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So, in the US, the bedrock of copyrightability is creativity. The opposite would be what SCOTUS derided as the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, where merely "working hard" would give you copyright over the result. No court in the US will actually accept a sweat of the brow argument, of course, because there's Supreme Court precedent against it. This is why you can't copyright maps[0], and why scans of public domain artwork are automatically public domain[1][2]. Because there's no creativity in them. The courts do not oppose the use of algorithms or mechanical tools in art. If I draw something in Photoshop, I still own it. Using, say, a blur or contrast filter does not reduce the creativity of the underlying art, because there's still an artist deciding what filters to use, how to control them, et cetera. That doesn't apply for AI training. The controls that we do have for AI are hyperparameters and training set data. Hyperparameters are not themselves creative inputs; they are selected by trial and error to get the best result. And training set data can be creative, but the specific AI we are talking about was trained purely on scraped images from the Internet, which the creator does not own. So you have a machine that is being fed no creativity, and thus will produce no creativity, so the courts will reject claims to ownership over it. [0] Trap streets ARE copyrightable, though. This is why you'll find fake streets that don't exist on your maps sometimes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel.... [2] Several museums continue to argue the opposite - i.e. that scanning a public domain work creates a new copyright on the scan. They even tried to harass the Wikimedia Foundation over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_... |