When I create something, I’m given de facto copyright over the work the instant that it exists.
With artificially generated content, the legal system has yet to completely define who owns the intellectual property. Rather, it’s uncertain as to whether the produced result is even technically ‘intellectual property.’ I’d like to explore a potential framework for how to adapt to this new technology.
Cryptocurrency and NFTs were the big topics over the last few years before chat bots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat took over the discourse. Services like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion were big points of contention for the artist crowd. I remember a number of heated discussions about the ‘death of artists’ in the context of no longer needing to pay this nebulous ‘real artist’ for their work.
I’d argue that you were paying the computer and its owner for resources. You are the promptress, weaving intricate tales from a pre-existing dataset.
When you mint and NFT you create something that ‘exists.’ You’re taking the IPFS hash of a file, and tethering it to a transaction on a blockchain running on a decentralized virtual machine intended for programmable money. Whether or not any state government agrees with you or will defend the ownership of that intellectual property in meatspace: you still have a ledger that says it exists and it’s tied to you. This creates some kind of stateless virtual copyright system.
This tokenized asset management effectively replaces the copyright system with a glorified receipt system. You (probably) don’t own the dataset your AI pulled from, and the law doesn’t agree that it’s your intellectual property either. But when you’ve minted these unique IDs, you’ve at least verified that at a certain moment in time, this property is associated enough with you for you to claim that you ‘own it.’ With the help of digital marketplaces (like Rarible) you can also transact with others, giving others the opportunity to compensate you for the time spent creating the prompt. There is still labor involved! You are making ‘user generated content’ and there should still be a way to compensate you for your time.
In a world where you’re only limited by your imagination and the ability to pay for compute resources, the idea of an ‘artist’ and ‘ownership’ will have to fundamentally change. Blockchain software like Ethereum runs off of a distributed virtual machine. In the future, we’ll likely have one big internet computer. It will require gas fees to use its processes and to upload new data to it. So, when I take some AI-generated art I pay some Stable Diffusion credits to their software. When I mint, I pay some ‘gas fees’ (the Ethereum token) to the virtual machine in order to be allowed to process that data.
While it’s true that sometimes you can accept tokens that are pegged to the US Dollar and that it can require fiat currencies for on-ramping, you generally really only deal in gas fees. It’s like a financial system where the computers can pay other computers. The human artist can treat this gas the same as money, but it might not be considered ‘legal tender’ but it’s still this virtual currency that can be used to interact with virtual intellectual property.
Current laws have not yet applied themselves to artificial intelligences that require their own currencies to operate. But at the very least, they all have their own methods of compensation and receipt systems that can exist in a virtual space outside of the state apparatus. I will talk more about the implications of this in my other article “The Fuel for the Infinite AI.”
Every country has its own set of copyright protections that are always changing. In the realm of blockchain data ‘code is law.’ When you want to license permissions, and ownership or get royalties you have to set this up from the get-go. You push a button, and you essentially have your own virtual copyright system that’s enforced by the network. If it’s not allowed to be copyrighted in your country, this would be a perfect alternative for it. It’s cryptographically secure, to avoid duplicates and brute-force seizure. Everything about who made it, when, and the terms of its release are publicly available.
Ok, great! You have a copyright system that’s enforceable on-chain. What recourse do you have if someone else tries to make money off of it using the state apparatus, I wonder? I honestly don’t think that the traditional copyright system is really a great fit for generative art. You can still prove you created something on-chain, IRL, but the entire ecosystem for copyrighting it and compensating for it would need to exist on-chain outside of that.
What I’d like to see is a copyright system for generative work that leverages AI to enforce copyright. They have tools that let you check to see if something was generated by AI or not, but I’d like to see a mechanism built-in to some of these marketplaces that allow you to license your work for new generations and it automates royalties and automates the credit to the original prompt-master. As AI-assisted art becomes more ubiquitous and the idea of paying for compute resources becomes more integrated into our budgets I think it would be incredibly helpful to have a self-sustaining system that is flexible enough to be seen as a viable replacement for individual copyright systems, globally.