Categories
Ai

AIs lose their copy rights

AI’s can’t copyright their own work, nor can their human (ab)users, according to a recent ruling by the US Copyright Office (USCO). The ruling applies to both artwork and text. It expands on an earlier one that revoked a copyright registration granted to Kristina Kashtanova for her and Midjourney’s collab on a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn. For this posting, I asked two AIs for their opinions.

The ruling is interesting because the USCO is already receiving lots of applications for copyright on AI-generated works, just as online bookstores are seeing the start of a likely deluge of AI-generated books and comics. The ruling states that the human author can be granted copyright for the entire work, but the copyright only applies to the human contribution such as composition of elements, not to elements that are AI-generated.

According to established precedent and law, only a human can be an ‘author’. But it isn’t always clear where human …

Categories
Ai

Neural wrap

Artificial neural network techniques like stable diffusion and online tools like Stability.ai’s DreamStudio are fun to play with, but are there practical uses? Decorative ones are the first that spring to mind. And people have already come up with some cool decorative–not to mention commercial–ideas, like this voice-controlled service to create wallpaper on the fly: Shopify’s AI wallpaper.

Here’s my attempt at AI-generated gift-wrap, using only plain white paper and a monochrome laser printer.

Neural Wrap!

Neural Wrap!

The small paper is best for books, of course. The prompts I used to generate the wallpaper-style images have some connection to both the theme of the book and the tastes of the intended recipient.

Is it creative? Well, um … I did think up the prompts all by …

Categories
Writing

Artificial Space Pirates

I’m not the first to play with ChatGPT, maybe not the millionth, judging by all the awe-struck articles and the red warnings: “We’re experiencing exceptionally high demand” and “Request timed out.” But I did want to see ChatGPT try its hand at space pirates.

And I wanted to see how good a student it could be. Here we go!

Gil: Tell me a story about a space pirate who unexpectedly encounters an alien spaceship.

As Captain Jack sailed through the vast expanse of space, he never expected to come across anything other than the usual asteroid fields and drifting debris. But as he rounded a cluster of dense celestial bodies, a strange shape caught his eye.

At first, he thought it was just a trick of the light, but as he drew closer, he realized it was an alien spaceship. Its sleek, curved lines and unfamiliar markings were unlike anything he had ever seen before.

Captain Jack’s pulse raced as he realized the potential of what he had stumbled upon. A …