I’ve generally been against giving AI works copyright, but this article presented what I felt were compelling arguments for why I might be wrong. What do you think?
The comparison between photography and AI generated images falls flat on its face when you think about it.
A camera requires not only human interaction, but going some place, setting up and having to process the image after the fact.
Contrast that with an AI farm constantly generating and squeezing out copyrightable material while scraping the web for any human made work it can emulate.
In the end what it will mean is that certain companies will be fuzzing the hell out of the copyright system to gain as much intellectual property as possible while diminishing the creative possibility of human beings.
It is in effect just a way to make companies richer and remove creative jobs from the market. Anybody who doesn’t see that is naive.
BUT I think that in cases of that image you should be able to apply for copyright. But just automatically getting it, as is the law in many countries? No. That’s a really bad idea.
The moment that copyright is granted to AI art is the moment that the war against corporations loses. Getty images is just going to generate endless images, copyright them all, and sue any small artist that starts having an independent thought
Agreed. I believe in a strong public domain and militantly protected fair use; AFAIC, all unaltered AI output should be considered public domain. Direct human authorship (or “substantially transformative” modification) is the benchmark for where copyright should apply.
All of the discussion over copyright of AI is a complete waste of time. Given only a bit of human editing AI art is indistinguishable from art made in entirety by a person. It will be nothing but a “feel good” law that does nothing to help the artists AI has displaced. We should be focusing directly on helping artists or others maintain their livelihood.
That’s a single line needed that clarifies that derivative works originally created by AI are not copyrightable, to make it explicit and distinct from the ability to claim copyright on non-transformative works made from public domain content. AI created works cannot be copyrighted (and that should include things like software) and derivative works should now be considered non-copyrightable as well. The onus should be shifted to the creator to prove that their work is transformative in order to claim copyright over the work.
That’s not how copyright works. It’s perfectly legal to create exactly the same image that someone else made… as long as you didn’t copy their image.
True, but that assumes that the people filing copyright lawsuits know the law and are acting in good faith. And that the recipient does, too.
If I’m an artist living paycheck-to-paycheck and I get a copyright-related cease-and-desist, I probably won’t have the money or time to fight it even if I know that it’s wrong.
Yeah. In a world where lawyers cost money, corporations can and will squash small artists without hesitation, with cease and desists, DMCA takedowns via youtube and similar platforms, and by threatening lawsuits they won’t even have to persue because most people can’t afford to fight it.
Even companies often can’t afford to fight bigger companies. Like, the makers of Kimba the White Lion had a very clear case that Disney plagiarized them in making The Lion King (if you go on youtube you can find shot-for-shot scene comparisons, it’s bonkers) but couldn’t afford to fight it at all. And that was a company - individual artists have no chance vs disney & etc.
“Intellectual property” is a silly concept that only exists because under capitalism massive powerful corporations benefit if they can leverage the legal system to permeantly keep knowledge, innovation, and art behind a paywall, and people in society are dependent on monetary gain to survive.
We should, to the fullest extent of the law, make it such that proper credit is given to people who make things, but calling something “theft” when the person you’re “stealing” from literally does not lose anything is asinine.
It’s not actually called “theft” or “stealing”, it’s called “infringement” or “violation”. Infringement is to intellectual property as trespassing is to real estate. The owners are still able to use their property, but their rights to it have nevertheless been violated.
Also, corporations cannot create intellectual property. They can only offer to buy it from the natural persons who created it. Without IP protection, creators would lose the only protections they have against corporations and other entrenched interests.
Imagine seeing all your family photos plastered on a McDonald’s billboard, or in political ad for a candidate you despise. Imagine being told, “Sorry, you can’t stop them from using your photos however they want”. That’s a world without IP protection.
right, but how often does that actually work out in people’s favor, and how often does that benefit corporate interests with massive influence? how many musicians don’t have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry? how many artists working for large corporations are denied residuals because a condition of their work is that everything they produce is owned by their employer? writers? animators?
that’s not even considering the ways in which corporations patent technologies that are the result of publicly funded research efforts. a great deal of pharmaceuticals would not be possible without massive public research grants, but the companies privatize the results of that research using the framework of intellectual property.
in theory, you’re right, it does protect you against corporations using your shit without permission, but in practice it just stops you from using your shit without their permission. there are far better ways of ensuring corporations cannot exploit you than to make your creativity and invention a commodity to be bought and sold.
how many musicians don’t have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry?
