Quote Originally Posted by rdenney View Post
The reason seems simple. A copyright isn’t attached to the work. It is what attaches the work to the holder of the “right”—the creator of the expression. Without a creator, who holds the right?

There is always a distance between the work and the creator. At some point, that distance becomes too great to confer the privileges of ownership. Pollack’s paint-can and brush shaker methods were deemed close enough—he created the machine with a specific outcome in mind (we can argue about how to describe that outcome). But the creators of the AI algorithms don’t have a specific outcome in mind—if they did, it wouldn’t be AI. The distance becomes too great.

But the case was, I’ll bet, not about the algorithm creator, but rather about the user who made the request. The case perhaps suggests that instructing a computer to make something does not confer copyright, unless the instruction is detailed enough (close enough) to provide the expression. The distance between the instruction and the product can’t be too great.

So, copyright is the same thing as the question of whether a photograph represents factual truth—the chain of creation has to be verified and verifiable to confer the origin of the image.

Rick “for whom photography is about the expression more than the product” Denney
As you said, copyrights must be awarded to humans. The case in question (see link) the copyright was filed for the AI machine as the author. The judge rejected it. In my opinion, had the litigant claimed the picture as his own, he could have gotten a copyright. After all, Photoshop presets have been doing all sorts of changes to pictures. Yet copyrights are granted to the human authors who shot the pictures. Of course, your point about distance is a very interesting one that will be tested in court, as well. Does AI create the work or is it just a tool?

I think another interesting question is can a human claim a copyright for a picture put together from other pictures created by others through the use of AI as a tool? I would say no. But who knows what a court will say? Congress will have to revisit copyrights at some point and write new law regarding AI.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/2...district-court