An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
Firstly, I agree with most of what you’ve said. However…
Is there anything in the world that isn’t a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn’t influenced by something you’ve heard, read, seen? Feeding art to AI is no different than a student walking a gallery and learning the styles of the masters. Is the AI better at it? Sure. But it’s still doing the same thing. If someone with eidetic memory paints like Picasso, are they not an artist?
To really drive home the point, if I have a friend that is an artist, like, a really good artist, and I ask them to paint something for me, say, a field with wildflowers in the snow, and they come back with something that looks just like Landscape With Snow by Van Gogh, does that mean my friend isn’t an artist? If I ask AI for that, and they come back with something like what my friend painted, how is it any different? We call them “learning” models, but we refuse to believe that they “learn”. Instead we call it “theft”.
I didn’t say I’m completely against imitation. I more or less implied that’s where lines start to blur. If someone spends their entire life learning Picasso and can perfectly imitate Picasso then I don’t consider that to be not art. Similarly if someone did that and fed it into an AI model that then imitates them imitating Picasso I think that’s still fine.
But if you throw in all the famous artists and have the AI generate an image could you really imitate it? Not only would you have to imitate how all of them paint and what colors they use, you should also be able to tell the difference which part of the painting was influence by which artist so you could imitate it correctly. And if we factor in that AI can blend brush strokes it becomes even more harder to actually imitate. That’s so muddy water it’s easy to make arguments for and against.
Congratulations! You’re now a journalist for having typed that paragraph. Man, you’re really racking up the careers here!
(Do you see the point here? Using a tool that does all the work for you, doesn’t make you comparable to those that spent their lives doing it without cheating. Just like typing something out using auto-correct doesn’t make you a journalist).
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Man. If coming up with apples to oranges comparisons was a skill, somehow I have a feeling you’d have AI do it for you.
Do you honestly think a farmer’s knowledge of crops, seasonal growth rates, harvesting times and techniques, using the right tools to promote growth, nitrogen/PH content of soil, and how to properly avoid blight is somehow the same thing as some kid knuckling a few adjectives into a computer and creating a pretty picture?
Fuck man. You are ALL the way out of gas here.
However, I’ll add that having punched up that ridiculous response, you’re now a world class comedian. Congrats!
Oh, and if they work on an assembly line, then no, they’re not a manufacturer- they’re what’s called a “laborer”. That’s how shit works. The company in your scenario would be the manufacturer. They would have done the R&D, designed and financed the machinery and produced the product.
Man, your school sucked.
That’s all knowledge you need to produce crops and not fuck it up. By saying you can’t “fuck up” AI art you’re saying that the years of art school learning about composition and all other stuff is worthless because a talentless pleb like me has the same aristic vision as someone who spent their life studying art. Way to take a huge shit on all the artists.
It takes zero art school knowledge to create art using AI. So no, despite your best efforts to villainize me and twist the argument in your favor…
What I’m doing is taking a huge shit on people who pretend to be artists by using AI. Actual artists won’t need to use AI because they have actual skill.
Same with music. If you’re too fucking lazy to pick up a guitar and play- you’re not a musician.
But it takes knowledge of art to know when a good image is generated vs any random image. The same way it takes knowledge of how to fertilize the soil, but it takes almost no farming knowledge to hop on a tractor and till the soil.
No, you’re clearly taking a shit on all the artist, especially after that last point about music. You pretty much said some of the greatest and most influential artists in the last 50 years are not actually artists.
No, I didn’t say that at all- oooohhh… wait, hold on… . Before this gets out-of-hand:
You think that because I specifically said “guitar” that I meant to say that if it’s not written on a guitar, it’s not music. Yeah. No. It’s implied that by “guitar” I meant ANY instrument of choice that isn’t someone hitting the spacebar to start the digital track that their AI computer created for them.
Give it a rest man. You’re not an artist in my mind. But don’t worry! I’m sure you have a lot of other people fooled. Why should one person that called you out matter?
Go have fun somewhere.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that because AI can blend together the works of hundreds and create something unique, that it is bad?
I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m saying claiming it as your own original work becomes very questionable. If you want to claim AI art as your own work you have to use only your own artistic expressions in the AI model.
Yes, i have made something that wasnt influenced by anything else
I mean, I don’t believe you?