Copyright is a hugely contentious aspect of the current wave of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the field of AI image generation. As AI continues to advance and both artists and laypeople produce creative works, questions are cropping up about who owns the copyright to those works.
Copyright and Image Generation
AI image generation has been the most public and most contentious aspect of AI and copyright. The primary reason is based on how these models are trained. In order to build an AI image generator, the developer must use millions or even billions of images. Stable Diffusion, for example, was trained on around 2.3 billion images. Many of these images have been "scraped" from the internet without the consent of the original creators.
This leads to problems with attribution, and with the potential for AI image generators to reproduce art in another artist's style. It also applies to living artists and photographers whose work has been scraped from sites like ArtStation and Flickr.
There is the additional problem of whether the current copyright laws extend to work created "by a machine". Although AI images are generated by a human controlling the input via the prompt, it has been argued that the actual image is created by the AI, and not the human.
US law states that intellectual property can be copyrighted only if it was the product of human creativity, and the Copyright Office only acknowledges work authored by humans. Machines and generative AI algorithms, therefore, cannot be authors, and their outputs are not copyrightable.
Writing, Film, and Music
Although the bulk of the conversation around AI and copyright has centred on the visual arts, the conversation has also arisen in text generation, film, and music.
The same human authorship requirement for copyright protection under the current US law means that AI-generated writing is likely either a public domain work immediately upon creation or a derivative work of the materials the AI tool was exposed to during training.
AI can already synthesise realistic versions of existing artists' voices, and with AI-generated film technologies around the corner, more contentious debates are coming.
Case Study: Zarya of the Dawn
In February 2023, the US Copyright Office revoked copyright protection for images created using the AI-powered Midjourney image generator for the comic book "Zarya of the Dawn" and issued a new copyright registration covering only the text of the work and the arrangement of images and text. The justification was incomplete information in the original copyright registration, which failed to disclose that the images were created by an AI model.
The Copyright Office argued that the images generated by Midjourney were not the product of human authorship and thus not copyrightable. Despite the creator's claim that she had "guided" the structure and content of each image, the Copyright Office rejected the argument.
The creator reacted by framing it as an overall win for AI-augmented artists. The ruling protects the comic book's story and the image arrangement. However, individual images produced by Midjourney were not granted copyright.
The decision means that AI-generated imagery, without human-authored elements, cannot currently be copyrighted in the United States.
Teaching AI Ethics
- Legal Studies: What is the current legal stance on AI copyright in your country?
- English and Literature: How does the use of AI to generate content challenge traditional notions of authorship and creativity, and what are the ethical implications?
- Computer Science: What ethical considerations should be taken into account when designing AI systems for copyright enforcement?
- Philosophy: What ethical theories can be applied to the use of AI in copyright enforcement?
- Business and Economics: How does the use of AI affect the market for creative works, and what ethical issues arise?
- Media Studies: What implications might AI have on the creation and copyrighting of film?
- Visual Arts: How does the use of AI in creating art raise questions about copyright and intellectual property rights?
- Music: Is it possible to copyright an artist's voice?