[tensor]

I really don't think this has been legally established, especially not in the case that AI is being used in conjunction with a copyright base image that it uses as a scaffold. It's incredibly hard to see the result as anything but a derived work of the original and being copyright by the author of the original in a similar way to applying a digital filter would.

The courts will sort out the boundaries of copyright here, but I'll eat my shorts if it's as extreme as the "all things that come out of AI are public domain" crowd thinks.

[swatcoder]

The gist of guidance from the US Copyright Office is that it's relative to what was put in.

If your input was a six word prompt of everyday langhage and the widely available magic box decompressed that into a cool picture, nobody produced anything copyrightable. And most of us wouldn't want that to be different. You'd just have squatters racing to claim copyright over every Midjourney prompt they can generate.

But if someone put what's clearly a demonstrably significant amount of commercial direction or artisanal effort into producing a original work while using generative tools, that direction/effort is what earns your copyright. The same would likely apply when using the tech to further "work" some already-copyrighted material of your own.

You're right that most of this stuff hasn't been tested by the courts when the tools are called "AI", but many of the underlying questions have decades and decades of precedent behind them (music sampling, collage and assemblage in visual art, monkeys taking snapshots, etc). Regulators do and lawyers will be making their cases about AI copyright in reference to those earlier, analogous, cases.

[jahewson]

Yes, the “copyright base image that it uses as a scaffold” case is special and I agree that we’ve not seen the conclusion there yet. Though, it must be said that I’d expect to the extent that such copyright exists it’s going to belong to the original image author, not the model creator/user.