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AI United States

Copyright Office Offers Assurances on AI Filmmaking Tools 11

The U.S. Copyright Office declared Wednesday that the use of AI tools to assist in the creative process does not undermine the copyright of a work. Variety: The announcement clears the way for continued adoption of AI in post-production, where it has become increasingly common, such as in the enhancement of Hungarian-language dialogue in "The Brutalist."

Studios, whose business model is founded on strong copyright protections, have expressed concern that AI tools could be inhibited by regulatory obstacles. In a 41-page report [PDF], the Copyright Office also reiterated that human authorship is essential to copyright, and that merely entering text prompts into an AI system is not enough to claim authorship of the resulting output.

Copyright Office Offers Assurances on AI Filmmaking Tools

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  • human authorship is essential to copyright

    Question is now how much human work on the project is considered authorship. Coming up with the title? Editing a few words or paragraphs or scenes?

    • I just finished getting chatgpt to make me a complex mesh generating algorithm.

      It took a whole day of writing prompts and iterating and reviewing its work but finally it made something useful.

      Why should I not own the copyright on this, when businesses do the same thing with employees and businesses own the copyright?

      • by siuengr ( 625257 )
        That isn't the issue. The problem will be that people will use AI to generate books, or screenplays, or pictures with basic prompts and get copyrights for 1000s of ideas in which they did very little work, then sue everyone that has and idea vaguely similar to theirs.
        • sue everyone that has [any] idea vaguely similar to theirs

          If that sound undesirable to anyone, I hope you'll join me in supporting Microsoft in Apple's "look and feel" lawsuit.

          • by siuengr ( 625257 )
            Yes, rounded corners, 1 click, and all the other concepts of a idea that get patented to stifle innovation. If you come up with a design to turn whosits into whatits and patent it, that is great. But, if someone else independently comes up with a way to turn whosits into whatits better and cheaper than you, that should be fair game.
      • ChatGPT is not your employee, and the terms of using it can change and are not suitable to claim copyright on (as far as I have read legal interpretation).
        So it still raises the question of how much manual work is required to be done to claim all rights to the output. Who or what will define that?

        • by Hadlock ( 143607 )

          Maybe a better word would be "contractor" since you're paying for the service. You still own their output. Most LLMs can run a smaller version on your laptop or desktop these days if you want to remove the third party portion of the argument.

      • by Kisai ( 213879 )

        Because you didn't create anything. Period.

        "Prompt smithing" is not a creative work. You'd get the same or better result from just paying a human who knows that field.

        I'm not going to 100% pooh-pooh using AI to code, but I guarantee the code you got is sloppy and inefficient, and someone who asks the same prompt will get exactly the same sloppy code. Hence why YOU can not own it. Whoever wrote that code before the LLM ingested it does.

        What we're going to be finding out (likely the hard way) is that companie

    • Interestingly, titles are not copyrightable. If you want to make a movie called "Top Gun," copyright law does not prevent you from doing so. (Trademarks, however, might.)

      I don't think we're anywhere close to the point where AI can generate watchable movies all on its own. These tools still play a relatively minor role in the movie-making process. A great deal of human effort is still required, to make a movie that anyone would pay to see.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Question is now how much human work on the project is considered authorship. Coming up with the title? Editing a few words or paragraphs or scenes?

      Likely a majority. So maybe 51% must be human effort. If you use it on a title, you have to come up with 51% of the words. If it's a script, likely 51% of the script must be human authored.

      If it's video, then 51% of each frame or 51% of all the frames of video.

      And there will be lawsuits over what constitutes a frame - are basically computer generated frames like

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