[tavavex]

I'm really struggling to conceptualize a world where every picture that's drawn must have a full notary log of how exactly it was produced, all for the sake of removing generative AI.

Besides, it's not that easy of a problem - a lot of corporate artists are salaried workers, they don't get specified commissions with an attached bill per work, but are paid a salary so the company can ask them to draw whatever they need throughout the process. Considering this, all artists would need to retain "intermediate artifacts".

And then, how do these artifacts work for other ways of doing art? What about traditional artists whose work gets scanned in after completion - would they have to keep a camera on hand to take photographs as they're working? What about an animated film - would every intermediate step in production, from character design to storyboarding to environmental design etc etc need to have a full record for every single sketch?

[omeid2]

It is for the sake of copyright, if you want society to protect your work, provide evidence for your creative work. It seems rather simple to me.

Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?

[tavavex]

> It is for the sake of copyright, if you want society to protect your work, provide evidence for your creative work.

I'm not sure if it's that simple - for one, this requirement is a complete departure from how copyright systems work now. Providing complete history logs isn't normal practice, and expanding law to necessitate it isn't common sense.

> Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?

I'll make a prediction that this future is further from now than you may think it is. Sure, things like static imagery may become completely indistinguishable from human-made art in the near(ish?) future, but the production of all art is still an unsolved problem. How long will it take until some advanced multimodal algorithm can make a full game that can measure up to ones that are released today? I'm guessing that it'll take a while.

And yeah - once we do reach this scenario of hypothetical "art post-scarcity", we may as well just delete the whole copyright system from existence - it'd be a logical thing to do. But how does any of it contradict what I said in my other comments?

[semiquaver]

  > for one, this requirement is a complete departure from how copyright systems work now.

A complete departure? Here is the current form used to register an artistic visual work for copyright. Its more elaborate than you might think.

https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formva.pdf

Registration is not a rubber-stamp, it is increasingly refused because of indicia of AI tooling.

Why would adding some questions on provenance and methodology be beyond the pale?

[tavavex]

Nothing in the form seems out of the ordinary to me. It is a lot of fields, but ultimately the main goal is establishing ownership, not discerning the specific methodology in which a person made the work. It's a departure in that the current system is results-based, where you register a final product, while the proposed system also must take into consideration every intricacy of creating the work.

> it is increasingly refused because of indicia of AI tooling.

Do you have a source that a statistically significant number of copyright applications gets refused on account of a work just seeming like AI? On what grounds does it get refused?

[semiquaver]

Asking for a statistical analysis is an unreasonably high bar. See the link I provided in a sibling comment, in which the copyright office plainly states as much and explains their guidelines.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

[omeid2]

What part of generative AI seems ordinary to you? the rest follows from there my friend.

[omeid2]

> How long will it take until some advanced multimodal algorithm can make a full game that can measure up to ones that are released today?

We can disagree on how long it will take us to get there, but if you use AI generated content, that is not product by copyright, your game as whole, sure, as long as it is not the result of a simple prompt, you're protected as usual.

Keep in mind that already, in many games, there is a mix of protected and unprotected content, for reasons of trademark, copyright, and licensing.

[semiquaver]

This is a really good point that I think will be hard for a lot of people to come to terms with. The basis for the whole idea of intellectual property rests on assumptions that look increasingly fragile.

[hnfong]

I think there's a lot of confusion about what records are needed presumably due to lack of understanding of what the law requires for proof of ownership.

Generally the party asserting ownership has the burden of proof. The standard is "preponderance of the evidence", which generally is understood to mean "more likely than not" or "> 50%". So basically it means if you can prove to judge or jury that there's a >50% chance you own the work, it's good enough.

Also note that in many cases where there's a dispute over the evidence, witnesses are summoned to testify. So you might not have a "full notary log" of how it was produced or all the "intermediate artifacts", but as long as the artist is able to convincingly explain how the work was created, and the other party's lawyers are not able to poke holes in their story during cross evidence, that's usually enough.

Which is, basically, what happens today, if the authorship or ownership of a work is disputed.

That said, I'm not sure whether "assume work AI (thus uncopyrightable) unless proven otherwise" should be the default for other reasons. For one, most quality "AI art" needs some manual adjustments or touch ups, and arguably the prompt and hyperparameters may be sufficient creativity element. I mean, that's basically how copyrights dealt with photography (the mere fact you decided when and where to point the camera with what settings is sufficient for copyright to subsist in a photo).

[krainboltgreene]

> drawn must have a full notary log of how exactly it was produced

I love when non-artists talk about art.

[tavavex]

The word choices were kind of on purpose - I meant to highlight the partial absurdity of having to entangle yourself with all these legal considerations and obtaining sufficient legal proof, all for the sake of making some art piece.

[PixyMisa]

If it's physical media, you have the physical media.

If it's digital media, the software can keep an encrypted record at the brushstroke level that can be played back to produce a bit-perfect reproduction. Maybe even write it to a public ledger.

[tavavex]

All of these things have loopholes. For physical media, depending on the quality of the output, one could pay a sufficiently skilled person to reproduce an AI output on physical media in a fraction of the time it'd take to come up with and draw for real.

For digital media - ignoring how overbearing this whole system could be, what prevents someone from taking all that data and making an algorithm that outputs brush stroke parameters instead of pixels? And digital art isn't the only thing we need to concern ourselves with - eventually, we might have AI models that could make 3D models, sounds, vector imagery and other forms of art. The idea of just documenting every workflow would be an ever-growing burden with no perfect solutions.

[bsder]

> All of these things have loopholes. For physical media, depending on the quality of the output, one could pay a sufficiently skilled person to reproduce an AI output on physical media in a fraction of the time it'd take to come up with and draw for real.

Um, that's a real work, you know? In what way does this differ from people who take a photograph and then, for example, creating an oil painting?

Now, there are some weirdnesses because of the copyright of the source photograph, but the oil painting would be your own work.

Yeah, you might get called into court to demonstrate that you can produce the work. But so did Michael Jackson.