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by danShumway 1181 days ago
No, this is highly misleading, if not outright wrong.

First, a picture taken of the Mona Lisa is only covered by copyright if it contains additional human creativity. Now, the bar for that is very low, and in practice many people don't challenge that copyright very often. But a perfect recreation of the Mona Lisa with a camera is not covered by copyright. You need human creativity as part of the process, and merely taking a picture is not enough on its own. There's actual case-law on the books about this[0].

Second, the additional creativity protects the photo, not the original picture itself. So in the most recent case with AI images used in a book, that additional creativity protected the book and the arrangement of those images, but it did not protect the images themselves -- in other words, entirely consistent with a photograph of the Mona Lisa.

To analogize that to AI art, it would absolutely be the case that doing additional modifications on an AI image would make the resulting image eligible for copyright. It would not make the base image spit out by the AI eligible for copyright, only the derivative work.

Where prompts are concerned, the US has argued that some prompts would be eligible for some kind of IP protection on their own. But a prompt that doesn't meet copyright muster on its own would not be eligible, and the same rules apply to photography.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....