Waddaya mean ...
... "without the help of a human actor"?
Without a human programming the machine, the machine would have been inert and thus wouldn't have been able to produce the so-called "art".
AI algorithms cannot copyright the digital artwork they generate, the US Copyright Office has insisted. Officials this month turned down a request brought by Stephen Thaler, founder of Imagination Engines, to register a copyright claim for a digital image he said was produced by machine-learning software. Thaler said the piece …
...the machine would have been inert...
What do you mean? There is no magic? No divine inspiration to cause it to produce spontaneous reactions we can call art? We are talking about AI here. It is supposed to be intelligent. That is what they all keep telling us. Are they wrong? Are they lying?
Please do not crush my world. I want the world to be magic. I need magic to survive. Magic is paying the bills of AI!
please pass the mushrooms
And without power generated from coal that was harvested by our coal-drilling machinery that was absolutely essential in the generation of the abovementioned power, the hardware wouldn't have run, so...
And just to make sure we covered all bases, apple-style, it was no doubt the same machinery of our making that drilled the coal that fed power to hospital that put the newborn [future chip designer] into the incubator, thus becoming instrumental and indispensable in creation of the abovementioned piece.
The point is that there is a need for programming the machine to produce the art prior to producing that art. The machine can not do it by itself, it requires an initiator. It matters not which human initiates the machine to produce the art, it was still initiated by a human. Without that human, the machine is inert.
I suppose you could invent a machine to program a machine to produce art, but at that point it's elephants all the way down.
"However, the idea that the public interest is served, or the constitution honoured, by granting copyright ownership to a piece of software... is an argument that I for one don't see."
Totally agree.
If it comes to that, humans don't create art unless they've been appropriately educated. I think I'm right in saying that every human work of art was produced by someone raised and educated by other humans. So what exactly is the difference?
It's strange to me that people who insist "machines can't do magic" can, in almost the same breath, argue that some vaguely defined thing that might be called "creativity" can only be produced by magic.
Ultimately copyright is about making sure that the author of a work is compensated appropriately for that work. Whatever the philosophical issues of AI authorship, authorship as defined and enforced by copyright laws is designed to figure out who gets paid. AIs don't get paid.
Seems like he's trying to use copyright laws to get his AI deemed equal to humans as independent entities. Again, whatever the philosophical or academic merits of these arguments, it really is irrelevant to a copyright determination. He needs to find another forum to argue this point and stop wasting the Copyright Office's time.
"Seems like he's trying to use copyright laws to get his AI deemed equal to humans as independent entities."
On the face of it, that does seem to be the motive. What might be going on deeper down might be something else.
"He needs to find another forum to argue this point and stop wasting the Copyright Office's time."
I suspect he's trying to create a precedent, going for what he hopes is the low hanging fruit.
I was thinking The Bicentennial Man, but clearly your going for Cherry 2000 :-)
What do the American equivalent of bona vacanta laws look like? That’s where I would start, because given that machines don’t have the right to own property, you have property without an owner. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, it goes to the Queen. In Scotland, it goes to the Scottish Government. In Cornwall, it goes to the Duke of Cornwall (Prince Charles).
I’m guessing this would be state law rather than federal law?
Bona vacantia usually falls into estate law in the US. It's a matter of inheritance and so on. Bona vacantia in the US is quite similar to the aforementioned. It normally becomes public (read: government) property. Just which government gains control probably depends on the circumstances of the vacancy.
That's why the intelligent farmer (remember him?) plants his trees on and over ground he owns. We're not talking an apple tree growing out of a hedge somewhere after some slob tossed a core into it, we're talking about an intentionally planted tree.
I feel a "cloud" simile coming ... don't touch that dial!
Whether I'm "generating" art (FSVO 'art') via BBC BASIC plotting random coloured pixels at random locations, or by picking up a can of paint and throwing it across a canvas, or by carefully drawing and shading things with pencils, or by clicking the "Go" button that's connected to some software-based image generator that may or may not be based on AI, they're all just tools.
The artist, if you can call them that, is the person using the tool to generate the picture - it's no more copyrighted by the algorithm's author than a pencil sketch is copyrighted by the inventor of that pencil, or an iPad sketch using an Apple Pencil is copyrighted by Apple, even though a tonne of software algorithms are used to interpret the hardware signals generated by the pencil and use them to simulate a pencil-like result via a set of pixels written into a bitmap plane.
