Human authorship?

Posted Jun 30, 2025 20:05 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Human authorship? by NYKevin
Parent article: Supporting kernel development with large language models

The other problem, even with photography, is that the amount of creative input varies massively. And the further back in time you go, the more effort it took to even "point and shoot". Today, you point a snartphone at a bunch of friends, and the AI will take a good shot for you.

Go back to the start of common digital photography (maybe Y2K, with your typical camera being measured in K-pixels, and a 1.3MP camera being very hi-def, you still needed a fair bit of nouce, zooming, framing, to try and give you a decent chance of post-processing (if you wanted to).

A bit earlier (early 90s) I had a mid-range SLR (F90), with a good zoom and flash-gun. It still took a fair bit of creative input in selecting the shot, but the camera took good care of making sure the shot itself was good.

Go back to the 70s/80s, the Zenith was a popular camera that basically had no smarts whatsoever. In order to take a shot as good as the F90, you had to choose the f-stop and shutter speed, balance the flash against daylight, basically doing a lot of work.

Go further back to medium format, and you needed a tripod ...

With *both* AI and photography, the more you put in, the more you get out (well, that's true of life :-)

And (iirc the parent context correctly) if someone says "the output of an AI is not copyrightable", what are they going to say when someone argues "the *input* *is* copyrightable, and the output is *clearly* *derivative*". If the output of photography is copyrightable, even with minimal creative input, while the output of an AI is not even with massive creative input, then something is pretty blatantly wrong.

Cheers,
Wol

Human authorship?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 10:46 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

If the output of photography is copyrightable, even with minimal creative input, while the output of an AI is not even with massive creative input, then something is pretty blatantly wrong.

At least here in Germany, copyright law differentiates between run-of-the-mill snapshot photography and photography as art, based on a “threshold of originality”. The latter gets full copyright protection and the former doesn't – there is still some protection but, for example, it doesn't last as long as it would otherwise.

IMHO, the analogy with photography falls flat because a point-and-shoot camera will, to all intents and purposes, produce reproducible results given the same framing, lighting conditions, etc. (which is generally considered a feature if you're a photographer). AIUI, with AI there is no unique deterministic relationship between the prompt you're entering and what the AI produces. If you feed your AI image generator (or what have you) the same prompt twice in a row you will probably get different results, so the output does not depend solely on the human effort on the input side. To my understanding this would conflict, e.g., with German copyright law, which stipulates – at least for now – that copyright protection is available exclusively for “personal intellectual creations” by human beings.

Human authorship?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 17:49 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> AIUI, with AI there is no unique deterministic relationship between the prompt you're entering and what the AI produces. If you feed your AI image generator (or what have you) the same prompt twice in a row you will probably get different results, so the output does not depend solely on the human effort on the input side.

It generally isn't non-deterministic, but it is pseudorandom. The input includes the prompt plus a PRNG seed; if you use the same prompt and seed, and sufficiently similar software and hardware, then you should get exactly the same output. (Some UIs might not let you set the seed, but that's just a UI limitation.)

With image generators there's also some coherence across prompts: if you use the same seed with two similar but different prompts, you'll probably get similar but different outputs. So you can generate a bunch of images with one prompt across many arbitrary seeds, pick your favourite, then reuse the seed and tweak the prompt to get a variation on that image; it's not completely chaotic and unpredictable. (They work by starting with an image of pure noise, then progressively denoising it guided by the prompt. Using the same seed means starting with the same noise, and it seems a lot of the output's high-level structure is determined by that noise and is preserved through all the denoising.)