A lot of bad thinking about AI flows from inappropriately anthropomorphizing AI systems. Examples:

(1) The Copyright Office's stance that you can't copyright AI-generated work flows from the mistaken idea that an AI is in some sense a person and can therefore be the author of a work. Actually Midjourney is a tool like photoshop and the human user is the author in both cases.

(2) People think "agents" are the future of AI, and they envision a future with a ton of virtual people running around the Internet running errands for us. But in most cases people are going to want systems that do exactly what they're told and have no goals of their own.

@binarybits Wait, is that the reason? They aren’t letting the AI system copyright the work. I thought it was based on the (imho potentially reasonable) assessment that AI was changing the relevant dynamics and that we shouldn’t therefore port over our old rules automatically?

@binarybits Well... the user? Some odd combo of model authors, training data and the user?

@binarybits Counter point: I ask you to write a novel of a particular genre and give you the theme and some plot points. You come back with a fully written novel. Just how am I supposedly the author? Now let’s say you are AI. How has this changed?

@binarybits @Plinz I thought that they deny copyright, because it doesn't pass the check of bare minimum creativity and effort. The text prompt is not enough of a contribution to have a copyright on the resulting work.

@binarybits Why is this a necessary corollary? Can't it be that a non-person is the "author"? Eg, if paint spills over on a canvas without a human's intervention, one needn't consider the paint can a "person" to say that's not copyrightable. Similarly w/ a macaque clicking a selfie.

I am unclear what you mean. In the U.S. “copyright” isn’t a verb. Copyright, a right that accrues to the author, inheres in creative works at the moment of their creation. The rights holder can choose to federally register that already existing right, although few do. AIs aren’t legally “authors”, therefore their output isn’t a “creative work”. Hence no copyright exists. So the US federal government’s view on this is because they correctly understand that AI isn’t a person. It’s the opposite of what you say.

@binarybits @Plinz Not human user but human programmer(s). It's easy to see: there is no line of code in the Midjourney to confirm that during its execution, it "could" do something instead of "would" do something. Free will is a necessity for creativity (and inventivity). epo.org/en/legal/guide…

@binarybits If you are using a model like dalle, you are finding a point along a continuous latent space, you haven't created anything. You should not be able to copyright points in the late in space

@binarybits dubious comparison

@binarybits @Plinz Indeed, all software is a tool for humans (and other living Earthlings, perhaps) to use to process data and output new data. Personally, I think copyright will go extinct in the future, where the goal is to use technology to help life, rather than the old goal of competition.

@binarybits Totally! similarily copying by using the tools should be the crime, not building the model based on copirighted data.

@binarybits Boy, I became a good artist _really_ fast!

@binarybits Truth is in the middle: copyright cannot be enforced in the era of AI. Open source is the future.

@binarybits No, you got that backward. Midjourney is not a tool like photoshop, it's a tool like a copy machine. The Copyright office nailed it.

@binarybits AI makes humans more editors and idea generators. Copyright does not protect ideas. It protects works. With AI generated works humans are not the authors.