Weirdness from the Copyright Office

A quickish update. I have said, and still believe, that things created using AI tools are just like anything else with respect to copyright. But recent events remind me that the Copyright Office is made up of people, and people are unpredictable, and US Copyright law is in many places a squashy mess made up of smaller squashy messes, so logic does not always apply.

Here is a currently-relevant set of data points:

• I have registered the copyright on an image I made using MidJourney. I didn’t mention that I used MidJourney (or Chrome, or Windows) on the application form, because there was no place to put that; the form didn’t ask. The application for registration was granted routinely, without any complication.
  • I imagine there are hundreds / thousands of similar registrations from other people.
• This person has registered the copyright on a work that they made using MidJourney (I think it was), and the work itself makes it clear that MidJourney was used. The application was afaik granted routinely, without any complication.
  • But now it appears that the copyright office has said “oh wait we didn’t notice that MidJourney thing, so we’re cancelling your registration”.
  • And the person is appealing, apparently with the help of MidJourney themselves. (Hm, they’ve also apparently deleted some of their tweets on the subject; lawyer’s advice perhaps.)
• This person has applied apparently to register various images made with various workflows involving AI (dalle2 I think) to various extents, clearly stated, and rather than being just accepted or just rejected they’ve received emails from the copyright office asking them for details of what they did, and especially bizarrely suggesting that perhaps at least one of the works might have been “conceived” by the AI.
  • Which seems crazy, because the Copyright Office has generally had the opinion that software isn’t creative, and can’t (like) conceive things.

I suspect that things are just rather in disarray at the Copyright Office, and different examiners are doing different things, perhaps having gotten different memos on the subject, or just having their own different opinions about things. It will be interesting to see how the appeal mentioned above goes!

To me, it seems obvious that things created with AI tools should be prima facie registerable with the copyright office, just like photographs presumably are, and if someone wants to challenge based on some legal theory about either lack of creativity or derivative works or whatever, they can do that. The copyright office itself, I would think, would want to stay far away from any situation where they have to somehow evaluate themselves how many units of creativity are in each of the kazillions of applications they get daily.

On the other hand, the Copyright Office could simply issue some sort of guidance saying “We won’t register copyrights on works created with the significant use of an AI tool like dalle or MidJourney, so don’t bother asking” (and could even update the forms to have a question about it).

I think that would be dumb, and lead to court cases eventually that would either overturn that or at least cause a great deal of faffing about that they could have avoided.

But then people and government offices do dumb stuff all the time, so who knows! All is in flux…

And here is an image that I made using Midjourney. No matter what the Copyright Office thinks today. :)

Updates: Things have developed legally and otherwise since this was posted; I recommend the copyright tag on the weblog here for currency.

Figure Three

Another “fun corners of the AI’s network” post. These are all pretty much unfiltered and unretried and unmodified results with the prompt “figure three” with the current “test” or “testp” engine (v4 said to be coming soon!) on MidJourney. I have no comment except that I find them all wonderful. :)

(There are, typically, various women’s faces, and perhaps the word “figure” got us more sort-of-bodies than we would have gotten otherwise?)

Klara, Part Two

Have you noticed, that sometimes one person is much more productive than another? :)

Due to my skilled collaborator on the first Klara video being one of those much more productive (than me) people, there is now a Part Two of Klara’s story, and that Part Two exists in the form of another amazing video on the You Tube!

Here is Karima’s post on the subject, and here is a direct pointer to the video itself (don’t forget to Like and Subscribe!). Images by me using MidJourney and the GIMP, words by me, voicing and everything else by Karima.

Given my comparatively relaxed productivity :) I may or may not put the largish (or even an edited smallish) pdf of Part Two up somewhere. Perhaps arranged with the one for Part One, in some organized way!

This is the end of Klara’s story for now, but one never knows; she may appear again, for Further Adventures, on other days. :)

I am still creating hundreds and hundreds of images; over fourteen thousand all together, MidJourney tells me. And NightCafe says I’ve done another “4.5K+” there. A handful in dalle2. Lots and lots in NovelAI because it is so fast, but it also doesn’t retain them or give any kind of count, so I don’t know! But let’s say around twenty thousand altogether. Rather a lot!

November is approaching, and I have no real idea what I might do NaNoWriMo-wise. Will I use Klara’s story in some way? Will I use MidJourney images? NovelAI words? Or just type a lot? Stay tuned! :) And enjoy these lovely videos in the meantime…

I hear they’re calling it “Jazz Cabbage”

If and only if you share my neural architecture, I highly recommend taking a couple of doses of a nice THC edible just about an hour before any dentist appointment involving lots of pain (i.e. any dentist appointment). You may need to hang around in town for a little extra time after, to make sure you’re safe to drive home, but it’s well worth it (even if you accidentally have to eat two extra scoops of ice cream, but that’s another thing).

