HACKER Q&A
📣 nutanc

The grey area of copyrights involving AI generated art


As we all know, there has been an explosion of AI generated art, thanks to models like stable diffusion(which is awesome BTW). But the ownership of this art is still a grey area. Lot's of debate on Twitter and other forums. Mostly the two sides of the coin seem to be:

1. AI generated art is fine. What if it is trained on other people's art work. Even people get inspired from other art works.

2. AI generated art is wrong because permission was not taken from the creators.

Both seem valid arguments. But an argument seeming valid is not enough. Is there any legal precedence? What is legal?

Also there are too many grey areas. What if an artist has created some digital art and put it up for sale. Can I use that art as the prompt(img2img) and generate similar art and also put up that new art for sale?

  👤 jqpabc123 Accepted Answer ✓
What is legal?

AI is not a legal entity. Whoever owns/operates the AI owns any results produced.

Look at this this way --- AI is simply a tool, like the "brush" an artist choses to use.

Also there are too many grey areas.

"Grey areas" have always existed and AI doesn't change this.

If you produce a derivative work without permission that is too close to the original, you can be accused of infringing copyright. Who decides? Ultimately, a judge or jury.

👤 bediger4000
The only reason this is a debate is that copyright has changed. It used to be a fairly well defined temporary monopoly that existed to encourage people to create things that would end up in the public domain so that everyone could reuse those things.

The USA has taken on aspects of European ideas about ownership of ideas, and we've let economic rent seekers take that ownership. This framework has inherent problems in that near simultaneous independent invention is well documented. How do we apportion sole ownership in that case?

Letting copyright creep into ownership of something very indeterminate, like "style", is especially problematic given how human culture evolves, by building on pre-existing works.