Three visual artists are suing artificial intelligence image-generators to protect their copyrights and careers.
“My fear is that our industry will be diminished to such a point that very few of us can make a living,” Ortiz says, anticipating that artists will be tasked with simply editing AI-generated images, rather than creating.
This feels very prescient. Maybe there will be laws passed to compensate artists for feeding their work to an AI, but there’s no way companies will avoid using AI to do the heavy lifting.
Here’s the EFF’s take on this situation. They’re not alone in their sentiment.
The Guild’s core proposal is this: AI-generated material can’t replace a human writer. AI-generated material cannot qualify as source material for adaptation in any way. AI-generated work can be used as research material, just as a Wikipedia article could, but because of the unclear nature of the sources that go into its output and how the output is generated, it has no place as an “author” in the world of copyright. AI outputs are not, in the Guild’s opinion, copyrightable.
That means that if a studio wants to use an AI-generated script, there can be no credited author and no copyright. In a world where studios jealously guard the rights to their work, that’s a major poison pill.
I think this would be a decent compromise. It feels like the core of the AI art fight is really who can make money off of it.
There’s already been a ruling saying machines can’t be authors or hold copyright, so that’s a point in their favor.
Good luck proving they used AI after the output has been fixed up or traced over by a human editor. As someone who dabbles in game development we have enough trouble identifying stolen assets within asset packs from reputable stores. We regularly fail to identify content with a clear origin (e.g. ripped directly from a game) and you’re telling me we’ll succeed with AI?
There’s no stopping people from using it. The only solution is unionizing for better wages and putting in clauses for union-only shops.