But not having copyright law doesn’t fix that, it makes it worse. Without copyright law if you make music, a big label can grab your music and sell copies without paying you anything. Sure you can try to sell it yourself and try to educate customers that they should buy it from you. But the big label can easily out-advertise you and get into the top spots on streaming services, online and physical stores etc. and get 99% of the sales.
Same for artists, writers, programmers, photographers, or anyone else whose work is protected by copyright.
I fully agree things are not great right now, but that’s not copyright laws fault. I think you need other laws and regulations to fix things, like small creators should be able to sue large companies with minimal cost if they infringeme on their copyright. And there should be some sort of provisions so companies can’t trap people in horrible contracts. I’d also love to see fair use exceptions broadened in cases where the copyrighted material is just not available anymore, like old games or movies that are not sold anymore. Shorten the length of copyright too. But getting rid of it completely would not work.
But not having copyright law doesn’t fix that, it makes it worse. Without copyright law if you make music, a big label can grab your music and sell copies without paying you anything. Sure you can try to sell it yourself and try to educate customers that they should buy it from you. But the big label can easily out-advertise you and get into the top spots on streaming services, online and physical stores etc. and get 99% of the sales.
this is… really not a good example of copyright stopping this sort of stuff. seriously, look into streaming platforms, they are essentially pulling this exact stunt, down to the part about grabbing artists’ music and not paying them anything, and its been extremely profitable for the record companies, who have been found to deliberately manipulate streaming numbers to ensure they get the top spots. most independent artists make very little off of streaming, but are compelled to participate because its captured so much of the market for music. i really can’t exaggerate here, the situation you’re describing as what would happen without copyright law is happening right now, and is being facilitated directly by copyright law as it currently exists.
Yes I agree with you, but I just don’t see how getting rid of copyright laws would fix this. Copyright laws aren’t helping artists enough, so instead of fixing copyright laws we should get rid of them? What do we do instead to protect artists?
i’m a radical, so i’d say don’t use copyright, use copyleft. make everything free. use open source software. let people listen to your music if they want to, and donate to you if they choose. make it so that the best products on every market are freely available to all people to modify and alter as they wish, and make it so the modifications must also be freely available. allow anybody anywhere to produce any medication they have the means to safely synthesize. make our culture free to use and free to participate in. the open source economy is a great model to look at, and its how we’re talking to each other right now. every piece of information can be that way, if we choose it. information scarcity is already a lie, copyright just artificially imposes antiquated notions of scarcity onto a limitless resource. its a gift economy! we freely contribute, and receive support in turn.
If your job stopped paying you, and told you to rely on donations from your clients/customers, then I’m pretty sure you’d find a different job.
Your point of view needs corrective lenses.
Streaming (as a legal business model) is not violating copyright, but streaming changed the business model for a lot of artists negatively.
That’s because in the old days people would buy an album just to listen to a song or two. So basically you get paid up-front for an infinite amount of playbacks.
With streaming artists and copyright holders are paid after the fact, based on the amount of playbacks.
This means singles are much more important than albums, because people don’t really listen to albums like they used to, and if I really like a song and play it a lot it will take a long time before the artist makes an equivalent amount of money as to me buying an album.
It should be fairly obvious that the big record companies come out of this change of business model a lot better because they have a continuous stream of revenue across their played/consumed portfolio, but smaller labels face the same difficulty as the artists.
This has nothing to do with copyright law - which you decide to focus on.
But remove copyright law and no-one is getting paid for anything.
The problem you are complaining about is how labels are milking artists, in lack of a better analogy. A cow gets fed and cared for just enough to make sure milk production keeps going and the cow stays healthy.
A farmer doesn’t cry when a cow gets old and slaughtered, he’ll get a new cow to replace her. That’s just how the business works.
While musical artists are obviously more sentient than cows, record labels follow a fairly similar business model. Help them become creators and make money on the produce.
Obviously not a perfect analogy, but the discrepancy between what the label earns and the artist is nothing new and anyone who was around before streaming should know this.