In my extensive experience (today), I find that it (the THC) has two complementary effects (man, either of those words could be spelt wrong):

Firstly, it drastically shortens the memory of pain. Or at least this was one of the deep insights that I had before the cannabinoids (oh, c’mon WordPress, that’s not mispelt!) started to wear off (and I had the thought “how sad, that these deep insights may be lost when normality returns!”): that most of the suffering from physical pain comes from the memory of the pain, not from the pain itself (there may have been other insights, that I’ve forgotten).

So when the hygienist jabs the spinning drill-head into one’s gums and presses it in (“Hm, you’ve got some bleeding on probes here”), one is like “heh, some pain!” like you just saw a (brief bright) shooting star, but a moment later it’s gone, and not a big deal, and pretty much forgotten (more than a real shooting star would be).

Secondly, it distances one from whatever it might be that is experiencing whatever pain is left. When there are big flares of pain, one experiences it as a sort of label (like one might see a large area of purple), but with the emotional content more like “Whoa, looked like that hurt a lot, poor body!”. Even when there was enough pain that the body winced or twitched or whatever, one was just observing it objectively, thinking, “looks like that hurt really a lot, tsk”, rather than getting upset about it.

I think my body’s reactions to the pain were perhaps, guessing, about half what they usually are. So there was still the initial motion / wince, but that slipped quickly out of memory (maybe the body, per se, doesn’t have much in the way of memory? that could be an insight) and so the physiological effects died down again quickly, not being enforced by consciousness-driving emotional effects (see how deep?).

Thinking about it, one major physiological effect that I associate with the dentist is a significant tightness across my chest and very tight breathing, and I have to consciously let go of those a few (several, many) times per session. I did notice that effect once this time, but similarly it wasn’t bothering me, I just casually noticed it, and consciously relaxed it away for the body’s comfort’s sake.

And that was all really nice. Another effect, or maybe a side-effect of the second effect, is that (as I think I’ve mentioned before) my attention gets considerably narrower (and possibly slightly deeper, but not as much deeper as narrower) than usual, and also it was sliding around all here and there, exploring other more or less nearby realities and planes of existence, and just checking in with this reality and the body now and then, not spending much time there.

So looking back it seemed like the torment part of the appointment was very brief (since, I guess, my consciousness and memory were mostly in other realities), but also occupied a pretty long and active time (all that exploring of alternate realities). Not alternate realities like hallucinatory hallucinogen things, but more attention or thought-region or abstract-concept things. Mostly pretty bliss-filled (because I live right?).

Normally I don’t notice one or two little squares of my Bedrock Bar (“Elevate your life”, about 5mg TAC per square), when all I’m doing is the usual stuff around the house. I took four once, I think, and I did notice that, but as I was just doing normal home things that day, the only effect is that I was aware of my consciousness bugging out to other realms and checking back in to see if I’d finished my sentence or whatever.

But apparently after a couple of hours, two squares (10mg TAC) is enough to make a dental appointment much more bearable than usual. Today. For me.

YMMV.

And all! :)

Klara by Dale Innis & Karima Hoisan

Well, this is just too much fun. :) Very good Second Life friend and collaborator liked the little Klara piece so much that she voiced it and set it to the perfect music and made it into a rather wonderful YouTube! Definitely more accessible :) and more of an experience this way than the 327MB pdf file. Wooot!

Digital Rabbit Hole

Very excited to share with you all, this off-beat, pretty long (almost 10 minutes) surreal video collaboration with Dale Innis
Those of you who read me regularly, know that Dale Innis is a scripter friend who has collaborated with me and also with Natascha & I for the last 10 years and lately has been dabbling in all sorts of AI Art, especially MidJourney, which is a veritable game-changer in this blossoming field.
He showed me a pdf file of slides and a story-line, that he had made and I fell in love…fell obsessed, is a better word, to try to bring this to a way more people could see it.
This is how the project was born. I found, what we both agree, is the perfect music   Meditative Music and I made a voice-over and edited the slides into what you’ll see below.
This is a very slow-…

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Klara’s Story (Part One)

So after I did “Ice Dreams” (50M pdf), as casually announced here, I did another graphic novel (to the extent that that phrase fits at all), or the first part of one, in a very different style and by a very different process.

