There’s a lot of ambiguity right now regarding the extent to which AI steals intellectual property. To the point where I have a hard time figuring out what’s theft and what’s not. If not legally, at least morally.
Not that the idea of theft will stop me, necessarily. A law unenforced is not a law. But I would like to know here I stand.
Luckily, the last few posts illustrate one reasonably clear line, I think.
If you read the just-prior post, you probably recognized the characters in some of the pictures. This, even though the pictures were brand-new, created by Gencraft.com’s AI, and are not perfect likenesses of their intended subjects.
My intent was a visual “running joke”, consisting of a string of famous green characters, in a post on eating green tomatoes. From start to finish, those were: Incredible Hulk, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Shrek, Kermit the Frog, and Yoda.
I think we can all agree that five pictures of random green creatures would not have been anywhere near as interesting. The entire joke, such as it was, leaned heavily on the stardom of those pictured.
Even though AI created the pictures on-the-fly, the fact that I played off your knowledge of these created and copyrighted characters means that my use of those recognizable characters was clearly theft of intellectual property. If the original creators and subsequent owners hadn’t made them famous, they’d be all-but-useless for the visual joke.
By contrast, the AI pictures from another recent post largely depicted public figures. As such, I’m pretty sure that nobody owns the copyright to their image, other than copyright to a specific and identifiable painting or photograph of that individual.
These were intended to be, in order: Lincoln, Czar Nicholas II, Aristotle, Elizabeth I of England, Shakespeare, the Pope, Typical White-Guy/Country Singer Jesus, and Einstein.
The Gencraft AI provided most of those, as well. And, as with the first batch, I was trying to use these to humorous effect. And the humor relied on your being able to recognize (or at least guess) at most of them. The only difference is that because these are public figures, and no image here specifically mimics a well-know copyrighted image, I’m pretty sure I have not, even in theory, engaged in theft of intellectual property.
So, mea culpa. I think. A bit. For that last post. I’m still trying to get the hang of this whole AI thing.
My understanding, from talking to a friend who’s in the business, is that the actual debate in this area is about far-more-subtle aspects of intellectual property rights. And I realize that nobody is likely to come looking for me, for the misuse of copyrighted material.
Still, at least for my own benefit, I want to be clear about what I’m doing. And capitalizing on a created, copyrighted character surely has to counted as theft, even if my accomplice is an AI. No matter what the details of the law actually say.