Streaming (as a legal business model) is not violating copyright, but streaming changed the business model for a lot of artists negatively.
my point is that people seem to think copyright law is somehow protecting artists from corporate exploitation, when it categorically is not doing that. you’re right, streaming as a business model is legal, and it does mean that lots of artists don’t profit as much from their work. that’s the part i object to, the part where copyright law did not in any way prevent record companies from eating into artist compensation.
It should be fairly obvious that the big record companies come out of this change of business model a lot better because they have a continuous stream of revenue across their played/consumed portfolio, but smaller labels face the same difficulty as the artists.
here’s the thing, though. the revenue is being generated on the basis of their ownership of that portfolio, and the only way that works is if there is an enforcement mechanism for that ownership. that enforcement mechanism is copyright law. that state of things as they currently exists allows people who did not make music to make the vast majority of the money from the music that gets made. that is wrong.
But remove copyright law and no-one is getting paid for anything.
they already aren’t getting paid though. copyright law just isn’t ensuring people get paid. like, have you paid attention to the WGA strike at all? companies use copyright law to legally strip the rights artists have over their art far more often than artists use it to prevent their art from being used by corporations.
The problem you are complaining about is how labels are milking artists, in lack of a better analogy. A cow gets fed and cared for just enough to make sure milk production keeps going and the cow stays healthy. A farmer doesn’t cry when a cow gets old and slaughtered, he’ll get a new cow to replace her. That’s just how the business works.
look. i really don’t care how business works. if it’s depriving people of the fruits of their own labor, we should make it work a different way. in any case, making a comparison to a system of agriculture which routinely tortures living beings, forcibly impregnates them, steals the milk meant for their babies, then kills them when they are no longer useful is not the slam dunk you think it is. i’m not particularly fond of that business model either.
Obviously not a perfect analogy, but the discrepancy between what the label earns and the artist is nothing new and anyone who was around before streaming should know this.
right. i’m fully aware this isn’t a streaming only problem, but its one that streaming has exacerbated. that doesn’t make it more okay. functionally, the fact that we have a mechanism by which the legal ownership of artistic works can be transferred to corporate entities concentrates the wealth generated by working artists into the hands of rich executives. i don’t know how i’m meant to ignore the way in which ownership of music is the primary mechanism by which record companies separate the wealth that music produces from the artists that make all the music, no matter how much its actually supposed to make doing that more difficult.
Obviously I’m doing a poor job at getting my points through if you think I’m arguing for the current state of affairs.
It doesn’t mean I’m against copyright.
The principle of copyright is important, so is copy-left (eg. GPL).
Being for copyright doesn’t mean I am against artists being paid their fair share. These are not contradictory principles.
There are certainly huge problems with parts of copyright legislation, especially in the US, and in particular the DMCA.
I always recommend this TED Talk where Larry Lessig talks about the issues with DMCA, and even though it’s starting to get old now it’s still just as relevant and he is still just as on point:
However, the fact that you don’t care about how business works means you ignore the root of the problem - how business works.
I’m not going to argue for communism, but when politicians are for sale to the highest bidder the rest of us lose out.
Feel free to dive into other videos with Larry Lessig if the first one hits home.
I would particularly recommend these two:
Okay so without copyright law, what’s the recourse for the creator? What is your suggestion, for example?
Pretty much what happens now–name and shame, get the story out there. If McDonald’s wanted to plaster a billboard with someone’s personal family photos, the odds that that family could even afford a lawyer for recourse to an appropriate degree is essentially nil. What would likely happen is that McDonald’s would settle for some absurdly low dollar value and perhaps take down the billboards–or just as likely, negotiate for use in the settlement agreement, saying “take this and let us use the photo or we’ll see you in court.”
If someone gets a reputation for stealing others’ work continuously, who is ever going to work with them?
Serious question, when is intellectual property being pirated/stolen (pirating a movie for example), not cause the studio to lose something? You can say that person would’ve not watched it in the first place, but there’s really no evidence suggesting that to be true, and plenty to the contrary. Things that want to be open for knowledge, like open source software or Wikipedia, are consenting to be open, which is in their license. It’s not stealing from them because of their license, so why is it also not stealing when there is a license preventing them from doing so? I’m referring to a digital context btw, where pirating is glorified copy&paste over the internet and nothing is technically physically stolen.
