Copywrong

By Gordon Hopkins So, this is an interesting development.I've been following the whole AI (Artificial Intelligence) versus copyright legal mishegas* and it has taken a turn I wasn't expecting. As I have noted previously, AI doesn't really create anything new. It takes existing content, be it writing, visual or sound, and “remixes” that content to produce something that gives the illusion of having been created by a human. That is why AI requires a massive pool of already existing content to draw from before it can “create” anything. Obviously, the content in that pool, be it books or movies or music, has already been copyrighted by someone else, the actual creator. So, the legal wrangling that has been swirling around AI usually focuses on accusations that AI is violating copyright by using the works of people. However, a federal appeals court in Washington D.C. just addressed a new wrinkle in the AI/copyright debate that I wasn't even aware of. This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit determined that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. The U.S. Copyright Office has rejected a number of attempts to copyright AI generated art. The judge in this case determined that creation by a human is a “bedrock requirement of copyright” based on “centuries of settled understanding.” This specific instance involves an image called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” created by DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). Stephen Thaler, the computer scientist that created DABUS, insist this decision is wrong because his creation is, in his words, sentient, “It’s more like a sentient, artificial being. But I even question the artificial part.” The claim that DABUS is sentient seems dubious, although I admit I'm not even sure how to define sentience. I can say this. If Thaler is, indeed, correct and his creation is sentient, I suspect the world may have bigger problems than copyright lawsuits. *I'm an Irish Catholic but I like to throw in a bit of Yiddish once in a while, just to shake things up a bit. By the way, you can tell autocorrect isn't Jewish because it does know “mishegas” is a word. It keeps trying to change “mishegas” to “mishmash.”

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