For “Klara’s Story” (working title), I generated two-by-two grids of Midjourney images using the prompt “detailed surrealism” (a favorite of mine) and some variants thereof, and crafted some sort of story around the images (rather than using the AI to create images for a more-or-less known story).

I haven”t yet had the patience to pare it down at all, so here is the current like 327M pdf draft.

The huge size does make it a bit awkward and slow to deal with, but… there it is!

More Visions of Yeni Cavan

I first found Yeni Cavan as a story and art venue, based on a bunch of words used as prompts in the pre-Stable Diffusion NightCafe, way back in February. Since then I’ve tried to find it in various other engines and things, casually and without much luck. But after playing with the engine flows and prompts and things some, here are some images from MidJourney that I rather like; sufficiently Yeni Cavanish, I’d say, although so far I miss the little random patches of bright purple neon and such. (Maybe I’ll try some of the other venues as well eventually.)

Yeni Cavan; interior room (image started in the –hd engine)

Yeni Cavan; room interior (love the comfy couch with the … circuit board? sitting on it)

Yeni Cavan; room interior (I’d like to be there yes)

Yeni Cavan; room interior (pure v3 I think)

Yeni Cavan; room interior (pure –hd I think; intricate!)

Yeni Cavan; detailed surrealism (whee!)

Yeni Cavan; adorable surreal bots

Yeni Cavan; more detailed surrealism!

Yeni Cavan; upstanding citizen

Yeni Cavan; City Waterfront

Simulation Cosmology at the Commune

Last night I visited the Commune in my dreams. I’ve been there before, to the extent that that statement means anything; it’s a great dim ramshackle place full of omnigendered people and spontaneous events and kink and music and general good feeling. I’d love to get there more regularly (and in fact this time one of the regulars teased me for always saying how at home I felt, and yet only visiting once in a while; I said that it wasn’t that simple [crying_face_emoji.bmp]).

As well as having ice cream, I took part in a spirited discussion about whether this reality is just a simulation running in some underlying reality, and whether that underlying reality is also a simulation, and then eventually the question of whether that series has to eventually end in some reality that isn’t a simulation, or if it can just go on forever. (The question of whether we might be in, not a simulation, but a dream, and the extent to which that’s a different thing anyway, didn’t arise that I recall.)

I remember trying to take a picture with my phone, of some book that was interesting and relevant to the discussion, and of course it was a dream so the phone camera would only take a picture a few seconds after I pushed the button, and it was frustrating. (Also there was some plot about someone releasing very small robots to find and blow up the dictator of a foreign country, recognizing them by their DNA, but that probably counts as “a different dream”, to the extent that that means anything.)

Then after waking up, I took a lovely walk outside in the sun and 50-something air, and it was lovely, and I thought thoughts and things. So now I am writing words!

Anything that is consistent with all of your (all of my, all of one’s) experience so far, is true, in the sense that it is true for someone out there in the possible worlds who is exactly identical to you in experience, memory, and so on. (Which is in a sense all that there is.) And so it would seem mean or something so say it wasn’t true.

So there are many incompatible things that are true; it is true that you live in a simulation running on a planet-size diamond computer created by intelligent plants, and it is also true that you live in a simulation running on the equivalent of a cellphone owned by a golden-thewed Olympian deity who does chartered accountancy in his spare time.

It is probably also true that you don’t live in a simulation at all, but in a free-floating reality not in any useful sense running on any underlying other reality, created by some extremely powerful being from the outside, if that can be made logically coherent. And also that you live in a non-simulation reality that just growed, so to speak, without external impetus.

(I notice that I keep writing “love” for “live”, which is probably an improvement in most ways.)

The “if that can be made logically coherent” thing is interesting; in my undergraduate thesis I had to distinguish between “possible worlds” and “conceivable worlds”, because I needed a word for a category of worlds that weren’t actually possible (because they contained Alternate Mathematical Facts, for instance) but were conceivable in that one could think vaguely of them; otherwise people would turn out to know all necessary truths, and clearly we don’t.

So now given this liberal notion of truth that we’re using here, are the negations of some necessary truths, also true? Is there a version of you (of me) that lives in a world in which the Hodge Conjecture is true, and another in which it is false? Not sure. Probably! :)

That is, given that in the relevant sense my current experience (this present moment, which is all that exists) doesn’t differentiate between Hodge and not-Hodge, there’s no reason to say either Hodge or not-Hodge, and therefore neither Hodge nor not-Hodge is any truer than the other.

Eh, what?

