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.”

  • Rhoeri@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    That douche punched a sentence into a computer and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become.

    • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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      17 minutes ago

      Dude just pointed a camera, pressed click and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become. We could take that train of thought all the way to “if you’re not grinding up your own pigments and painting on cave walls you’re not really an artist”.

      AI is a tool. I don’t have an issue with someone using AI and calling themselves an artist, as long as they’ve generated the AI model based on their own previous art. You teach a machine to mimic your brush strokes and color palette and then the machine spits out images as you taught it. I don’t see an issue there because you might as well have painted them yourself, it just saves time to have AI do most (if not all) of the work.

      Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?

      • Rhoeri@lemmy.world
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        9 minutes ago

        Ahh yes, the camera bullshit. Here we go…

        Yes a photographer is an artist. They need to know light diffusion, locational effects, distance and magnification, aperture, shutter speed, and have a subject prepped and able to take direction. They also have to have an insane understanding of post process editing.

        They don’t simply type a sentence into a computer and get beautiful photographs.

        A child can produce the exact same image by simply typing the exact same sentence into a computer.

        A child cannot be given a camera and be tasked to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer- and succeed.

        So stop with this bullshit comparison. It’s apples and oranges.

        • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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          11 minutes ago

          Did you read the rest of the comment or did you stop after the first sentence?

          • Rhoeri@lemmy.world
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            8 minutes ago

            I didn’t need to. The moment photography was brought up as a comparison, that’s all I needed to know.

            AI is not art. Period.

            • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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              4 minutes ago

              Let’s say I’ve been an artist for 10 years. I take all my work and stick it into an AI model. That model starts generating images based on the art I’ve created in the past 10 years. Have I stopped being an artist because I put down the brush and picked up a keyboard?

              How would a child produce the exact same image if they don’t have my AI model?

      • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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        9 minutes ago

        Firstly, I agree with most of what you’ve said. However…

        Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?

        Is there anything in the world that isn’t a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn’t influenced by something you’ve heard, read, seen? Feeding art to AI is no different than a student walking a gallery and learning the styles of the masters. Is the AI better at it? Sure. But it’s still doing the same thing. If someone with eidetic memory paints like Picasso, are they not an artist?

        To really drive home the point, if I have a friend that is an artist, like, a really good artist, and I ask them to paint something for me, say, a field with wildflowers in the snow, and they come back with something that looks just like Landscape With Snow by Van Gogh, does that mean my friend isn’t an artist? If I ask AI for that, and they come back with something like what my friend painted, how is it any different? We call them “learning” models, but we refuse to believe that they “learn”. Instead we call it “theft”.

      • Rhoeri@lemmy.world
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        15 minutes ago

        Yeah, the joke is that someone thinks they can call themselves an artist by typing a sentence into a prompt on a computer. I get that you’re trying to call me out, but the failure in your joke is that I’m not claiming to be an artist. That douche is.

        You’ve got nothing.