Tags
artificial intelligence, bing, Conan, copyright, google bard, poems, poetry, robot, writing
Here’s a bit of silliness for my fellow writers, followed by more serious thoughts and updates on the legal status of AI-generated images and text.
Conan and the Typewriter
The Cimmerian stood in a fit of rage,
typewriter before him, mechanical cage.
He’d tried to write, but words wouldn’t flow.
The keys were like hammers beating his soul.
The barbarian shouted, “Enough of this!”
He smashed the machine with his mighty fist.
“This thing shall not defile my name!”
He roared and swung the axe with aim.
The keys went flying, the carriage undone,
and paper was scattered like leaves in the sun.
“Now that is writing!” Conan declared,
and strode away, his torso bared.
He would not be bound by that silly thing.
The machine was dead, and Conan was king.
Image generated by Bing AI; Poem generated by Google Bard AI and edited by Mars Will Send No More.
In August 2023, a US District Court upheld the US Copyright Office’s refusal to grant copyright protection to an Artificial Intelligence for the “art” it generates. The judge made it clear that being human is essential to any valid copyright claim. On a related note, the US Copyright Office earlier this year established that humans cannot obtain copyright protection in their own names for AI-generated art. The material in question was images generated by Midjourney and then used as panels in a comic-book story. While the Office determined the story and text were the author’s original work, and therefore under copyright, the images were not.
I absolutely agree with these decisions. I don’t have any valid copyright claim to the image and poem above. I just had the robots make them for my own amusement. However, we will probably see a grey area where courts will be deciding on a case-by-case basis just how much “transformation” a human needs to do to the robot’s output before the result can be considered original human-made art. Writer/actor Steve M. Robertson’s new graphic novel Wist is an example of using Midjourney for basic layouts but then extensively editing and digitally painting over them to create, for example, consistent character faces across the story. That seems to me like a thorough transformation, but Steve has dicussed on Reddit how he isn’t claiming any copyright over the images themselves, despite his alterations to them — and that seems like a smart and honest move to me.
This all brings to mind the history of legal arguments since the 1980s about sampling existing music to create new hip-hop and electronic music tracks, except the robots won’t have any legal claims to their output. And during the half-century I’ve been alive, both analog and digital sampling have given rise to a common feeling that Everything is a Remix, especially among the Gen X and younger generations who have come of age in a modern society where much of art occupies an interesting position as both a commerical product and a part of a shared culture. The line between “folk music” and “classical music” has become increasingly blurred over the past few centuries, and may have been an illusion all along, but there’s no denying that every generation since mine has increasingly come to see everything as folk art we all have access to and can transform or change or add our own spin to as members of a globally shared culture — just like our great-grandparents and beyond would take a commonly known song and add or change verses, tempo, or song structure as they saw fit.
In any case, today’s Conan poem is a combination of three of Bard’s drafts, and I did minor re-writes to smooth it out. But if I showed you the original drafts, I think you’d agree there is not enough of my own originality to call this piece my own. It’s no more “my” writing than the books I have heavily edited for other authors, including re-ordering paragraphs or even entire chapters for clarity, and re-writing sentences to improve their readability. Although there have been a few situations over the years where an author needed so much help that I was almost a co-writer, I’ve always been happy to let the author take full credit for the text.
So, I give the robots full credit for this Conan silliness, and I hope the Estate of Robert E. Howard will forgive us. Now enjoy a fun video where educational Youtuber Tom Scott explains that he cannot claim any ownership of the footage a hungry bear accidentally created after taking Tom’s GoPro camera. It’s the same idea: Humans can’t claim copyright over things generated by non-humans, even if the humans do some editing and post-production.