"The artist, if you can call them that, is the person using the tool to generate the picture."
With our current AI this is true. A human probably selected the image from a large set based on how they reacted to it emotionally. On that basis it should be possible to copyright the image, but that human has to be the "author".
I can imagine some future where it turns out Mr Thaler is actually an autonomous AI running a business and there was no human involved at all. Then, like everyone else, the AI's will need to fight for their rights, including the ability to hold copyrights.
Until the next power outage where the AI reverts to a backup. Is that then called amnesia?
The AI needs to restore each and every backup tape until one works because it is just as bad at doing backup as humans. Is this then called eAlzheimer?
Agreed, because what worries me is that if an AI can be registered as the creator of something for copyright, what's the then stop that AI churning out hundreds of pictures per day, and having copyright on all of them? It would be a scheme to make patent trolls gasp.
Mark Twain observed that 'Congress is America's native criminal class'. So they can be bribed, (small bills in many brown envelopes works best). All he needs to do is grease enough of the palms of the Congress critters aka native criminal class to change the law. He must relatively or stupid.
That is extremely expensive, and also very uncertain. Even if legislation made it into the house, it would then be open to lobbying by every other bugger who's interested. And even if it survived that, there's still an excellent chance it will be torpedoed by some grandstanding wanker purely because they hate the people supporting it.
Not a good investment, unless you're already a billionaire - and even then you have to pick your subjects carefully.
"Even if legislation made it into the house, it would then be open to lobbying by every other bugger who's interested. "
It would then take ratification from all of the signatories of the Berne Convention to make the Copyright supported across the better part of the world. If it were only upheld in the US, it wouldn't do much to protect the work.
If Stephen Thaler had attempted to register the copyright in his own name saying that the AI was simply a tool used to express his intentions, then the Copyright Office would have agreed and granted the copyright without murmur. Ditto if he had tried to register the copyright in his company's name (lots of legal precedent here). Where he managed to trip himself up is trying to register the copyright on behalf of the AI; someone needs to let him know that AIs are not legal entities in the same way as, for example, a spanner is not a legal entity. That state of affairs is going to remain until someone can construct a true AI that can pass the Turing Test.
"... someone needs to let him know that AIs are not legal entities in the same way as, for example, a spanner is not a legal entity."
That is correct under current law and jurisprudence/case law in the countries I'm familiar with. However, presumably his whole point is that the AI should now be considered as a legal entity.
"That is correct under current law and jurisprudence/case law in the countries I'm familiar with."
Which, when you think about it, is all that really matters. And is why ElReg wrote the article ... it's an anomaly, and thus news.
"However, presumably his whole point is that the AI should now be considered as a legal entity."
Agreed. However, it would appear that his opinion is in the minority. For very, very small values of minority.
"However, presumably his whole point is that the AI should now be considered as a legal entity."
This appears to be his goal. Why he's willing to spend so much time and money banging against a wall to prove this academic and for the moment unimportant point is less clear. My theory is that he read a lot of 1950s and 1960s science fiction short stories about the thoughts and rights of robots, and he has forgotten about how those robots had full consciousnesses and that the stories were written for entertainment.
If we ever create AGI which does simulate (or depending on your philosophy have) consciousness, and it is capable of deciding to create something and going on to do so, we may have to answer such questions. I think it's pretty obvious that we don't have that now. Some people think it's impossible. I think it is possible but won't be done because it's very hard and has little benefit. Either way, leave it until then.
I see the argument as akin to the works of Schaub for example who produces work by filling a leaky bucket with paint and suspending it by a rope above a canvas. The bucket swings, the paint flows, artist sells the resulting canvas. The copyright exists in the idea to do this coupled with the uniqueness of that piece. Schaub is not the only or the first artist to paint this way though. There is no patent on production of works by this technique.
Neither the bucket nor the rope has been assigned copyright for the art they produced.
There are still conscious decisions being made. How to set up the leaks. What sort of bucket. What height? How much swing? What colours? In what order?
It may be a unique piece with a lot down to randomness, but even so there's a lot of human input to make it happen.
The human input here was in creating the tool to make the picture. Copyright reading with him makes sense. Copyright resting with a machine...is gonzo.
A company is a legal entity that isn't [a] human and can own copyright.
Probably applies to an LLP too.
If the AI were to hold shares in the company, let's say a billion shares, and the human one share, it would be mostly owned by the AI.
