> I have come to the conclusion that that almost every work created by an AI tool should be copyrightable, even without the iterative refinement and post-processing that Kris performed. The more I search, the more I see similarities with photography and the long copyright battles over what minimum amount of creativity is needed to support the copyright in a photograph.
I think this is shortsighted; this opens up a space for "AI copyright trolls" who generate images for popular prompts in an automated fashion to get copyright, then go after people using AI art who happened to hit the same seed and prompt. Admittedly unlikely, but it could happen, and might eventually even be worth the GPU time depending on how popular AI artwork becomes (and how fast GPUs get).
In any case, I don't see why the unaltered, or in this case extremely minorly altered, image output itself should be copyrightable. It's like two people going to Venice Beach to record the waves at the same time. They each have copyright over their specific recordings, but they can't copyright the sounds of the waves itself; the other person is free to do what they want with their own recording of the same sound. The same way that if you generate a Midjourney image with a specific prompt/seed, I should be able to use the same settings to generate the same image and do what I want with it.
I think this is shortsighted; this opens up a space for "AI copyright trolls" who generate images for popular prompts in an automated fashion to get copyright, then go after people using AI art who happened to hit the same seed and prompt. Admittedly unlikely, but it could happen, and might eventually even be worth the GPU time depending on how popular AI artwork becomes (and how fast GPUs get).
In any case, I don't see why the unaltered, or in this case extremely minorly altered, image output itself should be copyrightable. It's like two people going to Venice Beach to record the waves at the same time. They each have copyright over their specific recordings, but they can't copyright the sounds of the waves itself; the other person is free to do what they want with their own recording of the same sound. The same way that if you generate a Midjourney image with a specific prompt/seed, I should be able to use the same settings to generate the same image and do what I want with it.