The federal office found that Allen is not the “author” of the piece. Instead, the office wrote, “his sole contribution to the Midjourney Image was inputting the text prompt that produced it,” and then making visual modifications afterward. The office has found previously that copyright law is meant to protect human authors, not machines.
In earlier guidance, the office wrote: “[W]hen an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the ‘traditional elements of authorship’ are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.”
The Copyright Office pointed to numerous other cases in which the courts have rejected non-human authors, including one involving a book purportedly authored by “non-human spiritual beings.” (The decision also referenced a dispute about whether a monkey’s selfie could be copyrighted.”)
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteJason Allen prepares a print of his AI-assisted illustration, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” for photographing in Denver’s Pugasus Studio. Sept. 2, 2023.
Allen argues that he was merely using Midjourney as a tool, much like an artist would use a brush. In the earlier interview, which was conducted before the latest decision, he said the idea came to him while he was nearly asleep one night.
“I had a literal vision of women in Victorian dresses wearing space helmets. I was in a hypnagogic state halfway between awake and dreaming, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow. This is something I’ve never thought of or seen. Oh, I could put this into Midjourney,” he said.
He inputted “at least 624” text prompts before Midjourney delivered the image he envisioned, according to the Copyright ruling.
These were used to adjust the scene, tone and focus of the image, he argued to the Copyright Office, including details about “how colors [should be] used” and what style and era of art the image should display. He used a “writing technique” for prompts that he had “established from extensive testing.”
“Art doesn’t create itself, and as much as you might want to will a paintbrush to create a painting for you, it’s not going to,” he said in the interview. “And right now, we’re just talking about it being [created by] a much more complex system, a much more complex tool, but it is multimodal by nature, which means it requires human interaction in order to function.”
After Midjourney output the base of the image, Allen then used Adobe Photoshop to “remove flaws and create new visual content” before feeding the image into another platform, Gigapixel AI, to increase its resolution and size, according to the latest copyright decision. The work won the blue ribbon in the “digital art/ digitally manipulated photography” category of the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts competition, leading to national interest as well as intense criticism from some artists.
Allen argues that his role in directing the AI and shaping the image included “the essential element of human creativity,” according to the latest decision.
“The problem that the Copyright Office is being faced with is the fact that you cannot separate the human component from the artificial intelligence software in order to achieve anything,” Allen said in the recent interview.
The Copyright Office has now rejected Allen three times since last December, saying this week that Allen did not have true “creative control” of the work. It has held that only the “visual edits” that Allen added to Midjourney’s output could be copyrighted.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteJason Allen measures a print of his AI-assisted illustration, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” at the Pugasus Studio in Denver. Sept. 2, 2023.
Allen’s next option is to sue in court. His and other cases could have profound impacts on the development of the AI economy. If users cannot get copyright protections for generative AI’s images, they may struggle to profit, and large companies may become hesitant to use the technology.
Tech giants like Adobe and Microsoft already are building generative AI into the core of their software, from Microsoft Office to Photoshop. Allen described the Copyright Office’s stance as creating a “void of ownership troubling to creators.”
Other artists, though, have opposing concerns: a group of visual artists is suing AI makers, arguing that the use of their original works to help develop the engines is tantamount to theft.
In earlier guidance, the Copyright Office acknowledged that humans might use AI to help create art. But it said the question was just how much control and direction the human had of the work.
“If all of a work’s “traditional elements of authorship” were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship, and the Office will not register it. If, however, a work containing AI-generated material also contains sufficient human authorship to support a claim to copyright, then the Office will register the human’s contributions,” the office wrote.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
