If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"?
I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others.
This seems like a bad test because generic barely-creative works are much more easily generated by AI engines regardless of the source training data. I wonder if we're going to see IP troll style behavior from artists drawing many obvious things so they'll have standing to sue (and negotiate a 'fuck off' settlement) with AI art engines.
Probably not, though even this may be debatable given the specific prompt and specific similarities (for example, if it generated the exact color and exact aspect ratio for a prompt like "Yves Klein IKB 79", I could see an argument for infringement; if it generated the same thing for a prompt like "filled-in 16:5 rectangle with color #0000FF", it would be arguable that it isn't).
> I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others.
The important question in copyright is, theoretically, if you actually copied the specific piece or if you happened to create a similar-looking piece by accident. The difficulty of proving one or the other varies with the specific circumstances. For example, it's rather hard to claim you happened to paint a picture almost identical with Picasso's Guernica. It's rather easy to claim that signing an empty piece of canvas was entirely your idea and you weren't copying Dali's signed empty canvases.
Similarly for AI, the copyright discussion will come down to how much of its output is identifiable pieces of other's artworks, especially when prompted for such. I personally haven't played with it, but if it's possible to get SD or other similar models to produce identical or very similar copies of (pieces of) some artist's works using relatively simple prompts*, it should be a pretty slam-dunk case of copyright infringement.
* by this I mean prompts that don't themselves encode the information, like I showed in my "16:7 rectangle with solid color #0000FF" example.
Solid blue is superlative example, but I think the amount of creativity in different artworks has a HUGE amount of variance. You can kind of "score" any artwork using and AI Art engine in terms of "what is the minimum number of terms in a prompt that I can use to recreate a substantially similar image (that wasn't a part of the training set)"
Some artists' styles can probably be articulated in no fewer than 600 words. Other artists can probably be articulated in 6. The quantifiable amount of interesting decisions in a piece of art has orders of magnitude of variance.
If someone (manually) copies your style and lets AI train on their works, your 600-word masterpiece could instantly drop to 15-words once (human created non-copyright infringing) derivatives are in the training set.
We are explorers of the frontiers of latent space, and theres going to be all sorts of new things for people to get mad about along the way.
