DALL-E 3 will apparently include some sort of watermarking/metadata indicating the item was created by genAI. There's a mention of the Content Authenticity Initiative, but no specifics - OpenAI is not a member.

(paywall)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/20/openai-dall-e-image-generator/

"The release comes amid challenges for the San Francisco start-up, as competitive pressure builds. Traffic to and monthly users of both DALL-E and OpenAI�s flagship chatbot have slowed, as Google rushes a fleet of AI-driven products to users. But by integrating its novel image generator into ChatGPT, OpenAI is expanding its market and offering the technology as a feature to turbocharge its chatbot, rather than presenting the tool as a stand-alone product.
. . .
"DALL-E 3′s improvements make it more difficult for a layperson to identify real photos...�You�re not going to be able to trust your eyes,� said University of California at Berkeley Professor Hany Farid, who specializes in digital forensics and works with Adobe on its Content Authenticity Initiative. But Farid emphasized that the DALL-E 3′s improvements are not cause for alarm because AI gets better at mimicking the real world every six months or so.
. . .
"As part of a voluntary White House pledge in June, OpenAI agreed to develop and deploy mechanisms to identify when visual or audio content is AI-generated, using methods such as watermarking an image or encoding provenance data to indicate the service or model that created the content. DALL-E 3 is experimenting with a classifier that looks at where an image came from or the content�s �provenance,� said Ramesh, a method mentioned in the White House commitments.

These types of mechanisms help identify deepfakes but also can help artists track whether their work was used without consent or compensation to train models, said Margaret Mitchell, a research scientist at Hugging Face and former co-lead of ethical AI at Google."

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/20/23881241/openai-dalle-third-version-generative-ai

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/20/openai-unveils-dall-e-3-allows-artists-to-opt-out-of-training/

"Beyond this, DALL-E 3 has new mechanisms to reduce algorithmic bias and improve safety � or so OpenAI says. For example, DALL-E 3 will reject requests that ask for an image in the style of living artists or portray public figures. And artists can now opt out of having certain � or all of � their artwork used to train future generations of OpenAI text-to-image models. (OpenAI, along with some of its rivals, is facing a lawsuit for allegedly using artists� copyrighted work to train its generative AI image models.)"

https://www.wired.com/story/dall-e-3-open-ai-chat-gpt/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/openai-announces-dall-e-3-a-next-gen-ai-image-generator-based-on-chatgpt/

"Right now, US copyright policy says that purely AI-generated artwork cannot receive copyright protection, so technically any image created with DALL-E 3 will fall within the public domain. While OpenAI doesn't acknowledge that explicitly, it does say that "the images you create with DALL-E 3 are yours to use and you don't need our permission to reprint, sell or merchandise them." That's a marked change from last year when OpenAI restricted DALLE-2 image use based on a license that said OpenAI "owns all generations."

"OpenAI has given no word about its tool's potential to bend the historical record with convincing fabrications, although it says it is experimenting with a "provenance classifier" tool that can help identify whether or not an image was generated by DALL-E 3."

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https://petapixel.com/2023/09/21/youtube-will-allow-you-to-generate-ai-imagery-for-video-backgrounds/

youtube will let you generate ai images

Writers suing chatgpt against ai training abuse of their work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/books/authors-openai-lawsuit-chatgpt-copyright.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes&fbclid=IwAR2PP1UbMl95u-i2GPzTbNyYOdLrOmvkGGIXybv2Xb1jP16D0oIFFVoksXY

This is pretty disgusting.

Ai is being used to create fake nude photos of children. While it has always been possible to do this in photoshop, with ai this abuse goes to a whole new level.


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66877718

As an addendum to the above Guardian article, obviously is US specific. An interesting (brief) summary of US copyright law issues.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-1/ALDE_00013063/

"The Supreme Court held that originality, the sine qua non of copyright, requires that the work was independently created by the author and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity"

I think AI creations fail because it wasn't independently created by the author - the creation is dependent upon all the other people's artwork used to train the system. The fact that the prompter had some creativity is irrelevant.

...When cameras first came out it was denied any creative value and photographers were not considered artists.
...

This isn't about what is and isn't art. It's about copyright - and in particular US copyright law. Two different issues.

This summary is pretty helpful in outlining what qualifies a photograph for copyright protection.

This article is also helpful in covering the creation of derivative works from a copyrighted photograph (a right that the original owner possesses).

" In photography, whenever someone produces a photograph that closely resembles or is "substantially similar" to another copyrighted work, they may be infringing on the original owner's rights.

