> > as they are asking if the AI itself can hold the copyright on the output.
> Who is?
Thaler is. I’ve only read the intro sections of the documents you linked to, so I may have missed something more fundamental later, but the key points seem to be:
> The author of the Work was identified as the “Creativity Machine,” ... the Work “was autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine”
and:
> Thaler must either provide evidence that the Work is the product of human authorship or convince the Office to depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence. He has done neither.
So in this case they are asking if the AI can be the author.
Whereas the question in this thread was:
> If someone runs the model on their own hardware, do they "own" the images generated?
In that case, a human is providing a prompt to the model (providing creative input), and asking if they themselves count as the author (a human rather than a neural net), so it seems like a significantly different case.
Thaler specifically asks for himself to be given the copyright assignment in the filing, claiming that the AI is essentially creating it in a work-for-hire. He does not ask for the Creativity Machine to be assigned the copyright.
>In that case, a human is providing a prompt to the model (providing creative input), and asking if they themselves count as the author (a human rather than a neural net), so it seems like a significantly different case.
I don't know that I specifically agree with this, but this is probably due to me having read additional articles on similar filings, including one where someone took a photograph, applied a style transfer AI to it, and then tried to copyright the resulting image, and was denied, because the copyright office found that there was not evidence that the work was a product of human authorship.
Andres Guadamuz (a lawyer specializing in IP law, senior lecturer at Sussex university, and a proponent of AI generated work being copyrightable) discusses a lot of this in https://www.technollama.co.uk/dall%c2%b7e-goes-commercial-bu... - but the most relevant part to this discussion is "For the most part, the legal consensus appears to be that the images do not have any copyright whatsoever, and that they’re all in the public domain."
The user experience for DALL-E, StableDiffusion, Midjourney, etc. are all essentially the same - craft a prompt, fine-tune it, get artwork out, so his discussion should be broadly applicable to all of these similar tools.
Thanks for the link, interesting reading. I can totally appreciate the angle that some generations may be too trivial to be worthy of protection.
I happen to be in the UK, and this happens to match my expectations, but it does strongly imply more regional variation than I’d have guessed:
> The situation may be different in the UK, where copyright law allows copyright on a computer-generated work, the author of which is the person who made the arrangements necessary for the work to be created. This, in my opinion, is the user, as we come up with the prompt and initiate the creation of the specific work. I think that there may be a good case to be made that I own the images I create in the UK.
> Who is?
Thaler is. I’ve only read the intro sections of the documents you linked to, so I may have missed something more fundamental later, but the key points seem to be:
> The author of the Work was identified as the “Creativity Machine,” ... the Work “was autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine”
and:
> Thaler must either provide evidence that the Work is the product of human authorship or convince the Office to depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence. He has done neither.
So in this case they are asking if the AI can be the author.
Whereas the question in this thread was:
> If someone runs the model on their own hardware, do they "own" the images generated?
In that case, a human is providing a prompt to the model (providing creative input), and asking if they themselves count as the author (a human rather than a neural net), so it seems like a significantly different case.