On September 21, 2022, Allen submitted an application to the us copyright office for registration of the image. Prior to the first formal refusal, the Copyright Office Examiner requested that the request would exclude any features of the image generated by Midjourney. Allen declined the request and requested copyright for the whole image.
So what I'm getting from that is his Photoshop edits aren't significant enough to constitute a copyrightable work on their own and the copyright office was right to deem it a non-human production.
Another idiot who thinks "prompt engineering" is a real skill and not just another step those companies are using idiots for free AI training.
You ask AI to draw a ninja turtle on a skateboard, and that "effort" they put into phrasing their request well enough for the AI to understand makes the AI learn the 10 past attempts were looking for what the 11th got
And now it won't take ten tries to go that route
Any "skill" by the user has a very short expiration date because the next version won't need it thanks to all the time users spent developing those "skills".
But no one impressed with AI is smart enough to realize that. And since they're the on s training the AI....
Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.
He made the art shown below. It's not even good lmao, why the fuck would you declare something like that if you make the shittiest looking AI art. What a fucking clown.
In 2021 I made a sound installation project called "Opéra Spatial " and entered a bunch of public prompt in mid-jouney via discord to generate images for the work. This guy made his image on year later.
One of the very firest things I looked into when I learned about midjourney was look into the copyright matters pertaining to Ai generated art. Saw that it's not really copyrightable, and then started using the search feature on their discord to find prompts by others for the junk I wanted.
He cannot copyright it because he didn't make it. He wrote a couple of words into a text box. It's no different from commissioning an artist to draw for you, except in this scenario it is analogous to the artist turning out to be someone who traces other people's art without their consent, and claiming you made the picture.
I don't even care about the "AI is content theft" arguments. No self-respecting artist would ever accuse him of plagiarism over this. It looks like garbage. The copyright office rejected his copyright claims on the grounds that he didn't make it. Same story as the monkey selfie guy: You didn't make the art, it isn't your art. If a human didn't make the art, it can't be copyrighted.
He claims it was a mix of Midjourney and Photoshop, but honestly, I've made prettier things just fucking around with SDXL on my gaming PC, and I can confirm that it took absolutely no talent or effort to do it. The hardest part of the process was setting up AUTOMATIC1111, and that's not even very hard.
And I would never even dream of taking credit for anything I've generated, because I didn't make it. I just typed a bunch of wildcard arguments into a prompt and let my GPU dump out thousands of 4K wallpapers for entertainment. This guy thinks this one artifact-ridden generation has any actual value? It's "famous" for pissing people off by competing against humans and unjustifiably winning. Being controversial could be valuable, if the controversy didn't fundamentally render the "art" valueless by revealing that it is nothing more than a GPU vomiting up inference. The real villain in this story is the art contest organizers that stuck a blue ribbon on this slop.
This article is annoyingly one-sided. The tool performs an act of synthesis just like an art student looking at a bunch of art might. Sure, like an art student, it could copy someone's style or even an exact image if asked (though those asking may be better served by torrent sites). But that's not how most people use these tools. People create novel things with these tools and should be protected under the law.