> Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright?
Is taking a picture of a painting enough to violate copyright? Is a digital copy of a VHS tape a copyright violation? Is copy/pasting an image a copyright violation?
A computer is not creative because it cannot think. It can only copy what others do; it doesn't understand what it's doing, only how to do something. Equating a human with a computer is unreasonable at the current state of computing and I doubt we'll see a truly conscious AI in the future.
For an automated tool to replicate art into a state such that it would no longer be a mere reproduction of copyrighted material, one would assume that the tool would gain such sophistication that the tool itself should deserve copyright rather than its operators. After all, a commissioner of an art piece may provide the prompt but the art itself is under copyright by the author.
We'll have to see how the courts look at these reconstructions. Personally, I believe tools like DALL-E and Copilot are no more than fancy copy/paste systems and should only be trained on copyright-free materials for their use not to be subject to copyright issues.
Is taking a picture of a painting enough to violate copyright? Is a digital copy of a VHS tape a copyright violation? Is copy/pasting an image a copyright violation?
A computer is not creative because it cannot think. It can only copy what others do; it doesn't understand what it's doing, only how to do something. Equating a human with a computer is unreasonable at the current state of computing and I doubt we'll see a truly conscious AI in the future.
For an automated tool to replicate art into a state such that it would no longer be a mere reproduction of copyrighted material, one would assume that the tool would gain such sophistication that the tool itself should deserve copyright rather than its operators. After all, a commissioner of an art piece may provide the prompt but the art itself is under copyright by the author.
We'll have to see how the courts look at these reconstructions. Personally, I believe tools like DALL-E and Copilot are no more than fancy copy/paste systems and should only be trained on copyright-free materials for their use not to be subject to copyright issues.