I’m not sure of any evidence suggesting that piracy impacts the bottom line in a meaningful way. The piracy problem is primarily one of competition and innovation–people pay for things they find valuable and convenient, and if the barrier to payment is too high, they won’t pay it.
Highly pirated movies tend to be the most successful, most profitable ones. I don’t know of any high profile, highly regarded pieces of media that didn’t earn their investment back purely because everyone pirated it instead of paying for it.
Some links you might find interesting: https://copia.is/library/the-carrot-or-the-stick/
That last one is an especially interesting case study, albeit a perhaps accidental one.
The key here is that as a business your objective isn’t to capture every last dollar that you potentially could have if every single use of your IP was completely in your control–you want to make enough people want to pay you so that you can be profitable. Pirates are often just providing free marketing to someone that may or may not have ever heard of your product.
Modern copyright sucks balls anyway
The article compares Photography, (which despite being “created” by nature is copyrightable), to AI art. The difference between AI art and photography is that AI art is derivative of other artists and generalized into a Model. Nature is not derivative of other photography. Derivative work has special exemptions in copyright law which prevents it from being subject to copyright.
The argument relies a lot on an analogy to photographers, which misunderstands the nature of photography. A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.
A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.
A better analogy would be giving your camera to a passerby and asking them to take your photo, with prompts about what you want in the background, lighting, etc. No matter how detailed your instructions, you won’t have a copyright on the photo.
I like this analogy a lot.
“Prompts” are actually used a lot in creative circles, whether for art or writing. But no matter how specific you are when you write a prompt for, say, r/WritingPrompts (and some of them are incredibly specific due to posters literally having an idea and hoping someone else will write it for them), the resulting story will never be copyrighted to you.
What if you’re paying the writers on a work for hire basis?
The writing is still copyrighted to the writers, not to you, unless the contract states otherwise. Same as with the wedding photo example described in other comments.
In a work for hire contract, the contract explicitly states that the employer gets the copyright.
You can think of the compensation as being partly from employment, and partly from the sale of any copyright.
This AI ruling is also actually completely in-line with existing precedent from the photography world.
The US Copyright Office has previously ruled that a photograph taken by a non-human (in this case, a monkey) is not copyrightable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
If he had deliberately caused the monkey to take that photo, he might have owned the copyright.
If you pay a photographer to take photos at your wedding, you own the copyright for those photos - not the photographer.
Unless it is explicity specified in a contract, no you wouldn’t. Most people don’t.
Unless you specifically pay for the rights transfer (and it’s not cheap), the photographer owns the copyright.
Under federal law, if there is no agreement to the contrary, your wedding photographer, or any photographer for that matter, owns the pictures that they take. This means that they have the sole right to copy and distribute the photos, including potentially the right to sell the photos, to publish the photos in any form, and to reproduce the photos either electronically or in a printed hardcopy version. And even more importantly, copyrighted material cannot be reproduced or copied without permission from the photographer.
…
Generally, photographers do not like to offer their services to clients through a Work for Hire Agreement. This may be partly related to their desire to require clients to purchase prints and books directly from them. Many photographers, however, do not want to completely relinquish their rights because they may be trying to build or protect their reputation.
Granted, this a US take and may vary by country…
If you are a couple getting married in Australia, the copyright law automatically assigns copyright to you and not the photographer. However, most professional photographers will have their clients sign a contract that reassigns the copyright to the photographer. Now let’s be very clear, this is not the photographer being shady or deceptive in anyway. It’s simply to protect their work, the photographs in this case, that they created.
Generally, photographers do not like to offer their services to clients through a Work for Hire Agreement
If I was getting married, I’d find one that will do a work for hire agreement. It’s my wedding, I want to own the photos. Nobody else should be profiting off them (aside from what I paid them to take the photos).
You probably actually wouldn’t when it’s 5 times more expensive.
This is the first actually decent article I’ve read on AI art. It absolutely covers my concerns and fits with my own experiences using the technology. A lot of this is stuff I’ve been saying, and it’s nice to see that I’m not alone here.
AI art is not at all straight-forward and absolutely requires creative input in order to get something usable. Prompt engineering, to me, is itself a type of art. You may at times find that there’s something you want AI to generate that it’s actually quite good at, like old women playing cards around a table, but usually you’re going to be looking for something it struggles with. This is when you need to be creative and inventive with prompts, thinking about things from the perspective of what’s probably out there in abundance.