It’s an interesting question what would happen if I got and thoroughly understood a correct proof that, say, not-Hodge. Would there at that point no longer be any of me living in a universe in which Hodge? Given that I can (think that I) have thoroughly understood something that is false, there would still be me-instances in worlds in which Hodge, I’m pretty sure. Which kind of suggests that everything is true?

Given all that, it seems straightforwardly true for instance that you (we) live in a simulation running in a reality that itself a simulation running in a … and so on forever, unlikely as that sounds. Is there some plausible principle that, if true, would require that the sequence end somewhere? It sort of feels like such a principle ought to exist, but I’m not sure exactly what it would be.

It seems that if there is anything in moral / ethical space (for instance) that follows from being in a simulation, it would then be difficult and/or impossible to act correctly, given that we are both in and not in a simulation. Does that suggest that there isn’t anything moral or ethical that follows from being in a simulation? (I suspect that in fact there isn’t anything, so this would just support that.)

It’s true that you can communicate with the underlying reality that this reality is running on, by speaking to a certain old man in Toronto. It’s also true that you can communicate with that underlying reality by closing your eyes and thinking certain words that have long been forgotten almost everywhere. You can even be embodied in a physical body in that underlying reality! You could make your way down the realities, closer and closer to the source (which is also an infinite way off!)!

If you were to arrange to be downloaded into an individual body in the underlying reality, would you want the copy of you in this reality to be removed at the same time? That would sort of seem like suicide; on the other hand leaving a you behind who will discover that they didn’t make it to the underlying reality, might be very cruel. Perhaps the left-behind you could be (has been) flashy-thing’d, per Men in Black.

Another thing that appears to be true: it’s very hard to use any of these AI things to create an image that accurately reflects or elicits or even is compatible with my dreams of visiting the Commune and having ice cream! Not sure what I’m doing wrong. Here is one that I like in some way, even though it doesn’t really reflect the dream. (The center divider is part of the image; it’s not two images.) Enjoy!

AI Art and Copyright some more

I am losing track of the number of AI-based image-creation tools I have access to now. It’s not that huge a number, but it’s complicated! :) There’s at least:

• good old ArtBreeder, which I haven’t used in ages, and which seems to have a potentially interesting new mode where you sketch a thing with a few shapes, and then type text telling the AI what to make it into,
• MidJourney with the old V3 engine and the newer and lyrically named ‘test’ and ‘testp’ engines and mixmashes of those,
• NightCafe, which was my main goto image tool quite some weeks, with the old Artistic and Coherent engines, but now also the new Stable Diffusion (SD) based “Stable” engine, and various workflows among those,
• NovelAI which now does images as well as text; the images are also in a Discord bot, and it’s really fast; it uses some heuristic smut-blurrer (maybe just the standard SD one?) but the devs sort of promise they will eventually move it off of discord and then have few or no restrictions (similarly to their text generator),
• and now I discover that I have access to Dall-E also, from OpenAI, which I have just barely begun to use (detailed surrealism).

The “you can’t copyright art made with AIs” meme seems to have withered (which is good since it’s not true, although nothing is certain), but my experiment to gather additional evidence against it has finally borne fruit (months before I expected it to, really): I have now registered my copyright in this masterpiece of mine:

A blonde porcelain doll and a worn teddy bear sit on a trunk, in a musty attic in light from the window

with the real actual US Copyright Office, who have sent me a real actual certificate testifying to it. The registration can also be found on the web (you have to go to that page and then search on Registration Number for “VA0002317843”; I have yet to find a permalink that persists, bizarrely).

I did it through LegalZoom rather than myself; it cost more (I think), but I was more confident that I was Doing It Right during the process. There were no questions about whether AI was involved, or about what software I used to create it, or anything like that. I did have to say that I’m the creator, of course, but since I am :) I don’t see a problem there.

Registering the copyright doesn’t mean it’s 100% correct, it just creates a legal presumption. Someone could still challenge it, arguing that I wasn’t really the creator at all. I think that would be very unlikely to succeed.

And in any case, here is a nice concrete counterexample to any remaining “you can’t copyright art produced with an AI” claims that might be floating around.

The image is, by the way, provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, so feel free to do anything allowed by that license. :) Knock yourself out! Figuratively!

Extremely generous friend Karima also continues updating the virtual world region “AI Dreams in Art” with things she likes from my Twitter feed, etc, so drop by! It is getting blushingly positive reviews on the Social Medias; apparently there are significant numbers of people who have heard a lot about this AI Art stuff, but never really seen any. They seem to like mine! :)

Updates: there have been significant developments, legal and otherwise, in this area since this was initially posted; see the copyright tag on the weblog here for more.