Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are therefore public domain.

I find this claim on the "about page" quite interesting. Some of those images might be so close to the training data that the copyright protection for fictional characters becomes relevant, even if the image is not identical. This is visible in this topic as people recognize characters from popular-culture (video-games or movies), because the training data seems to also contain fanart.



I suspect in legal terms, if you feed copyrighted images into a computer program, the output is a derivative work, AI or no.

As you say, some of the output images are clearly of specific characters, which turns this from "legally grey" into "definitely not public domain".


Depends how creative the AI is. Human artists are trained on copyrighted images too.


Good artists copy, great artists steal?

This is the whole conundrum of creation and copyright. Every creative work is protected by copyright yet every creative work is the sum of unconscious derivations to varying degrees of something an author has perceived, creative works existing ex nihilo are at best vanishingly rare; personally I'm not even sure they exist, I'm leaning more towards we're just mistaking unusually big jumps of derivations/combinations of those for ex nihilo creative works. We readily recognise "influences" of great artists (whether it is music, literature, painting...).

Doesn't mean creative work should not be protected, but drawing the line of infringing vs not is by definition extremely blurry and subjective.

That talk is as relevant as ever:

https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_cr...


Man what happens when thispersondoesnotexist.com generates something that is exceptionally close to my face ... ?

Am I now in the public domain?

Not that I'm looking to sue for such things but this "AI did it so it's public" thing ... easily could cross over into real life.


AIUI, copyright holds for a specific fixed expression. So if an artist drew a face that looks incredibly like yours, the artist would hold the copyright over that drawing, but have no claim over your face.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: