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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3104 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Right. Generally, as I understand, copyright is very generous (when no AI is involved), in the sense that as long as you exercise the slightest creativity, they don't question stuff like "but you just randomly threw a pile of trash on the floor, that's not a sculpture" or "you just put a red square on white background, that's just geometry, not an art piece" etc. because that would kill a lot of contemporary "what even is art anyway" type of art.

So it seems like if you use a ControlNet, or any similar guidance, you're good for sure. But

For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare’s style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.

Now if the user types "change the rhyme pattern to ... and make the lines shorter" and gets another poem fitting this requirement. Under the historical broad interpretation of "creativity" (which doesn't have to be impressive or painstakingly high effort), this would have to count as enough creative input I think.

Same with images. Today's AI chat apps can do iterative work on images that wasn't available in 2023 (when the doc was written), you could just re-generate with the same or a different prompt, but real editing wasn't possible. Today, you can tell ChatGPT what to change, and it will only change that part and keep the rest the same (as much as it can). So if you do 3 such iterations, each time specifically naming an aspect you want changed, that has to be enough... And what about selection? Is that exercise of creative judgment enough? Generate 10 Shakespeares and pick the one you like best? Based on the above text, I guess no. But what if you change your prompt inbetween?

I highly doubt the guy just sat down to the computer, typed out the perfect prompt for Tung Tung Sahur and got an image and he ran with that. He likely experimented with lots of weird and absurd character ideas and this one came out the funniest and he wrote and rewrote that prompt to make it maximally funny. It's absurd to deny him authorship for this.

That would be broadly my suspicion as well, with the caveat that the government and AI lobbyists may decide that the wind is blowing the wrong way and that some concessions on copyright may be needed to forestall serious rebellion/challenges to the training of AI as a whole.

Sorry I don't understand the polarity of which way you think it will go. You mean anti-AI people will get it their way and govt and pro-AI people will retreat, and refuse to grant "authorship" to AI-generated stuff, where AI-generated is broadly interpreted? Because that takes away the commercial value of AI art, hence AI art-making won't be profitable and hence not done, and hence human artists can keep making money?

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