Ethics and Rights for AI Artwork
By Cheryl Gallagher
Cultural and Creative Content Specialist
In the news recently, the US Copyright Office partially rescinded copyright protections for an article containing exclusively AI generated art. It was a landmark decision that is likely just the beginning of a long legal and ethical debate around the role, ethics, and rights of Artificial Intelligence in today’s global society — and tomorrow’s interplanetary one.
AI artworks are currently being denied copyright protection because copyrights only protect human generated work, and in the Copyright Office’s current opinion, the “artist” does not exert enough creative control over the output of the program (i.e., just using a written prompt to generate an image does not constitute a copyrightable work, as the program generated it, not the human involved). At least some AI generated images are considered to have enough human “involvement” to be copyrightable, but more direct working with the imagery is required.
Representatives of the US Copyright Office at the recent SXSW interactive week 2023 stated that the legal precedents for some forms of AI art remain largely undefined and are being evaluated case by case - based on the amount and application of AI used in producing the artworks. Further complications include the fact that the end result of AI art generation may also be an infringement because the data sets the AI is using to generate the art ARE copyrighted. To what degree are other artists rights being infringed? Can one say the copyright is violated if an AI scrapes the information for its generation purposes?
These are big unprecedented questions. Also under consideration are the possibilities for sentient forms of AI, with new developments and discoveries happening almost daily. If an AI is determined to be sentient, would it retain the copyright to art it produces? What other rights will be appropriate for Artificial Inteligence as we expand together throughout the solar system and beyond?
Excerpt reposted from A New and Unknown Frontier — ethics and rights in the budding sentient AI universe. Visit the original post for additional detail and more from Cheryl.
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