> It would be interesting to see if this technology can erode the copyright concept a bit
Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no.
What I expect instead is artists being sued by a big tech company for copyright violations because that big tech company used the artist Public Domain image for training their copyrighted AI and as a result it created a copyrighted copy of the original artist's image.
My bet is that big corporations won’t risk suing anyone over a supposed copyright on generated images,as there is a good chance that a court ends up stating that all AI generated images are in fact public domain (no author, not from the original intent and idea of a human)
You can already see the quite strange and toned down language they use on their sites. (And for some the revealing reversal from we licence to you to you licence to us)
Some smaller AI companies might believe they own a clear cut copyright and sue, but it would make sense that they would either be thrown out or loose
So, the US Copyright Office will already refuse to issue a copyright for text-prompt-generated AI art, at least if you try a stunt like naming the artist to be the AI program itself.
However, even if an image is not copyrightable, it can still infringe copyright. For example, mechanical reproductions of images are not copyrightable in the US[0] - which is why you even can have public domain imagery on the web. However, if I scan a copyrighted image into my computer, that doesn't launder the copyright away, and I can still be sued for having that image on my website.
Likewise, if I ask an AI to give me someone else's copyrighted work[1], it will happily regurgitate its training set and do that, and that's infringement. This is separate from the question of training the AI itself; even if that is fair use[2], that does nothing for the people using the AI because fair use is not transitive. If I, say, take every YouTube video essay and review on a particular movie and just clip out and re-edit all the movie clips in those reviews, that doesn't make my re-edit fair use. You cannot "reach through" a fair use to infringe copyright.
[0] In Europe there's a concept of neighboring rights, where instead of issuing you a full copyright you get 20 years of ownership instead. This is intended for things like databases and the like. This also applies to images; copyright over there distinguishes between artistic photography (full copyright) and other kinds of photography (20 years neighboring right only). This is also why Wikimedia Commons has a hilarious amount of Italian photos from the 80s in a special PD-Italy category.
[1] Which is not too difficult to do
[2] My current guess is that it is fair use, because the AI can generate novel works if you give it novel input.
> So, the US Copyright Office will already refuse to issue a copyright for text-prompt-generated AI art, at least if you try a stunt like naming the artist to be the AI program itself.
That’s because only humans can own copyrights. People can and have registered copyrights for Midjourney outputs.
> Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no.
There's certainly arguments to be made in this direction, for example corporations tending to have the most money they can afford to spend on lobbying to get their way, but the attitude of "it hasn't been good up 'til now so it definitely can't ever be good" is pretty defeatist and would imply that positive change is impossible in any area.
In this situation, it would seem like the suit would end up at "comparing the timestamp at which the public domain and copyrighted versions were published", wouldn't it ?
There is nothing that the generative AI can do in this process that's legally different from copy pasting the image, editing it a bit by hand, and somehow claiming intellectual property of the _initial_ image, no ?
In theory yes, in practice you have to pay your legal expanses in US even if you win the case. Which means you can bankrupt because a big company thought you infringed on their rights even if you didn't. Simply because you can't afford the costs.
Copyright law (especially in US) only ever changes in the direction that suits corporations. So - no.
What I expect instead is artists being sued by a big tech company for copyright violations because that big tech company used the artist Public Domain image for training their copyrighted AI and as a result it created a copyrighted copy of the original artist's image.