You make really compelling points that need to be addressed by modifications of copyright law.
I don't fully agree with your prescription, though. I agree that what you describe should not be allowed but I don't agree that no AI generated content should be protected by copyright law.
"Lila Shroff at The Reboot writes brilliantly about artists who are curating their own original datasets with which to train generative AI models so as to produce their own very specific artistic visions:
"Stephanie Dinkins explores the possibilities for “small data” with “Not The Only One,” an embodied chatbot sculpture trained on the oral histories of three generations of women from a single family. In “The Zizi Show,” Jack Elwes’ deepfake drag cabaret highlights representational harms felt by queer communities. The datasets Elwes developed for the show are deliberately diverse and designed around a principle of consent. Finally, as part of a project exploring the migrational patterns of her Saudi and Iraqi ancestors, Nouf Aljowaysir’s “Salaf” explicitly investigates issues of dataset representation. When Aljowaysir performed an object-classification task on historical images of Bedouin lifestyles, the model she used routinely misidentified veiled women, confidently labeling them as “soldiers,” “army,” or other military paraphernalia. In protest, Aljowaysir used an image segmentation model to erase the misrepresentations from the archival images. She then trained a new model on the erased dataset to make visible the absent figures, signifying the “eradication of her ancestor’s collective memory.”
"You cannot seriously tell me creative works produced with these AI models are not worthy of copyright."
Maybe copyright law needs to address the scale of production to protect against your scenario while leaving room for protection of other forms of AI generated content?
I agree. A gating function - perhaps something as simple as requiring copyright applications for machine-generated work with a small filing fee. Human works would have implicit copyrights, and machine works would require a $5 filing fee. Anyone submitting a billion works would have not only a hell of a bill, but also a legion of work to do.
Hey, Christopher:
You make really compelling points that need to be addressed by modifications of copyright law.
I don't fully agree with your prescription, though. I agree that what you describe should not be allowed but I don't agree that no AI generated content should be protected by copyright law.
I wrote about this awhile ago (https://www.thereputationalgorithm.com/p/copyrewrite), citing a specific example of artists who were training their own models to acheive their artistic visions. Specifically:
"Lila Shroff at The Reboot writes brilliantly about artists who are curating their own original datasets with which to train generative AI models so as to produce their own very specific artistic visions:
"Stephanie Dinkins explores the possibilities for “small data” with “Not The Only One,” an embodied chatbot sculpture trained on the oral histories of three generations of women from a single family. In “The Zizi Show,” Jack Elwes’ deepfake drag cabaret highlights representational harms felt by queer communities. The datasets Elwes developed for the show are deliberately diverse and designed around a principle of consent. Finally, as part of a project exploring the migrational patterns of her Saudi and Iraqi ancestors, Nouf Aljowaysir’s “Salaf” explicitly investigates issues of dataset representation. When Aljowaysir performed an object-classification task on historical images of Bedouin lifestyles, the model she used routinely misidentified veiled women, confidently labeling them as “soldiers,” “army,” or other military paraphernalia. In protest, Aljowaysir used an image segmentation model to erase the misrepresentations from the archival images. She then trained a new model on the erased dataset to make visible the absent figures, signifying the “eradication of her ancestor’s collective memory.”
"You cannot seriously tell me creative works produced with these AI models are not worthy of copyright."
Maybe copyright law needs to address the scale of production to protect against your scenario while leaving room for protection of other forms of AI generated content?
I agree. A gating function - perhaps something as simple as requiring copyright applications for machine-generated work with a small filing fee. Human works would have implicit copyrights, and machine works would require a $5 filing fee. Anyone submitting a billion works would have not only a hell of a bill, but also a legion of work to do.