Original article on www.tabycoe.com

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Well. Does an art director automatically deserve copyright protection for giving prompts to an artist who then produces tangible art?

No, and the art director wouldn’t get a piece of the art without a licensing agreement or fee. If anything, people claiming a copyright on an AI creation after entering prompts should pay some sort of licensing fee in order to retrieve it. (Not equivalent to a subscription fee to the software program.)

A disclaimer: I very much recognize the complexity of issues, developments and changes ahead of us given the proliferation of artificial intelligence. This includes all kinds of legal questions and I don’t want to make sweeping assumptions and even predictions.

But there is one thing I just can’t wrap my head around: Do people really believe they have the moral (possibly legal) right to a copyright claim on the results they retrieved after giving prompts to a machine? (This guy sure does. His stance is, in my opinion, outright delusional, considering how artists’ rights are being completely disregarded in the first place.)

I get some of the counterarguments: People who used AI software can put many hours, even days, into figuring out the right prompts, changing them, thinking about what they would look like etc.. They also may have distinct ideas that they’re proud of. Understandable.

In my opinion, none of this changes anything or is any justification for a copyright claim – as long as you’re not one producing the tangible piece of art. Consider the art director again: They may spend a long time sitting down with an artist to explain their vision to them, maybe even in written form. This may result in multiple, long meetings or talks. In the end, all the client does is commission a professional who naturally wants compensation in exchange for their labor. And don’t forget: The artist may even charge the client just for the consultation. Think about that when you retrieve your AI images. You’re basically getting free art (or for an extremely low monthly fee!) and now you want to go even further and legally facilitate your copyright claim? My gut tells me, again: delusional.

If anything, here’s something that in my opinion makes much more sense logically: The person retrieving AI artwork should make an effort to find out whose art was being used to train that particular AI software (Midjourney, DALL-E…) and pay them a share of whatever money they make off of their AI creation. Or, really, any money at all for using somebody else’s work, time and creativity.

At this point, that’s an impossible task, I know. Which is exactly why many artists are so furious. Artists are not even getting paid from the very software companies who made billions with their art.

Frankly, the more I think about it the more outrageous it becomes. People are really now starting to claim at least a moral right to the results a software program produced for them (again, after being trained on human-made art). You may be a very creative art director but unless you yourself turned your ideas into actual tangible works (digital or physical) – I’m sorry, but you remain just that: A very creative art director. Creativity alone does not justify protection if that skill isn’t put to tangible use.

And again: Thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of artists have had their real, tangible and copyrighted artwork as well as time and emotional and cognitive efforts taken from them without compensation or consent (a.k.a. stolen). Please have the decency to at least recognize this, if you’re not willing to stop using these platforms as long as the compensation and consent aspects have not been rectified. You absolutely would not be able to retrieve ANY results from Midjourney etc. if it wasn’t for human-made art, but the human artists have largely dissented to it.

Thank you for at least considering that the people who made AI art possible to begin with finally speak up.

(Frustrated artists: There’s some good news, too!)