Why bother?!
Was that not the first question that came to you after reading the piece? Why was the artist trying to obtain copyright registration in the first place? For possible monetary gains? To cause an outrage? To see if he can get away with it, thus gaining notoriety?
Despite appearances, most of us in law school can’t actually read minds.
Whatever the artist’s motivation, one thing is clear: he definitely succeeded in getting his name out there: Jason Allen. I am, after all, talking about him and I did, after all, just make you read his name. You probably went back to reread it. And now you remember it.
So then, could such registration attempts be indicative of a secret race for notoriety? Could artists in various fields be actively trying to fool the bureaucrats and obtain registration, only to later pull back the curtains and claim the mantle of “first ever artist to get copyright for AI art”? As a professional musician, I’ll reveal my thoughts: I couldn’t care less. This is not my idea of gaining recognition for your artistic contributions.
Nonetheless, an interesting piece about an AI generated artwork. The piece apparently won the Colorado State Fair art competition.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/ai-wins-state-fair-art-contest-annoys-humans/
Then, the US Copyright Review Board rejected copyright registration for the work. The reasons?
“The Board finds that the Work contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (“AI”), and this content must therefore be disclaimed in an application for registration.”
Apparently, a fair bit of human input was required for the generation of the image. Still though, this was not enough to satisfy the bureaucrats.
This is not an admission of premonition powers, but: I predict that in the near future, an artist of some sort will manage to register an AI work for copyright. Then we’ll need to have a very serious conversation at the dinner table.
Copyright & Social Media
Communications Law
I wonder what would happen then if a generative AI was created and a human fed it a curated set of art, and heavily modified it’s processes to create art in a specific way to accommodate that artists vision. Perhaps that would would be sufficient input?