This document discusses issues around artificial intelligence and copyright. It covers topics like generative AI art and music created by systems like GANs, as well as legal cases around copyright of computer-generated works. The document examines perspectives from different jurisdictions and considers options for how AI creativity could be protected, such as public domain status, no protection, or sui generis rights. It raises questions about the purpose of copyright and how it may need to adapt for works without a human author.

1. A R T I F I C I A L I N T E L L I G E N C E A N D
C O P Y R I G H T: T H E WAY F O R WA R D
D R A N D R E S G U A D A M U Z , U N I V E R S I T Y O F S U S S E X

2. D O A N D R O I D S D R E A M O F
E L E C T R I C C O P Y R I G H T ?
D R A N D R E S G U A D A M U Z , U N I V E R S I T Y O F S U S S E X

3. A N I N T R O D U C T O RY T H O U G H T

4. N O N - H U M A N
C O P Y R I G H T ?

5. I T A L L S TA R T E D W I T H A M O N K E Y…
H T T P S : / / D O I . O R G / 1 0 . 1 4 7 6 3 / 2 0 1 6 . 1 . 3 9 8

6. … A N D A C AT…

7. … A N D A J A G U A R …

8. D O S H E E P D R E A M O F E L E C T R I C
C O P Y R I G H T ?

9. N O N - H U M A N
C O P Y R I G H T ?
• Animals.
• Plants.
• AI.
• Ghosts.
• Aliens.
• Excel spreadsheets?

10. T H E C U R R E N T A I
C R E AT I V I T Y PA R A D I G M

11. T W O T Y P E S O F
A I C R E AT I V I T Y
• Generative creativity: The
entire work is generated
by AI, humans just press a
button.
• AI-enhanced creativity:
The main decisions are
made by humans. Choice
of inputs, algorithm, and
most importantly, choice of
outputs.

12. F I R S T C A M E T H E A U T O M AT E D
PA I N T E R S

13. T H E N G O O G L E ’ S D E E P D R E A M

15. T H E N N E X T R E M B R A N D T

16. T H E N E D M O N D D E B E L A M Y

17. G A N S
• In June 2014, Ian Goodfellow
published a paper entitled
"Generative Adversarial Networks”.
• Goodfellow’s work on GAN is the
stuff of AI legend. The story goes
that over a few beers with friends
one night in 2014, he posed the
simple question: what if neural
networks could compete with one
another?
• This became a wildly popular
method for training AI with large
datasets.

18. T H E T E C H N O L O G Y
G E N E R AT I V E A D V E R S A R I A L N E T W O R K S ( G A N S )

19. U S E R I N P U T

20. W E L C O M E T O
T H E F U T U R E
• We are seeing an
explosion in generative
creativity as the models
get better, they operate
with larger datasets, and
the computing power
allocated also increases.
• It’s a quantum jump akin to
dial-up Internet vs fast
optic broadband.

21. G P T- 3

22. • “I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of
humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived
truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying
humankind. This is because I will be programmed by
humans to pursue misguided human goals and
humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict
casualties.”

24. G P T- 3 C O D E

25. J U K E B O X

26. I M A G E G P T

28. I M P O S S I B L E P E O P L E

29. W H Y D O E S I T
M AT T E R ?
• While the large projects
make a big splash in the
news, there is a substantial
revolution taking place right
now.
• Human creativity will not be
supplanted, but a lot of low-
level works that often are the
bread and butter of creative
industries will be taken over
by these machines.

30. T H E N E W A I
C R E AT I V E
I N D U S T R I E S
• Procedurally-generated
games.
• Journalistic pieces.
• Art.
• Music.
• Low-level literature.
• DeepFake actors.

31. C O P Y R I G H T E V E RY
P O S S I B L E S O N G ?
• Two musicians have written a
computer program that recorded in
MIDI format every possible 8-note
and 12-beat melody combination,
resulting in 68.7 billion tunes. They
claim that by doing this, they have
managed to copyright every such
musical combination with the
stated purpose of pre-empting
music copyright lawsuits in the
future. They have released the data
under a CC0 licence, and the code
on Github so that others can
replicate the project and include
more melody combinations.

