[p1necone]

Yeah I'm a little torn on this one. I generally think that much of IP law causes more harm than good, so in the abstract I'm in favor of copyright being weaker. But in this specific case, given the context of existing copyright law and its intent it seems pretty obvious to me that he should have copyright over the photo.

I don't think it's analogous to AI art though - no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process, and it's not like monkeys have any use for money or ownership of intellectual property. (Although the hypothetical situation where you assign the monkeys personhood and give them a bunch of royalties to pay for a better habitat and piles of bananas would be pretty cool.)

[visarga]

> no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever involved in the process

What would be the creative output of an artist who never saw the creative output of other artists? We think too highly of ourselves, as if creativity happens in a clean room and we are the hero-creators of our works from pure brain magic.

[radlad]

Creative input is more than just "an idea" though. It's things like design elements: composition, color, light, line and shape. It's also things like symbolism and metaphor, meaning and intent. It's both a thought process and a physical process, not unlike figuring out the details of a software program, versus the startup idea itself.

For me the question of whether an image created via an off-the-cuff prompt ("create an image of a cat hanging from a limb") is uninteresting, but what about the huge grey area of images that are AI-edited? Or which were composed by a human, but within which all elements were created by an AI (similar to sampling in music, if you will)? Or, that underwent hours of image-prompt cycles (i.e. having an AI, or multiple AIs, iteratively edit an image via prompting)? (edit to add - What if the AI isn't generating the image, but is automating the usage of tools within Photoshop?)