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Interesting thoughts in the context of the latest NY Times lawsuit against OpenAI https://www.zenontech.co/p/ny-times-vs-openai-court-case-who

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How can any content generated by AI be considered the property of the person using it in his/her work and therefore able to be copyrighted under that person's name? It's like saying someone really got an "A" on an exam when he used crib notes. We are destroying the creative efforts of true artists (something that's been going on for decades now). My work will ALWAYS be AI free.

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I think the recent decision by the Thaler v. Perlmutter court got it right in concluding that AI generated works with minimal human input should not be copyrightable and therefore are not the property of the person using it.

But where a human author incorporates AI-generated works into their own (e.g., similar to how a human might incorporate an old public domain image into a book they are writing) or who sufficiently modifies AI generated works to incorporate their own creative expression (e.g,. taking an image and adding to it), I think that while the human wouldn't own rights in the AI-generated work itself, the human could own rights in new things that he or she did with that AI-content.

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Okay, now we're in that game of percentages. Where is the line drawn? 50% AI-generated? 20%? 65%?

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I think the Supreme Court already answered this in a different context. In Feist v. Rural Telephone, a case about whether you can copyright the white pages (you can't because it's not creative), the Supreme Court said that you only need to introduce a "modicum" of creativity that you mix with unprotectable content, such as a fact or idea (or, in what we're discussing, AI generated works). Subsequent courts have interpreted this as a very low bar in lots of other cases where humans have mixed their own creative work with unprotectable content. That said, in those cases, courts have tended to view the resulting work as having "thin" copyright protection, meaning the creators rights are somewhat limited --e.g., being protected only from others making virtually identical copies.

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Let's just say that AI-generated work, even if only a small part of the overall work, is a total cheat. My work will always be 100% AI-free, and I encourage others with even a milligram of integrity to follow suit.

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