Recently I needed to make some rings for my upcoming Planescape-themed Conan Exiles server. I started out by asking NightCafe for rings and it output a bunch of useless junk. Using my brain, I realized it’s probably much more likely that it’ll have a reference point for ‘wedding band’, and then I’ll have my ring shape and can work from there. This worked quite nicely and it started producing rings, but it was often shoving them half out of the picture as it tends to do. There are some negative prompts that sometimes help with this, but I have my own technique that I think works better.
My method for framing objects in AI art generators is to surround them with something. If you add ‘surrounded by’ and some other object that’s slightly smaller than the object you need a clean shot of, usually you’ll get your image of the whole thing. Which object you pick to surround your target object with makes all the difference.
In this particular case, I first tried to put the ring on a table surrounded by small dogs, but it got caught up in the dogs and forgot to render the ring. Eventually I landed on ‘surrounded by berries’, and that was the jackpot. I’m guessing this one was a good choice because of Christmas themed ads, because suddenly my pictures were all full of mistletoe blasted with the kind of bokeh you only see in jewelry ads and wedding photos. And within each shot, a nicely centered ring in half-decent focus.
Now this is where I got really lucky. During my ‘surrounded by berries’ iterations, the generator decided to do something weird. It put a bunch of tiny little purple berries along the outer surface of a ring, standing on its side. It was perfect. I took this iteration and used it as a base, feeding it back into NightCafe and decreasing the noise ratio down to like 20-40% while turning up the prompt weight a little and changing my prompt. Now instead of berries and wedding bands, I go back to my initial search for magic rings encrusted with glowing gems. And in one step, my berries are a gorgeous array of gemstones. A few iterations later, I have a couple of decent rings to bring into GIMP and do some work with.
After pathing out the rings, separating the gems, adjusting the colors, and creating a few iterations with different colored bands and gem stones for my different finalized options, I had my results. A little blurry, okay, but totally fine for an inventory item thumbnail. Looks gorgeous.
Personally, I’ve dipped my toes into all sorts of art. I write, I take pictures, I sing, I play around with painting, I’ve made animations, games, mods, videos, weird unpalatable noise music; if it’s a method of creative expression I may not be particularly good at it but I’ve almost certainly tried some version of it. And to me, this feels like creative expression. It feels like art.
Working with AI art feels like trying to collaborate on a project with an alien robot. You’re trying to take these presumptions that we have and figure out how to get a workable result from something that fundamentally doesn’t understand any of it. It’s this really fascinating exercise in exploring this almost dream-like logic that’s heavily rooted in media consumption, and weirdly enough your own understanding of media culture can be a way of teasing out what you want.
I don’t just go and say ‘please give me one rabbit’ and get a rabbit. It doesn’t feel like handing the project off to another artist with some notes and coming back to see what they made, it feels like an actively creative process. It doesn’t feel more creative when I’m editing those images than when I’m digging through this strange robot-logic dreamscape looking for them.
And like, given that I could literally just take a picture one of my own rings and edit that, I don’t see how it’s less mine via creative output. I bought the ring, I didn’t spend an hour digging it out of a morass of nonsense.
Frankly, I care little about law and less about money. I’ll make the things I’m inspired to make with the methods I’m inspired to make them with and we’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll make something people like, maybe I’ll cut my own ear off and die penniless, but the opinions of the copyright office on what legal claims I can make around my work aren’t really a primary factor in that or in my decision making when it comes to art.
I do hope they’ll read articles like these and talk to folks with similar perspectives and find a better take, though.
I’m really good at searching Google. I’m a “prompt engineer” too
Thank you for describing your process in such detail. I’m sorry if this is going to come off as overtly contrary; that’s such an impersonal convoluted way to make an image. There are good illustrators out there that can sketch roughs and make a beautiful finished painting in a night, all right out of their head. Frank Frazetta would be laughing in his grave at AI art.
I’m in it to make stuff, not to impress you or any dead person. What are you making?
Right now, a game, an album, and um… oil painted MTG Myr Tokens?
Cool!
I am not a good illustrator though, but I’m good at working with AI and Photoshop. Using generated images as a base gives me the best quality in a reasonable time.
