠ theft<p>Can we please end this delusional demand that property rights can be applied to data? Pretty please? If not now, then when? How much more unfeasible does copyright need to be before we move on? How much more unfeasible can it really get? When are we, as participants in a society, going to simply give up on playing this ridiculous game?<p>Copyright demands that <i>we all</i> participate in <i>its own</i> failure. That is, all of us but a select few who have already won the game.

AI art is dead, dude. Get over it. Grifters lost. Regulators won.

<i>&gt; “The refusal of the U.S. Copyright Office to recognize human authorship in AI-assisted creations highlights a critical issue in modern intellectual property law. As AI continues to evolve, it is imperative that our legal frameworks adapt to protect the rights of those who harness these technologies for creative expression,” Allen’s lawyer, Pester, recently said.<p>Got it. So while substantial efforts have been made to claim that real artists—people who spent years of their lives working to produce actual works of art—have no legitimate claim to legal protection from AI companies, the people that should get legal protection are the people using Midjourney.</i>

Real AI artists are spending hundreds of hours and their human labor is absolutely copyrightable.<p>There are three types of labor-intensive AI art: (1) ComfyUI node graph editing, (2) canvas-based compositions that use AI as a filter or brush, and (3) large multi-day compositions typically built for film and gaming. Sometimes all of these manual and laborious methodologies are employed for one work.<p>We&#x27;re so past the &quot;prompting&quot; phase: artists are building complicated workflows, manually drawing and sketching on diffusion canvases, and spending days precisely rendering the videos that they want. It&#x27;s more like Photoshop combined with custom-built shader pipelines than Midjourney. Or a long virtual filming and editing process with deliberate intention.<p>You wouldn&#x27;t call algorithmic manipulation by Photoshop non-copyrightable. If AI is just a &quot;brush&quot; employed by a human, and the human is doing a substantial amount of work, it shouldn&#x27;t render the entire work uncopyrightable.<p>If you&#x27;d like to see what actual AI artists are doing, check these out to get started:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;comfyui&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;comfyui&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aivideo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aivideo&#x2F;</a><p>Here&#x27;s something that was &quot;prompted&quot;, but that took days of effort in pre-production, composing, and editing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aivideo&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1ftvole&#x2F;ouroboros_kling_15_ai_short_film&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aivideo&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1ftvole&#x2F;ouroboros_...</a><p>Here&#x27;s something else that was built up from lots of node graphs and drawing and editing. This is a tremendously complicated work:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;comfyui&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1fse25a&#x2F;putting_this_here_because_it_deserves_more_views&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;comfyui&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1fse25a&#x2F;putting_th...</a><p>You can&#x27;t possibly tell me that these are uncopyrightable.<p>And while you may or may not like these pieces yet, there is clearly something incredible is happening here. These are real artists. And as individual creators and small teams, they will soon be capable of taking on the likes of studios like Pixar without the millions of dollars of capital the big studios have employed.

The U.S. Copyright Office has made a bogus claim -- &#x27;work derived from AI platforms “contained no human authorship”&#x27; -- my belief is that this incorrect and probably illegal edict is simply a poor excuse for the office to neglect its mandate. They do not have the resources and technological footing to register the flood of AI art they would likely receive for copyright protection. Regardless of chutzpah I support Allen&#x27;s move against it. Style has not been copyrightable, living human artists learn and are influenced from their exposure to the broad history of art, it is not somehow different for AI models to do so as well. Infringement lies in the output of AI models, not on its inputs. Artists using generative art making techniques have been provided copyright protections for generations. While inconvenient for the office, AI mediated works also warrant protection.