An artist has filed a lawsuit against the United States Copyright Office for not granting ‘copyright’ to a creation for which Artificial Intelligence (AI) was used Midjourney considering that it did not have “human authorship”, which has resulted in plagiarism of the work by other users.
In late August 2022, Jason M. Allen entered an art contest at the Colorado State Fair (United States) with a work made with the text-based image generation tool Midjourney, which is paid and offers very realistic results.
Thanks to this painting, Space Opera Theaterits creator won the first prize, which generated criticism on platforms such as Twitter or Reddit; evaluations in which questioned the validity of this recognition because he had used said technology.
This debate, which has spread to other artistic disciplines such as music, addresses issues such as the value of originality, the replacement of the figure of the artist by the use of AI or whether the work done by a person can be attributed to a person. technological solution like this.
Allen, for his part, defended his work and insisted that he was not going to apologize for it. “I won and I didn’t break any rules“, he pointed out in an interview with the New York Times, where he stressed that art was “dead” and that humans “had lost” to AI.
HUMAN AUTHORSHIP
In September 2022, Allen filed an application with the United States Copyright Office to register Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial, at which time a professional was assigned to determine its viability to be considered a work of art. This examiner asked the artist for more information about the creation process, who stated that there was introduced “numerous text promptsat least 624 times” to reach the final result.
At that time Allen also pointed out that, along with Midjourney, he had used other programs such as Adobe Photoshop to remove defects and create visual content, as well as Gigapixel AI to “enhance” the image, increasing both its size and resolution.
Once this information was collected, the examiner determined that said work did not contain “human authorship”, so it was not susceptible to copyright. Allen, for his part, asked the United States Copyright Office for reconsideration in January 2023.
After evaluating it, this organization once again declined the artist’s proposal because the work included “inseparable and inextricably fused contributions” and that it was not possible to separate the authorship of Allen – who intended to register the complete work – from that of Midjourney, but the ‘copyright’ should be limited exclusively to what the artist himself did. In that case, the creator refused to delete the sections of the image generated by the AI to record only those of his authorship.
In turninsisted that his “creative contribution” to the AI tool included “adding a series of cues, adjusting the scene, selecting parts to focus on and dictating the tone of the image”, which was “on par with what other types of artists have expressed and is susceptible to copyright protection”. He also then accused this body of being “issuing a value judgment on the usefulness of various tools” and that refusing to protect the work with ‘copyright’ would result in a nullity of ownership.
Despite all this, after “carefully” examining the work and considering the arguments presented by Allen, the Oversight Board of the United States Copyright Office considered that the work contained a greater than the minimum required amount of generated content. by AI, so its registration had to be discarded to protect its copyright. With this, he stressed that Midjourney did not interpret the messages as specific instructions to create “a particular expressive result, because it does not understand grammar, the structure of sentences or words like humans.”
PLAGIARISM DUE TO LACK OF ‘COPYRIGHT’
Allen has now sued the Office and the copyright registrar and director of this institution, Shira Perlmutter, in the United States District Court of Colorado, alleging that their actions “were arbitrary and capricious” and that They were not “supported by substantial evidence.”
In this complaint, the artist has insisted that the Office “is improperly making a value judgment about the work” by denying its copyright protection and considers that the instructions provided to Midjourney to create the image should be understood as a contribution creative.
Recently Allen has commented that he is having plagiarism problems because his work is unprotected and that they are spreading to the rest of his works because now “less value” of their work is perceived. This has affected its “ability to charge industry-standard licensing fees,” according to Colorado Public Radio.