More than 5,600 artists signed an open letter protesting the auction, saying that the works used AI models that are trained on copyrighted work.
A representative for Christie’s shared a statement about the issue. “From the beginning, two things have been true about the art world: one, artists are inspired by what came before them, and two, art can spark debate, discussion, and controversy,” the statement reads. “The discussions around digital art, including art created using AI technology, are not new and in many ways should be expected. Many artists – Pop artists, for example – have been the subject of similar discussions. Having said that, Christie’s, a global company with world-class experts, is uniquely positioned to explore the relatively new and ever-changing space of digital art: the artists, collectors, market and challenges.”
AI art is not protected by copyright, yes. That isn’t a “should” but rather how it actually works in nearly all countries but a few, certainly including the US.
This isn’t true. You should read the latest guidance by the United States Copyright Office.
The CO didn’t say AI generated works were copyrightable. In fact, the second part of the report very much affirmed their earlier decisions that AI generated content is necessarily not protected under copyright. What you are probably referring to is the discussion the Office presented about joint works style pieces–that is, where a human performed additional creative contributions to the AI generated material. In that case, the portions such that they were generated by the human contributor are protected under copyright as expected. Further, they made very clear that what constitutes creative contribution and thus gets coverage is determined on a case by case basis. None of this is all that surprising, nor does it refute the rule that AI generated material, having been authored by something other than a human, is not afforded any copyright protection whatsoever.
But they do, explicitly:
Correct, but they were stating that people should not support artists backing IP laws, and my lay understanding is that the only thing keeping it that way is IP laws. If we got rid of IP laws, I’m not sure individual artists would win. Large corporations would be able to produce at scale, and you’d get the same issue as with redbubble or whatever, but with legit companies instead of shady ones.
For sure. I personally think our current IP laws are well equipped to handle AI generated content, even if there are many other situations where they require a significant overhaul. And the person you responded to is really only sort of maybe half correct. Those advocating for, e.g., there to be some sort of copyright infringement in training AI aren’t going to bat for current IP laws-- they’re advocating for altogether new IP laws effectively thar would effectively further assetize and allow even more rent seeking in intangibles. Artists would absolutely not come out ahead on this and it’s ludicrous to think so. Publishing platforms would make creators sign those rights away and large corporations would be the only ones financially capable of acting in this new IP landscape. The compromise also likely would be attaching a property right in the model outputs and so it would actually become far more practical to leverage AI generated material at commercial scale since the publisher could enforce IP rights on the product.
The real solution to this particular issue is require all models that out materials to the public at large be open source and all outputs distributed at large be marked as generated by AI and thus being effectively in the public domain.
Unfortunately, I can’t speak intelligently as to specifically what should be done with IP, but broad strokes I agree that output should be public domain and public facing models should be open. I do feel as though there should be a way to compensate people for inputs used for internal commercial purposes.
If there’s training needed for something and it has separate books/video, a company should not be able to throw that into an AI, and generate a new book/video for their internal use. Either they need to make that resource available publicly, or purchase a specific license for internal use of the original material for AI. I don’t know why I think that, mostly just vibes based because if they hired a person/company to do the same I’d be fine with it, so maybe I just have some cognitive dissonance going on, but it feels different. The way that there are commercial and personal licenses, I think having an AI license might make sense. But again, I’m way out of my depth and field of knowledge here, so I could be way off.