If I ask it for the text of Harry Potter, will it give it to me? If I ask it for a copy of a Keith Haring painting, will it give me one? If I ask it to perform Williams’s Jurassic Park theme, will it do so?
If it does, it’s infringing copyright.
If it does not, it is not.
If it just reads the web and learns from copyrighted material, but carefully refuses to republish or perform that material, it should not be considered to infringe, for the same reasons a human student is not. Artistic styles and literary skills are not copyrightable.
e e cummings doesn’t get to forbid everyone else from writing in lowercase.
(Some generations of ChatGPT won’t even recite Shakespeare, due to overzealous copyright filters that fail to correctly count it as public domain. The AI folks are trying!)
What’ll be interesting is when people start asking, “write a song in the style of Marvin Gaye” given the ruling against Robin Thicke a few years back, since that was about the style of the song hedging too closely to Gaye’s output (edit for clarity)
That’s the Thaler v. Perlmutter case, which has been widely misreported and misunderstood.
Thaler generated some art using an AI art generator and then tried to claim that the AI should hold the copyright. The copyright office said “no, you imbecile, copyright can only be held by people.” Thaler tried to sue and the judge just confirmed what the copyright office said.
But note that Thaler never tried to claim the copyright himself. If he’d said “I made this art using AI as a tool” that would have been completely different. That’s not what the court case was about.
The question should be pretty simple:
Does the AI product output copyrighted material?
If I ask it for the text of Harry Potter, will it give it to me? If I ask it for a copy of a Keith Haring painting, will it give me one? If I ask it to perform Williams’s Jurassic Park theme, will it do so?
If it does, it’s infringing copyright.
If it does not, it is not.
If it just reads the web and learns from copyrighted material, but carefully refuses to republish or perform that material, it should not be considered to infringe, for the same reasons a human student is not. Artistic styles and literary skills are not copyrightable.
e e cummings doesn’t get to forbid everyone else from writing in lowercase.
(Some generations of ChatGPT won’t even recite Shakespeare, due to overzealous copyright filters that fail to correctly count it as public domain. The AI folks are trying!)
What’ll be interesting is when people start asking, “write a song in the style of Marvin Gaye” given the ruling against Robin Thicke a few years back, since that was about the style of the song hedging too closely to Gaye’s output (edit for clarity)
That’s what got me into using chatgpt. I’d ask it a question like “how can I trouble shoot this issue I’m havibg”
It would give me this big answer then I’d ask it to give me the answer back as an Elton John song. So much fun. Can’t have nice things though anymore
Perhaps every federal judge should receive a copy of Spider Robinson’s “Melancholy Elephants”. (It’s under a Creative Commons license.)
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
The issue is still the output, not the model itself.
Just like a gun.
@fubo
It’s been suggested that AI art created without human input cannot be receive copyrights;
https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/
That’s the Thaler v. Perlmutter case, which has been widely misreported and misunderstood.
Thaler generated some art using an AI art generator and then tried to claim that the AI should hold the copyright. The copyright office said “no, you imbecile, copyright can only be held by people.” Thaler tried to sue and the judge just confirmed what the copyright office said.
But note that Thaler never tried to claim the copyright himself. If he’d said “I made this art using AI as a tool” that would have been completely different. That’s not what the court case was about.