Andres Guadamuz

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-but-what-about-copyright - 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…

It seems the more interesting legal question is not regarding input, but whom owns the copyrights of the output, if any. Interesting article:

https://www.technollama.co.uk/dall%C2%B7e-goes-commercial-but-what-about-copyright

If I interpret that article correctly, at least Dall-e does not claim copyright on the generation nor does it grant it to the person writing the prompt. The copyright question seems entirely unanswered.

Perhaps that should be codified in law explicitly: AI generated art cannot be copyrighted.

If it was created from the collective input of humanity (unasked), its output may as well benefit all of humanity as well. It's hard to make the case that somebody writing a prompt deserves full copyright protection. Even if so, just add one word and one can claim it's once again an "original".

Not respecting AI copyrights would also help protect the vast area of commercial art, as it lowers its value if it cannot be legally protected. This could get hairy though, because what happens if you take AI output as input and then start manually tweaking/editing it. It would then be a mixed AI/human works.

Framing this as learning is unhelpful. Copilot isn't just learning. It can reproduce code it saw during training verbatim. It will even reproduce the GPLv3 licence itself. If you copy-paste code from a GPLv3-licenced sourced without attribution, it's a copyright violation. Why should it be different for Copilot?

EDIT: After more reading on the subject, I'm willing to accept that copyright infringement is unlikely here. This link [1] was the one I found most convincing.

However, I would still shift the goalposts and look at this ethically, and I still think it's wrong that Microsoft is profiting from code with licences like GPLv3. This is a whole other topic, though.

[1] https://www.technollama.co.uk/is-githubs-copilot-potentially-infringing-copyright