AARON MAK, Politico; Congress wants artists to own their aesthetic
"Artificial intelligence has made it incredibly easy to replicate the work of artists, with users generating images reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons or Studio Ghibli characters.
Congress is now looking to protect people from having their artwork aped by AI. A bipartisan group of lawmakers recently introduced the CREATOR Act, which would grant visual artists control over how AI mimics their creative styles.
Existing intellectual property law generally doesn’t provide people with a right to their artistic styles. The CREATOR Act would significantly expand the scope of IP, and raises a number of unsettled questions about what exactly makes an artists’ work distinctive in a legal sense.
“There’s a lot of ambiguity about what we mean when we say ‘style,’” Cornell tech law professor James Grimmelmann told DFD. “Some elements of artistic style are things that are common in a genre … on the other hand, sometimes when we talk about artistic style, we really are referring to characteristics of somebody’s creations that are recognizably by them.”
The CREATOR Act would allow visual artists to sue those who purposefully use AI to profit from their creative styles without permission, as well as AI platforms that knowingly allow such conduct to occur."