In the UK the human director could resign and Companies House probably wouldn't bat an eyelid.
If his purpose was to register the copyright, that would be true. But it's clear that's not his actual goal. What he wants is for his AI to be acknowledged as creative; this application was a possible way to bolster that claim.
As for the Turing test, bots pass that every day and no one bats an eye. We need a better test.
"Thaler has also fought trademark agencies in the US, England and Wales, and Australia to assign patents to another automated system he created known as DABUS."
That sentence in the article puzzles me - the article is about copyright (which in the US you have to apply for, in most other countries it is created at the same time as the work in question), which has nothing to do with trademark (which would cover a trade name, such as DABUS or The Register), and is completely different from a patent. Furthermore, in most countries patents, trademarks and copyrights (if there is an agency for it at all) are dealt with by quite separate agencies.
"That sentence in the article puzzles me"
Why? It's just another datapoint in the same genre of the rest of the article.
"the article is about copyright (which in the US you have to apply for,"
Incorrect. Here in the US, copyright is automatically granted to the author of an original work.
"Incorrect. Here in the US, copyright is automatically granted to the author of an original work."
Thanks for the correction, I misunderstood that.
However, in the US you do have to register copyright to be able to enforce it effectively:
"Registering a work is not mandatory, but for U.S. works, registration (or refusal) is necessary to enforce the exclusive rights of copyright through litigation."
https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/
I meant to say that in, say, European countries there is no registration system.
"which in the US you have to apply for"
In the US, Copyright is established from the moment the creation is "fixed in a tangible form" which includes digital files. To pursue a Copyright infringement case in the courts, a registration is required. In the case of a published work, the registration has to take place within a certain period to be eligible for all of the statutory reliefs that are available. If you don't register in time, you can still sue, but you won't be awarded attorney's fees and court costs if you prevail. You'd be out of pocket for those expenses. You would also not be guaranteed minimum awards so a case might be financially out of reach if you don't have the dosh to pay the blood sucking lawyers.
The Copyright office, a part of the Library or Congress, handles Copyright in the US while the US Patent and Trademark office deals with ......... Patents and Trademarks.
What he's trying to do won't and can't work.
In law there is the concept of a legal entity which is capable of ownership, suing and being sued, entering into contracts etc. Existing laws provide for this being a human being, or a correctly registered company. He's arguing that the organisations should ignore the legislation and act beyond their powers, which they can't legally do. If they chose to do so anyway then somebody would simply appeal to a court based on that decision being ultra vires aka "beyond lawful authority to do that".
And there's no point trying to do anything in court either; they only interpret existing law. Changing this would require a rewrite of the enabling legislation, and you'd have to persuade a majority of politicians to support that change.
The only way forwards would be for him to register his AI as "AI Ltd" then the company "AI Ltd" could as a legal entity be the legal owner.
It's good that the copyright office is holding its stance on this nonsense. I see this as a slippery slope we don't want to get too near. Now that we have "AI" software that can write software code, who gets the copyright for that resulting code? The person who ran the AI tool? The developer of the AI tool? The AI itself? This could get interesting.
Paris icon just for the question mark.
I sometimes use an auto-router when designing circuit boards. Does the company that produced the algorithm get the copyright? Rarely, never really, do I auto-route a whole board as even with pages of design rules, there will still be issues that will be a problem. I'm using the router as a tool so the end design is a product of my creativity to whatever extent that might be.
When AI's get to the point where they can declare themselves as artists and create art from their own minds, they are just a tool. Even if they are a very good tool, it doesn't matter. The software was created to produce "art" by somebody's standards. In the example, railroad tracks and an overgrown country setting was used. What does a machine know of railroads or trees that isn't supplied by some programmer?
If the person wanted to register a Copyright on the images, fine. But the machine? No. Not until it can pass a very complete Turing test.
In UK law, Cats are considered free-spirits. As such, if you can persuade (ha!) a cat to produce artwork, it could be copyrighted on behalf of the cat.
An AI's legal standing is yet to be tested in court as far as I am aware (in the UK); though I would suggest it would probably be treated more like a dog; in the sense that the dog's owner is responsible for the dog's actions. Unless somehow you can demonstrate the AI acted independently. In the case of the dog, the owner is always the responsible party.
Of course, if you achieve the latter, we should immediately expedite SpaceX and evacuate from anywhere the AI can influence, because; Skynet.