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Robotic artists have been involved in various types of creative works for a long time. Since the 1970s computers have been producing crude works of art, and these efforts continue today. Most of these computer-generated works of art relied heavily on the creative input of the programmer; the machine was at most an instrument or a tool very much like a brush or canvas
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. When applied to art, music and literary works, machine learning algorithms are actually learning from input provided by programmers. They learn from these data to generate a new piece of work, making independent decisions throughout the process to determine what the new work looks like. An important feature for this type of artificial intelligence is that while programmers can set parameters, the work is actually generated by the computer program itself – referred to as a neural network – in a process akin to the thought processes of humans.
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Creating works using artificial intelligence could have very important implications for copyright law. Traditionally, the ownership of copyright in computer-generated works was not in question because the program was merely a tool that supported the creative process, very much like a pen and paper. Creative works qualify for copyright protection if they are original, with most definitions of originality requiring a human author. Most jurisdictions, including Spain and Germany, state that only works created by a human can be protected by copyright.
But with the latest types of artificial intelligence, the computer program is no longer a tool; it actually makes many of the decisions involved in the creative process without human intervention.
Commercial impact
One could argue that this distinction is not important, but the manner in which the law tackles new types of machine-driven creativity could have far-reaching commercial implications. Artificial intelligence is already being used to generate works in music, journalism and gaming. These works could in theory be deemed free of copyright because they are not created by a human author. As such, they could be freely used and reused by anyone. That would be very bad news for the companies selling the works.
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If developers doubt whether creations generated through machine learning qualify for copyright protection, what is the incentive to invest in such systems? On the other hand, deploying artificial intelligence to handle time-consuming endeavors could still be justified, given the savings accrued in personnel costs, but it is too early to tell.
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There are two ways in which copyright law can deal with works where human interaction is minimal or non-existent. It can either deny copyright protection for works that have been generated by a computer or it can attribute authorship of such works to the creator of the program.
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Should the law recognize the contribution of the programmer or the user of that program? In the analogue world, this is like asking whether copyright should be conferred on the maker of a pen or the writer. Why, then, could the existing ambiguity prove problematic in the digital world? Take the case of Microsoft Word. Microsoft developed the Word computer program but clearly does not own every piece of work produced using that software. The copyright lies with the user, i.e. the author who used the program to create his or her work. But when it comes to artificial intelligence algorithms that are capable of generating a work, the user’s contribution to the creative process may simply be to press a button so the machine can do its thing.
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Monumental advances in computing and the sheer amount of available computational power may well make the distinction moot; when you give a machine the capacity to learn styles from large datasets of content, it will become ever better at mimicking humans. And given enough computing power, soon we may not be able to distinguish between human-generated and machine-generated content. We are not yet at that stage, but if and when we do get there, we will have to decide what type of protection, if any, we should give to emergent works created by intelligent algorithms with little or no human intervention
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Source: Artificial intelligence and copyright
It’s interesting to read that in 2017 the training material used is considered irrelevant to the output – as it should be. The books and art that go into AI’s are just like the books and art that go into humans. The derived works that AI’s and humans make belong to them, not to the content it is based on. And just because an AI – just like a human – can quote the original source material doesn’t change that.
Robin Edgar
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