Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, Art News; Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever
"Abbott and Thaler’s push for copyright brings up a very basic question for artists today: how do we locate agency and creativity when we make things with machines? When is it our doing, and when is it “theirs”? This question follows the arc of history as humans design increasingly complex tools that work independently of us, even if we designed them and set them into motion. Debates have raged in public forums and in lawsuits regarding to what extent a model like Midjourney can produce genuinely novel images or whether it is just randomly stitching together disparate pixels based on its training data to generate synthetic quasi-originality. But for those who work in machine learning, this process isn’t all that different from how humans work."
