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.”
That douche punched a sentence into a computer and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become.
Dude just pointed a camera, pressed click and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become. We could take that train of thought all the way to “if you’re not grinding up your own pigments and painting on cave walls you’re not really an artist”.
AI is a tool. I don’t have an issue with someone using AI and calling themselves an artist, as long as they’ve generated the AI model based on their own previous art. You teach a machine to mimic your brush strokes and color palette and then the machine spits out images as you taught it. I don’t see an issue there because you might as well have painted them yourself, it just saves time to have AI do most (if not all) of the work.
Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?
That’s, uh, not what happened here. And I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Anyone with the skill to draw the kinds of pictures they want would simply draw the kinds of pictures they want instead of putting in tons of effort to get an AI to do it worse
Prompting an AI is not making art
I agree. He shouldn’t own that image.
I think that’s a matter of time until it becomes the norm. There was a time we painted literally everything and then photography came along. You could make the same argument against photography because back then photography needed setting up, the images were black and white and you could arguably do a better job painting it instead. However photography took over because you could spend the next how many hours or days painting something or you could go click and have the photo that isn’t as “high quality” but is close enough.
I think in the future artists will use AI to quickly prototype through ideas and when they get roughly what they originally envisioned, they take the AI image as a canvas and touch it up a bit. Sure they could paint it themselves and spend the next week prototyping all sorts of ideas before creating the final image, but would you really do that when you could spend maybe a day prototyping with AI and then another day to fix up the image? Maybe the image doesn’t even need fixing up, maybe the AI generated exactly what you imagined?
Ahh yes, the camera bullshit. Here we go…
Yes a photographer is an artist. They need to know light diffusion, locational effects, distance and magnification, aperture, shutter speed, and have a subject prepped and able to take direction. They also have to have an insane understanding of post process editing.
They don’t simply type a sentence into a computer and get beautiful photographs.
A child can produce the exact same image by simply typing the exact same sentence into a computer.
A child cannot be given a camera and be tasked to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer- and succeed.
So stop with this bullshit comparison. It’s apples and oranges.
Did you read the rest of the comment or did you stop after the first sentence?
I didn’t need to. The moment photography was brought up as a comparison, that’s all I needed to know.
AI is not art. Period.
Let’s say I’ve been an artist for 10 years. I take all my work and stick it into an AI model. That model starts generating images based on the art I’ve created in the past 10 years. Have I stopped being an artist because I put down the brush and picked up a keyboard?
How would a child produce the exact same image if they don’t have my AI model?
You did not stop to be an artist, you just stopped to make art and every kid is able to recreate what you did, because all it have to do is type your name in prompts.
More than that, every kid drawing with a crayons on papers or on tablet is more creative than you this time.
That assumes you have a big enough data set to even make anything useful with just your art. And we know that that was not the case here
That’s not the case here and I think the artist in the article has no claim to that image. I’m against the general idea that using AI instantly disqualifies someone as an artist, which is what the other person believes.
The moment your art was run through AI, it was no longer yours, and no longer art.
I’m done talking about this. I stated my point, my opinion, and I have no intention to change it. AI is garbage.
If you want to be the old man yelling how the world is changing for the worse, go ahead. You are entitled to your conservative opinion.
k. Thanks! I have been waiting for weeks for permission from an AI “artist” to be allowed to have an opinion on something.
You’ve helped me out a lot!
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”.
Yes, i have made something that wasnt influenced by anything else
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.
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.
The jokes write themselves, folks.
Imagine thinking this is a salient point, lmfao. “oh, you criticise people writing text prompts on large learning model tools to generate art based on an amalgamation of everyone else’s stolen art, for claiming to be artists, AND YET, here you are writing text.”
it’s so fucking stupid. a work has to be actually creative and novel to be protected by copyright, most AI prompts would not meet the threshold of creativity and originality to benefit from protection.
Yeah, the joke is that someone thinks they can call themselves an artist by typing a sentence into a prompt on a computer. I get that you’re trying to call me out, but the failure in your joke is that I’m not claiming to be an artist. That douche is.
You’ve got nothing.
That’s a matter of perspective.