AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge::United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell found that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, putting to rest a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office over its refusal to copyright an AI-generated image.
How does this work for using ai generated art as part of larger projects e.g. games development? Is the game still copy rightable? Are parts of it protected but others not?
The ai generated portion does not have copy right protection. This also applies within an image. So for instance in an ai generated building image with a human created character in front. People couldn’t copy the character but could use the background.
How will the copyright office know what’s ai generated and what’s not
They’ll have to find the tools that will help them detect AI works. However, the current standard they’ve set is that once they learn its AI generated the work is no longer protected under copyright law.
AI generated portions of things would have copyright per the article. Only wholly-AI-created content is non-copyrightable per this ruling.
Also, is there even any need to tell people that parts aren’t copyrighted? That’d be pretty tedious to do (“texture on model pot_interior_clay_2_cracked is not copyrighted”). But if a game has a mix of copyrighted and non copyrighted media, that basically means nobody can use the non copyrighted parts because they simply can’t identify which parts those are.
I suspect there’s no need to tell people. After all, mixed media is already a thing. I can make a copyrighted video, for example, in which I quote some Shakespeare. The Shakespeare quote isn’t copyrighted, but the rest is. I’ve never seen any kind of copyright notice mention this.
So the net result might not be any different. Just if you steal assets from something, they might have a harder time identifying if they have a case of copyright infringement. Only if something was entirely AI generated would things likely change much. Though there’s also some weird edge cases. Like what if a human makes a 3D model but an AI textures it. 3D models are basically never used without their texture. So what’s the copyright implications of using videos of this textured model? Perhaps something for a very expensive legal case to figure out?