Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted::Matthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.”
Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted::Matthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.”
As I’d just written in another reply here, there is a world of difference in describing an illustration and creating an illustration.
Same goes for lightning a fire without and with a lighter.
Even if I were to grant you that generative AI is just “describing an illustration”: other people say there is a world of difference between painting something with your hands and using a mouse, yet I think digital illustration is as real as physical illustration. Yet other people say there is a world of difference between creating something from the ground up and using store-bought materials and tools, yet I don’t discount artists who do just that.
But I don’t grant you that, because if I simply describe an illustration, the generative AI will not give me anything close to what I want. I have to learn the prompting language of the model (what words and phrases result in what?), I have to learn the influence the many different parameters have on the output, and I have to learn how to use things like prompt weighting, negative prompts and the like to get what I want. It’s something completely different from describing an illustration.
And that’s ignoring things like variant generation, inpainting, outpainting and the many different things that are completely removed from just “describing an illustration”.