[danShumway]

What's the argument for why prompt generation deserves copyright protection that doesn't also imply that commissioning a piece of artwork deserves copyright protection?

If I go to a human and ask them to draw me an image, I will iterate and collaborate with my prompt just as much if not more than I would for an AI generated image. I'll look through multiple pictures and point out things I like and dislike. But I won't get joint copyright over the final image unless the artist gives me a contract assigning it. We recognize that collaboration with a human to describe a final image isn't something that usually falls in the narrow range of copyright.

So the argument around prompt generation seems like it has much wider implications than most copyright-expansionists are saying. I don't understand how to grant AI images copyright without granting a bunch of other stuff copyright too. And traditionally, we don't think of commissioning as a copyrightable act, even though it arguably has very similar elements of creativity that are being talked about here.

Is there a creative human input into an AI-generated image that isn't present when commissioning or working with a human artist? Because otherwise we're talking about a frankly massive expansion of copyright that should probably be approached with a lot more caution. I mean, some of these arguments I see for granting copyright are getting really close to outright saying that deciding what to draw should be treated as creative enough to warrant protection. That's a wild thing to say, that has so many implications beyond just AI images.

[jay_kyburz]

I always assumed that Midjourney, the company running the application, owns the copyright (if there was any) and that they assign it to you when they hand you back the image. The website is fairly circumspect around the whole issue as you can imagine.

It's not that different to a company paying artists.

[danShumway]

> I always assumed that Midjourney, the company running the application, owns the copyright

In a way that's even worse; building a tool that someone else uses to produce a creative work shouldn't grant the original builder copyright over the user's output. That would also have a ton of implications beyond AI.

It's bad enough that many software tools come with license agreements around their usage that reassigns copyright and restricts output, but at least in those cases the agreement rests on a license that the user is signing to get access to the tool. But we wouldn't claim that the person who's made an artist's paints owns the painting made with them.

> The website is fairly circumspect around the whole issue as you can imagine.

I remember it making the news when one of the companies in the imagegen space (I don't think it was Midjourney, but it might have been) said that users would keep copyright on images they made, and I remember similarly thinking at the time, "well, that's very nice of you but I'm pretty sure that's not your decision to make."

But agreed, I think that the company is probably not going to go out of their way to really clarify how much IP control they think they have over what other people do with their tool.

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There's implications beyond AI to saying that AI images are copyrightable, but I think they're small potatoes compared to the implications of saying that inventions confer copyright of artwork made with inventions back to the inventor, even if someone else was using the invention to create the artwork.

When studios pay artists, they don't get copyright, the artist does. The studio gets copyright if they think ahead and make the artist sign a contract to assign their copyright over. And negotiation over assigning copyright is part of the payment process and contract process, the studio doesn't get that for free.