I’m pretty sure there are musicians who would roll in their graves at the thought of generating music in synthesizers, yet without we would have electronic music.
I don’t think that is a fair comparison. Electronic musicians don’t outsource song construction to an algorithm that copies all the other songs on the Internet. Even though they can use midi instruments, sequencers, and samples (which do carry a known risk of copyright violation) they’re still composing or performing.
The entire point of generative AI is to generate things not present in the training set by teaching it to abstract the concept.
It’s a very fair comparison because in both cases you take the physical skill requirement that takes years to learn and even longer to master out of producing art. To make a good electronic song you need to compose, but you don’t need to know how to physically play the instruments. To make a good image you need to know how to compose it, but not how to physically draw it.
That’s a good argument. I get this. The problem that I see is that you aren’t very present in the art. The AI is 100% leading you with what it knows. AI is essentially helping you create a collage of all the styles and bits of image content on the Internet. How are we going to develope new styles? A human can use their imagination and skill to create something groundbreaking and pioneering (artists had to break ground and fill the world with this art for AI to be even able to do this). AI is just going to continue to remix remixes of remixes. It’s sad to me. That’s not really what art is about. I’m not saying AI art isn’t useful. It’s a remix machine.
The problem that I see is that you aren’t very present in the art.
Now that depends on how much agency you give yourself, doesn’t it? If you just give Midjourney a prompt and call it a day then yes. But the result won’t be very good, will it? Similar how you could just input random notes to a synthesizer and get shitty music in return.
The problem is that the majority of people does exactly that and then shares the resulting images online, making it appear that is all there is to it. You can however express yourself artistically by using prompt engineering to get something good and than working with that to further approach what you imagine by editing the result. There are many people out there who could not artistically express themselves as they lacked the ability to translate their vision to a canvas. With the help of image generating AI they can finally express themselves. I think this is something beautiful.
How are we going to develope [sic] new styles?
While I do agree with you that our current AI image generators won’t be very innovative, this is by design and not necessity.
This is what you would have gotten in let’s say 2017 when asking an AI what it thinks a dog looks like (s. DeepDream).
And a couple years later you can achieve this with Midjourney.
Things are developing very fast and in the end of the day, even if we would never get an AI that can innovate art there is nothing stopping humans from just doing it themselves as we have always done over millennia. You can already greatly increase the creativity of existing image generators by tweaking the randomness factors and those algorithms don’t just remix existing images, they are actually creating their own. You need the training set of existing labeled images to train the AI as it doesn’t know what a frog is, nor a tree or anything really.
AI is just going to continue to remix remixes of remixes
This is indeed a concern. If you feed too much AI generated images into the training of an image generator it causes a sort of degenerative disease in the AI that results in inferior results. Some sort of AI incest so to speak. The prevalence of AI art on the internet and the inability to reliably differentiate it from human art is proving to be a challenge for making new training sets.
This photography analogy is getting more tiresome the more it is repeated. It reduces the extensive work and techniques that photographers do to “using a tool”, ignoring we also have tools like photocopiers whose mechanical results are not considered separate artworks, while also trying to pass the act of iterating prompts and selecting results as something much more involved than it actually is. Like many people pointed out already, what is being described is the role of a commissioner or employer. Is Bob Iger an artist because he picked what works are suitable for release? I don’t think so.
There is an error that many in the dispute are making…
Imagine that BORG-AI is an ai that was trained ONLY on GPL2 program-code…
Imagine that you use it to fill-in some functions in your codebase…
What sort of copyright-status should be on those??
I say they should be GPL2, and they should be considered derivative of the ENTIRE training-data-set.
That doesn’t mean I think that the BORG-AI should be a copyright holder, though!
I’m saying that there should be a NEW category, between uncopyrighted & copyrighted, and that the training-sets need to be segregated by license, so that derivatives CAN know what their legal licensing-status is.
GPL2, GPL3, BSD, LGPL2, whatever… it needs to be consistent within the training-data-set, so that the derivative of THAT module/expert can be having the same license, see?
The strongest argument against AI art is that it is derivative of the copyrighted art it is based on. A photo of a copyrighted artwork would be similarly difficult to copyright. In this sense, AI art is more akin to music sampling in that it uses original material to make something new – and to sample music you must ask permission.
Which works were sampled for this?
Is that a picture of a straw man?
