> The photo you take involved choices of composition and timing and equipment choice.
And the AI image involved choices of prompt and model, and subsequent selection from among several generated images.
I recognize that what you said here:
> Your prompt for the AI image generation is copyrightable.
> The output is not.
... probably represents the state of the law at the moment (with meaningful amounts of uncertainty), but I don't think there's a principled difference based on the amount or nature of creativity involved. IMO the equivalent would be "you own the specification of (position, equipment, relevant world state) but not the photo" which obviously doesn't do anything we want for photography. And I guess that's a part of my point. We should pick the policy we want to make sure we capture the incentives we want. Maybe it is best that AI assisted art (past some point?) not be copyrightable. But I don't think basing the distinction on the amount or nature or... propagation (I guess?) of creativity makes any sense in distinguishing flippant and bullshit photographs (at least a third of my photos, although I would hesitate to apply the labels to any particular photo by someone else) from prompt-driven generative works.
And the AI image involved choices of prompt and model, and subsequent selection from among several generated images.
I recognize that what you said here:
> Your prompt for the AI image generation is copyrightable.
> The output is not.
... probably represents the state of the law at the moment (with meaningful amounts of uncertainty), but I don't think there's a principled difference based on the amount or nature of creativity involved. IMO the equivalent would be "you own the specification of (position, equipment, relevant world state) but not the photo" which obviously doesn't do anything we want for photography. And I guess that's a part of my point. We should pick the policy we want to make sure we capture the incentives we want. Maybe it is best that AI assisted art (past some point?) not be copyrightable. But I don't think basing the distinction on the amount or nature or... propagation (I guess?) of creativity makes any sense in distinguishing flippant and bullshit photographs (at least a third of my photos, although I would hesitate to apply the labels to any particular photo by someone else) from prompt-driven generative works.