Under US copyright law, only works created by humans can be copyrighted. Courts have (imho rightly) denied copyrights to AI-generated images.
My question is when do you think AI image tools cross from the realm of a “tool” (that, for example generates and fills in a background so an item can be removed from a photo) into the realm of “a human didn’t make this”?
What if an artist trains an AI so specialized it only makes their style of art? At what point do you think the images they create with it begin to count as their “work product”?
This would be an ideal test case for the law. If an artist uses a computer as a tool in the creation of a work, then they retain copyright. Consider a 3D animation. The artist does not manually and with intent create the highlights, shadows, and (often) textures, etc. They are emergent properties of the way the computer generates the image based on the artist’s inputs.
Lots of fine artists use computer generated elements, such as 3d printed patterns, photo collages, iterative designs, etc.
It seems that the legal question would be whether generative images are categorically distinct from other types of computer aided creation. It’s hard to imagine an argument that an artist created the data, wrote a program to use the data to train a model, used the model to generate an image, created some type of prompt, and published the output… but doesn’t own the output. It would be an interesting argument anyway.
“Your honor, my AI generator contains my original work!”
“Your honor, about 0.0000001%”