this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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This photography analogy is getting more tiresome the more it is repeated. It reduces the extensive work and techniques that photographers do to "using a tool", ignoring we also have tools like photocopiers whose mechanical results are not considered separate artworks, while also trying to pass the act of iterating prompts and selecting results as something much more involved than it actually is. Like many people pointed out already, what is being described is the role of a commissioner or employer. Is Bob Iger an artist because he picked what works are suitable for release? I don't think so.
One question I have is that if two people use the same prompt, do they get the same result?
If they do, how could that result be copyrighted because I can just as well reproduce the prompt, making an original "copy".
If they don't produce the same result, well it's not the human that's really doing the "original" part there, which is what copyright aims to protect, right?
On the other hand if I write an original comic book story and use AI as a tool to create the pictures, that, in my opinion, could be worth copyright protection. But it's the same as just original story, it's not really the pictures that are protected.
(And let's not forget that AIs are mostly just fed stolen works, that needs to be solved first and foremost.)
The process is deterministic, but does not rely only on the prompt (or other forms of conditioning), the model itself has to be the same, then the PRNG seed, and, to varying degrees, configuration parameters such as step size, image resolution and configuration (meaning, roughly, "how much should the process weight your prompt over the model".
The more detailed the prompt is, the less creativity the process will show, and at least in my book the more can be attributed to the human. What can also be attributed to the human is sifting through multiple seeds with a single prompt until you find one that's just right. Coming up with various process pipelines. Creating input for the model, such as depth maps.
Generally speaking you shouldn't liken the human input to the process to painting, but to art direction. If I tell a painter "draw me a tiger in a forest" then no court ever will give me copyright to the image, if I write a whole novella to describe the image, influence the artists' output sufficiently, I'd get acknowledged as a co-creator. AIs not being able to hold copyright themselves, once you hit that co-creator threshold you should have sole copyright over the work.
...and that's nothing new that's just how copyright works. In the Anglosphere you have the sweat of the brow doctrine and coming up with the sentence "yo draw me a hot chick with big tiddies" does not produce sufficient amounts of sweat, in the continental tradition it's threshold of originality, and no that instruction was not sufficiently original.
Maybe you can copyright the prompt itself. But not the output.
That wouldn't make sense as the output is derivative of the prompt.
It would also mean that if you take a picture with your phone you could only claim copyright to the RAW image, not the final output, as an AI has done its colour grading and denoising stuff all over it.
And as far as I understand it that's also the position of (US) courts: Sufficient creative input before and/or after the mechanical part.