To determine if copyright laws have been violated, a court of law compares and evaluates the derivative work against the original. Essentially, a photographer who meticulously recreates an original work's composition, lighting, and other creative aspects is more likely to be found guilty of copyright infringement than a photographer who merely captures subjects that already exist in other photos (e.g., monuments, nature). This allows multiple photographers to photograph the same subjects, like the Golden Gate Bridge, without infringing on each other's artistic rights."

This article talks about the fair use defense - often trotted out by the companies who scraped data without asking for permission or paying.

"Another important fair use factor is whether your use deprives the copyright owner of income or undermines a new or potential market for the copyrighted work. Depriving a copyright owner of income is very likely to trigger a lawsuit. This is true even if you are not competing directly with the original work."

If you read the section on joint authorship in the first article, IMO that comes closest to what's happening with humans using genAI tools. The humans probably wouldn't like that approach as they'd be sharing their copyright with Midjourney or whoever, not to mention it's not clear that Midjourney came by their contribution legitimately:

"Jointly authored works are works that are prepared by two or more creators with the intent that their contributions be inseparable from one another. In a joint work, each of the authors hold an undivided, equal share to the copyright in the final work. Thus, the default rule is that each author has an equal claim to all the exclusive rights in the joint work�the right to reproduce, distribute, create derivative works, and publicly perform or display�unless they separately agree among themselves that the shares or division of rights or profits should somehow be different."

The more I use ai tools for image creation, the less "intelligence" I find in it.

In the end it is all human intelligence.

There are the original art creators, going all the way back to the first cave paintings, where a human mind translated the world around them into 2d cartoon like drawings. Then the whole evolutionary process of art, depending on the material and techniques used. Then cameras and the new way to play with light, people, scenes.

It is always humans telling a story.

The ai tools, the software, is written and evolved by humans. Used on machines and computers designed by humans.

The users, the prompters, who often mix prompt works with normal photoshop or other art work...again...humans.

Humans give a thumbs up/down to the pixel mixing machine, to tell it what is good and what isn't in the eye of the human.

So yes, it is a huge collaborative effort, including all the artists that came before us.  And all the software engineers who are creating the interface for the users.

Copyright will evolve to be practical in the modern world.

Probably there has to be a new category for ai.

But all modern marketing and design will use ai tools and they will want to protect their branded results from competitors.

So to be of service to the business world, where copyright is needed to protect brands, the legal framework will evolve to include ai.

Copyright does not exist for itself, it is another human tool invented to organise certain situations in business.

It has a lot of interesting ideas

"Article 4

This may seem like a throwaway article, but this is the real land-grab by collective societies. This article also adds to the existing Art L121-2 (publication right), and it says:

�Furthermore, in the event that a work of the mind is generated by an artificial intelligence system from works whose origin cannot be determined, a tax intended to enhance the value of creation is introduced for the benefit of the organisation responsible for collective management designated by article L. 131-3 as amended of this code.

�This tax is imposed on the company that operates the artificial intelligence system used to generate the said �artificial work�.

�A Conseil d�Etat decree sets the rate and basis of this tax�.

As you can see from the analysis of Article 2, allocating an author may be either impractical or impossible. So in my view, this is the real intention of the legislation. As it will be not possible to find the author of an AI work (which remember, has copyright and therefore isn�t in the public domain), the law will place a tax on the company that operates the service. So it�s sort of in the public domain, but it�s taxed, and the tax will be paid by OpenAI, Google, Midjourney, StabilityAI, etc. But also by any open source operator and other AI providers (Hugginface, etc). And the tax will be used to fund the collective societies in France� so unless people are willing to join these societies from abroad, they will get nothing, and these bodies will reap the rewards.And remember, the idea behind the tax is predicated on outputs being able to make money, which is not at all guaranteed."

As the article says, this is early stages.

To benefit from the tax collected the artist has to be a member of the countries artists organsitations, which excludes a lot of people.

In our case the agencies who sell licenses and probably the customers will also be taxed in addition to the normal vat.

The whole legal framework around ai will take years to sort out.

But in the end we will hold some form of copyright, and not just midjourney.

Why don't you create specific targeted sellable content with ai and then explain to me again how your mind was never involved doing that?

If you write software that feeds ai with random word salads, does no research into needed content and never considers a customer...well then you would still be the human writing the software to program the ai...

By your definition no photographer could ever hold any copyright...because we are all just pressing a button just like the monkey..

How do you create with pushing a button on a camera?

That is less creative than writing a sentence.