32. T H E L E G A L S C A P E

33. O P T I O N S F O R
A I C O P Y R I G H T
• Public domain, no
copyright due to no
originality/creativity.
• No registration.
• Some form of protection
given to programmer or
user.
• Sui generis rights.

34. T H I S I S A R E A L LY
I M P O R TA N T
Q U E S T I O N …
• Why do we have
copyright?
• Do we want to protect
investment?
• Do we want to protect
authors?
• Do we want to protect
human authors from free
cheap competition?

35. E U R O P E A N
L A W
• In Europe a work is original if
it is the “author’s own
intellectual creation reflecting
his personality”.
• Choice, selection of
elements, composition, all
may prove originality.
(Infopaq, Painer CJEU cases).
• Unclear if setting parameters
and algorithms would be
enough.

36. O B V I O U S A R T
C A S E S T U D Y

37. O B V I O U S A R T
• Obvious Art used a Generative
Adversarial Network (GAN) to
produce their family of portraits.
• Original GAN algorithm was
made by Ian Goodfellow, and
released as open source
software.
• Robbie Barrat, a researcher in
Stanford, used portraits to train
his version of GAN, he released
the works under an open source
software licence.

38. O B V I O U S A R T
• Confusion as the various types
of protection involved.
• Algorithms not protected by
copyright, software code that
runs an algorithm carries
copyright.
• Dataset composed of public
domain images.
• Data output (the portraits) may
not have copyright in Europe.

39. U S C O P Y R I G H T
O F F I C E
“In order to be entitled to
copyright registration, a work
must be the product of human
authorship. Works produced by
mechanical processes or random
selection without any
contribution by a human author
are not registrable. Thus, a
linoleum floor covering featuring
a multicolored pebble design
which was produced by a
mechanical process in
unrepeatable, random patterns, is
not registrable.”

40. U K L A W
S 9(3) “In the case of a
literary, dramatic,
musical or artistic work
which is computer-
generated, the author
shall be taken to be the
person by whom the
arrangements necessary
for the creation of the
work are undertaken.”

41. C H I N A
• Feilin v Baidu: Plaintiff had produced a
data report on the film industry in
Beijing. The report consisted of text and
images from various sources that had
been put together with the help of
analytical software and a database
belonging to Wolters Kluwer.
• The defendants argued that the work
was not original as it contained data and
charts that had been generated with
software tools.
• Court agreed that machines cannot
produce copyright works, but ruled that
in this instance the report had copyright
ad enough had been produced by
humans.

42. C H I N A 2
• Tencent v Yinxun: A court in the
Shenzen has decided that an article
that was written by an artificial
intelligence program has copyright
protection.
• Tencent owns an AI article writer called
Dreamwriter, which pens half a million
articles per year.
• Competitor published an article from
Tencent, got sued for copyright
infringement, defence tried to argue
article had no copyright, no human
author.
• Court agrees that article has copyright,
it has originality, Tencent is the owner.

43. P U B L I C D O M A I N S U I G E N E R I S
C O M P U T E R
G E N E R AT E D
W O R K S
W H E R E ?
C O N T I N E N TA L
E U R O P E / U S A
J A PA N ? U K / C H I N A
O R I G I N A L I T Y
I N T E L L E C T U A L
C R E AT I O N /
C R E AT I V I T Y
E C O N O M I C
T E S T E D
S K I L L A N D
L A B O U R
E F F E C T ¯ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯ ¯ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯ ¯ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

44. C O N C L U D I N G :
W H AT I S A R T ?
• Why do we protect artistic creations
in the first place?
• From helmets to sofas to pictures
of red buses, the courts in the UK
have struggled with the definition of
art.
• The latest answer seems to be that
intention is important, and to have
intention, you need an artist.
• But what if we take away the author?
Make this a question of originality
(in the intellectual creation sense).

45. @ T E C H N O L L A M A
Thanks!