andrewducker | Interesting Links for 23-09-2023

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Interesting Links for 23-09-2023

1. Neil Gaiman's Robin Williams story: (tags:neilgaiman )
2. Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year (unless you pay to go ad-free): (tags:TV Amazon advertising )
3. The Copyright Office is making a mistake on AI-generated art: (tags:copyright ai )

#3: I haven't been following AI-generated art in particular, and therefore the odd thing about that article for me is that it omits any mention whatsoever of the central issue in the debates about copyright on AI-generated code: what about the material the AI was trained on?

In code, this seems to be the primary concern. An AI coding assistant is trained on a large body of code, and its output is at least in some sense a derived work of all of that code. Is it a derived work for copyright and licensing purposes? Lots of people don't want to risk it. So companies will adopt policies of telling their developers never to use AI coding assistants – meaning both "don't put their output into our products" (with risk of, e.g., GPL contamination) and "don't expose our proprietary code to systems that will feed it into the AI training set" (with even more obvious risks).

But apparently for art purposes this isn't even in the dialogue, and the question is just: is this image copyright to the AI artist, or is it not copyright at all? The third option of it being (at least in part) copyright to someone else isn't even mentioned.

I suspect that will come down to copyright on the input side (i.e. you weren't allowed to train your AI on these works in the first place.)

Offering 3 million people the right to a 3 millionth of the copyright in something feels unlikely to occur to me.