An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
Another thought experiment: If I hire an artist and tell them exactly what they should draw, which style they should use, which colours they should use etc does 100% of the credit go to the artist or am I also partly responsible?
According to these people, YOU become the artist, AND the AI is the artist.
Normally, if you’re commissioning a piece of art for commercial purposes, you would have some sort of contract with the artist that gives you the copyrights. Otherwise, the copyright belongs to the artist that produced the work, even if you buy the product.
Then there needs to be a copyright ownership agreement between the artist in the article and the artists’ whose work was used to train the AI…
But does the artist get 100% of the credit? Ignoring copyright for now, this is just a thought experiment, who’s getting how much credit?
There is no legally defined basis for “who gets credit.” An artist is not a tool that you used to produce art. The artist produced the artwork. They own the artwork and copyrights (that is, the right to make and distribute copies) unless there is some legal arrangement that says otherwise. The fact that you paid them and told them what to do, by itself, means nothing in a legal context. That’s why, if you’re paying an artist to do creative work, or if you’re an artist being paid to do creative work, you should always have a contract that defines, among other things, what everyone’s rights are with regard to the final product.