"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
It's about people ("Authors") and work ("their Writings") and money ("useful").
In the case of AI there's no author, no work, and no money.
The media company doesn't get a copyright because they said "this story, these characters, this setting" they buy the copyright from the person that actually creates the work.
When you tell an AI to do it you're getting the result for free, so why do you believe it's valuable? You're asking society to give you protection over this thing you got for nothing so you can charge other people for it. And that makes sense to you.
What you said makes sense taking the OP's example at face value if there was no human input beyond the initial prompt. However if there is any transformative creative process added to it by a human, then the work as a whole should be copyrightable by him or her. I just hope this ruling is not overreaching.
This is just the labor theory of value applied to AI-generated output.
AI is just a tool that gets you from point A to point B faster, no different than any other tool. If you create something using AI that is worthwhile to other people, why should you not get the same copyright protections that anybody else gets for their work? How many hours are you supposed to spend creating it before copyright protections kick in?
If I go through an iterative process where I tweak my AI's output 1000 times and spend 100 hours to get it exactly the way I had it envisioned, does that count? What if the AI gets it right after 500 iterations? 50 iterations? 1 iteration?
If I spend 20 minutes throwing paint at a canvas, is that output copyrightable? Why would that be any different than spending 20 minutes querying an AI?
Is a poem that I spend 20 minutes writing copyrightable? If I want to put it in a book and sell it and prevent other people from also copying it and putting it in their own book, are you going to tell me I can't because I didn't work hard enough on it?
Should animators not get paid because they're able to use computers to do the work in a tiny fraction of the time that it used to take?
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
The "author" is the user of the tool. The "writing" would be the output of the tool. The money would be what people were willing to pay for the output of the tool.
The media company doesn't get a copyright because they said "this story, these characters, this setting" they buy the copyright from the person that actually creates the work.
This is not only irrelevant, but it's factually incorrect. If Disney pays a crew of 1 or more people to make a new movie, they aren't "buying" the copyright from the crew. Disney owns the copyright, period. Yes, if some individual produced something that Disney was later interested in, they could purchase the copyright from that individual, but that's clearly not what I was referring to.
If you create something using AI that is worthwhile to other people, why should you not get the same copyright protections that anybody else gets for their work?
Because they're creating something and you're selecting something.
When you use something like stable diffusion, those images you created are already in there; anybody with the same seed and prompt gets the same image. So it's really akin to a giant book of clipart and you're flipping through it or using the index to find the section on "your prompt"; you don't get copyright over clipart because you flipped to the right page and selected a particular one. The large AI models are just "zip files" that compress all the outputs into a small (relatively) file size.
So if the output is copyrightable it's the maker of the AI who created the outputs. AIs recreating copyrighted works shows that they "contain" copyrighted works, and all their outputs are math so functionally exist when the AI is made.
You might want to think about that before insisting the works of AI are copyrightable, because instead of getting a work for free you're going to end up paying somebody else for it - Google, or Open AI, or Baidu most likely.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
It's about people ("Authors") and work ("their Writings") and money ("useful").
In the case of AI there's no author, no work, and no money.
The media company doesn't get a copyright because they said "this story, these characters, this setting" they buy the copyright from the person that actually creates the work.
When you tell an AI to do it you're getting the result for free, so why do you believe it's valuable? You're asking society to give you protection over this thing you got for nothing so you can charge other people for it. And that makes sense to you.
What you said makes sense taking the OP's example at face value if there was no human input beyond the initial prompt. However if there is any transformative creative process added to it by a human, then the work as a whole should be copyrightable by him or her. I just hope this ruling is not overreaching.
This is just the labor theory of value applied to AI-generated output.
AI is just a tool that gets you from point A to point B faster, no different than any other tool. If you create something using AI that is worthwhile to other people, why should you not get the same copyright protections that anybody else gets for their work? How many hours are you supposed to spend creating it before copyright protections kick in?
If I go through an iterative process where I tweak my AI's output 1000 times and spend 100 hours to get it exactly the way I had it envisioned, does that count? What if the AI gets it right after 500 iterations? 50 iterations? 1 iteration?
If I spend 20 minutes throwing paint at a canvas, is that output copyrightable? Why would that be any different than spending 20 minutes querying an AI?
Is a poem that I spend 20 minutes writing copyrightable? If I want to put it in a book and sell it and prevent other people from also copying it and putting it in their own book, are you going to tell me I can't because I didn't work hard enough on it?
Should animators not get paid because they're able to use computers to do the work in a tiny fraction of the time that it used to take?
The "author" is the user of the tool. The "writing" would be the output of the tool. The money would be what people were willing to pay for the output of the tool.
This is not only irrelevant, but it's factually incorrect. If Disney pays a crew of 1 or more people to make a new movie, they aren't "buying" the copyright from the crew. Disney owns the copyright, period. Yes, if some individual produced something that Disney was later interested in, they could purchase the copyright from that individual, but that's clearly not what I was referring to.
Because they're creating something and you're selecting something.
When you use something like stable diffusion, those images you created are already in there; anybody with the same seed and prompt gets the same image. So it's really akin to a giant book of clipart and you're flipping through it or using the index to find the section on "your prompt"; you don't get copyright over clipart because you flipped to the right page and selected a particular one. The large AI models are just "zip files" that compress all the outputs into a small (relatively) file size.
So if the output is copyrightable it's the maker of the AI who created the outputs. AIs recreating copyrighted works shows that they "contain" copyrighted works, and all their outputs are math so functionally exist when the AI is made.
You might want to think about that before insisting the works of AI are copyrightable, because instead of getting a work for free you're going to end up paying somebody else for it - Google, or Open AI, or Baidu most likely.
And when someone draws something, they've also seen all of the images they're aping.
You completely ignored the whole rest of my argument, so I'll ignore the rest of yours.
This is what being wrong looks like. Run away.