Jason Allen, the AI “artist” whose image he created with Midjourney won a fine arts competition two years ago, is still mad that the government won’t let him copyright his opus — and, in an amazing lack of self-awareness, is also crying that his work is being stolen as a result.
The prizewinning image, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” was deemed to not wholly exhibit human authorship because a significant amount of it — as Allen himself disclaimed — was AI-generated, the US Copyright Office said in a ruling last September. As such, Allen could only claim credit for specific portions of the image that he created with Photoshop — not the thing as a whole.
Now he’s making another appeal, Creative Bloq reports, complaining that he’s losing money to the tune of “several million dollars” because, without a copyright, his work is being used without his approval. Does this argument ring any bells?
When you write a prompt into midjourney or any other image generator, nothing get’s “made”, simply aggregated from datasets; a pixel from here, a pixel from there. An eye that is eerily similar to this image, a fold of a cloth that is taken almost exactly from a similar painting in it’s dataset.
All (or most) of those datasets are taken from the work of actual artists, without attribution or pay because for years we all got suckered in to posting our work online.
Now if you…as an artist…wanted to make a piece of art by cutting out parts of various paintings using something like photoshop, that’s a legitimate claim to art. But if you write three sentances into a text box and let the computer do that aggregating for you…you’re not an artist.
Even IF we take it to the extreme and say that AI art IS in fact art, you’re still not the artist, any more so than I would be if I gave a painter a description of what I wanted and got him to paint it for me. You’re the person procuring the piece, nothing more.
Yeah I’d argue that creativity starts after the idea, when you roll your sleeves up and see it through to completion. Ideas are easy. Everyone has them. Doing the work by using your skills and tools is the actual creative process. Everything else is mindless ideation.
Or to put it another way, imagine a high-level executive telling the art department to come up with something cool for the next product line. He fires an email off, waits for the result, maybe sends a couple notes back. When he unveils the product, he says “look how creative and artistic I am.” Is he? I’d argue he isn’t. He just had the idea. Other people executed that idea. The best you can say about him is he guided the process along, but nobody in the art department needs him to be there.
Idk about that logic
The dudes stuff is pretty nice. Most people can’t make stuff that nice in midjourney. Not necessarily saying it should be copyrightable mind you, but I think there’s at least some artistic ability this guy has. Copyright is a clusterfuck as it is so that seems like a moot argument anyways.
You confuse “obsessive pushing of the ‘Create!’ button” with artistic ability. Most people can make that stuff in Midjourney. They just have to be sufficiently obsessive to sit down at the prompt and believe that eventually the monkey with the paintbrush will generate something acceptable.