Jason Allen won a prize for this digital ‘painting,’ which I am flagrantly ripping off and posting here without paying any licensing fees.
He was triumphant and a bit cocky about his win.
Much consternation spread throughout the artistic community two years ago when Jason M. Allen, an executive at a tabletop gaming startup, submitted an AI-generated “painting” to a Colorado digital art competition and won. Critics claimed that Allen had cheated, but the prize winner didn’t have much sympathy for his detractors: “I’m not going to apologize for it,” Allen said. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.” He also didn’t seem to care much for the complaint that AI companies like Midjourney—the one he used to create his “painting”— were poised to destroy the art market. “This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
Except that now he is dismayed to discover that he isn’t getting the rewards he thinks he deserves.
Now, in an ironic twist, Allen is upset that his work—which was created via a platform that’s been accused of ripping off countless copyrighted works—cannot, itself, be copyrighted, and is thus getting ripped off. In March of last year, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that work derived from AI platforms “contained no human authorship” and therefore could not be extended copyright protections. Allen has been trying, since late 2022, to register his painting as a copyrighted work.
Last week, Allen filed an appeal in federal court in Colorado, arguing that the U.S. Copyright Office was wrong to deny copyright registration to his work, dubbed “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” Allen’s primary concern is that he’s not making enough money from the work. “I have experienced price erosion in the sense that there is a perceived lower value of my work, which has impacted my ability to charge industry-standard licensing fees,” he told Colorado Public Radio.
It’s so unfair. He worked so haaaaard on his picture, as if people should be compensated for how much effort they put into something.
Allen’s lawyer, recently claimed that Allen had worked hard on his digital illustration. “In our case, Jason had an extensive dialogue with the AI tool, Midjourney, to create his work, and we listed him as the author,” Pester said.
Sorry, dude. It’s over. Capitalism won. Humans lost.
As long as they keep their digital paws away from the book covers by Boris Vallejo, Julie Strain or Richard Corben…
(yes, I am a nerd)
Art is pretty much unkillable. Its an abstract.
Do they use “prompts” to generate AI artwork? If so, perhaps he could copyright his prompts. I gather that crafting generative AI prompts is an area of expertise in the field.
Now where have we seen this before?
Steve Jobs 1996: “Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Steve Jobs 2010: “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
@2: art is indeed immortal, but artists sure ain’t. They do need to eat at least, and all this AI kerfuffle is going to make their paid work chances even smaller (the stereotype of the starving artist is often all too true).
I am putting this here again for a very good perspective:
(An aside: google did not want to show “vimeo wizard of AI” at all and came up with unrelated crap, while duckduckgo found it at once even if it was placed only fourth or so in the list. Whaaaats going on with them search engines?)
Since the ai created the art, the ai should get the copyright, but, of course, only if it applies for one.
It’s not even a particularly good AI render! The walls are full of weird artifacts, the window/balcony thing is asymmetrical, the people have weird postures or look fuzzy or distorted. The lamp on the right is fused to a malformed chair or couch, and the ones on the left are just… weird abstract rectangles. This isn’t the kind of AI output that should confuse people, this is the kind that idiots mass upload to wallpaper sites.
@ ^ tallora : Also are they walking on what? Water? ice? Really badly laid carpet?
@5.outis : “@2: art is indeed immortal, but artists sure ain’t. They do need to eat at least, and all this AI kerfuffle is going to make their paid work chances even smaller… “
Truth. Yup.
#7 tallora
Speaking as one of the visual artists he was gloating over, I’m completely unimpressed. Even if this had been done by hand I wouldn’t have been impressed because it’s nothing more than visual gibberish. Yes, the computer did all the work, and the computer is also completely untrained in things like composition and technique.
Actual digital artists make choices (about sizes, details, colors), that put more work into their art than this guy did with some prompts.
outis @ #5 — I note that the video seems focused on “generative AI”, at least in the first 5 minutes. Many people, including Marc Zuckerberg and people around here, tend lump together all the different areas of AI. While there is certainly overlap between the different areas of AI/ML research and implementation, generative AI is the new-ish endeavor that’s getting the most public attention right now and perhaps the most troubling because the leap from an statistical analysis of a large body of content (LLM) and turning into a generated response to a specifically query is obviously fraught.
There’s an interview with Janelle Shane in Scientific American titled, “Please Don’t Ask AI If Something Is Poisonous” where she talks about her investigations into generative AI and some of the issues she’s run into with it.