Not how copyright works. Everything gets a copyright, it is not something you need to actively seek like a trademark. Once you make something, you own the copyright for it. Now there is the Fair Use doctrine, a set of guidelines for being able to both protect the original copyright holder while allowing others to use and experiment with it. Generative AI basically violates all 4 pillars of the Fair Use doctrine, meaning it is almost certainly
de facto copyright infringement (e.g. THEFT); and on a worldwide scale effecting millions of individuals.
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1 - The intended purpose and use is absolutely commercial (non-commercial uses like parody are more likely to get a pass). So Big L for the 'Purpose and Use' pillar.
2 - AI are incapable of imagination (they also don't get copyright protection for their output as per the US Copyright Office), and so fail the 'Nature of Use' pillar.
3 - The algorithm ingests the whole work to study it. Again, this is a product. The whole artwork is being used to 'teach' the end product. So you don't need an archive of copied work to cut/paste from to violate the third pillar 'Amount and Substantiality'.
4 - This product is absolutely being groomed in such a way as to compete with and replace actual artists. So another Huge L for the 'Effect of the Use Upon the Potential Market' pillar.
Stable Diffusion is a corporate product. It's only 'free' now while they're building up hype, using techbros as unpaid beta testers (corporations love your free labor), and have VC money to burn. Make no mistake, it will be split off into a sperate branch intended for corporate use and sold at the enterprise level; and that walled off version will have all the good shit. After all, who's actually paying for all the server farms, their electricity, and the massive CO2 they produce? Those VC ghouls are intent on getting their pound of flesh eventually.
This is not a COMMON MAN revolution. This is stealing form the common man in order to benefit the select few. It is yet another way for the elite to skim wealth off the top of those who already have less than them. You don't own shit, and the shit you don't own was made by stealing from others.
This would be like declaring the Guttenberg printing press as a COMMON MAN revolution, if it was exclusively powered by slaves with access to a library who could copy anything you asked them too for shits and giggles, and routinely needed to also burn down entire forests worth of CO2.
3DCG, so long as you're buying the models and have any modicum of skill with posing and lighting your render? They have to potential to be far less 'soulless' than anything generative AI spews out. Because you'll still be able to infer intent from the work, with the choices they made in their shot composition; photography and videography are now rather mature art forms with a deep communication visual language. What intent can you infer from a algorithm blackbox you have no control over, whose output even with identical input/prompts will still be entirely randomized? None.
That is
soulless.
