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the word artist is special because it’s tied to the rules. […] in our rules under the EU Copyright Directive (and to some extent the DMCA), being an artist implies they have copyrightable works. So we have to handle their reports fairly and responsibly to protect the site, including the possibility of takedowns—which I’d really like to avoid. So, sorry for repeating myself, I’d really like to avoid us using that word in any way that doesn’t match how it’s used in the rules.

Does the dump include tag metadata like categories, descriptions, implications, and aliases?

In some cases, the redaction role of the human user will be reduced to that of selecting or refusing ready-made output generated by the AI system. This raises an interesting question from a copyright perspective. Clearly, the mere act of selecting may be one of many factors contributing to a finding of originality. But what if selecting one AI output from several is the only choice left to the user? Like many other questions raised by AI, this is not a novel issue.
In the past, the emergence of non-traditional art forms such as the ready-mades created by conceptualist artists, have triggered similar questions. What is it that elevates a pre-existing artefact such as a prefabricated urinal or a bicycle wheel to a work of art – and, by implication, to a work of authorship? According to Swiss copyright scholar Kummer, the decisive creative act here is converting the (in itself unprotectable) idea of a ‘‘ready-made’’ into copyright protected expression by presenting the artefact (the objet trouve´) as a work of art. Kummer’s ‘‘presentation theory’’ implies that the mere act of selecting a pre-existing object suffices to convert the object into a work. While Kummer’s theory has been embraced by some copyright scholars, it remains controversial. In any case, personal selection undoubtedly contributes to a finding of originality in AI-assisted output.

Proving or enforcing authorship or copyright ownership of a work may sometimes be difficult in practice. For this reason, many Member States provide for rules that establish a (rebuttable) presumption of authorship or copyright ownership, in that the person indicated on or with the published work as the author is deemed to be the author, unless proven otherwise. The Berne Convention and the Enforcement Directive validate such legal presumptions and allow the person whose name ‘‘appear[s] on the work in the usual manner’’ to instigate infringement procedures.

Tagging (and filtering by it) would be good, but I’m not sure there’s the bandwidth for that; as in, uploaders probably wouldn’t tag their own stuff with “negative tags”, so there’d need to be a fair number of active users going around curating each image. It would be an additional workload, albeit distributed on more people that just mods, and avoid “unnecessary deletions”, but could also fail if there aren’t enough people going at it.

Annalee: I wonder though if that limit could be controlled with the same switch that says whether your uploads go into the approval queue or not? I’ll ask staff.

Update: This is possible, but will take some work to achieve. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime.

BigBuggyBastage: Seems like the easy solution would be to maintain the tagging limit on anonymous/BgP users, and substantially increase it for registered users (or at least those who’ve been around for a while).

Annalee: I think that might be how we head - just like what currently happens for people uploading images.

I just looked at the nightly dump […]

Do not attempt to deceive or mislead regarding the origins or creators of an image. Regarding artists in the pony and furry fandoms, this can include copying their signature, or perfectly mimicking their unique style (combined with themes) to the point viewers would believe it’s their work.

Like if picking the favorite ones is what gives them artistic value or makes me the images’ artist, then what if I just generate 20 pics and dump them on a site without even looking at the results? Would they be less worthy of being called art, and would I even be considered as the artist?

Or if I send them to someone else and they pick their favorites and post them online, would they be considered as the artist, even if they had nothing to do with the actual image generation?

I just think that the current prompter/artist/ai assisted artist labels are distinctive and descriptive enough for there to not be any need to start trying to redefine them.

That’s like saying that a traditional artist isn’t actually an artist because the pencil does the work and the human only provides it with the inputs.

If you tell another person to draw something based on your inputs, that person is the artist.

As a bonus question, if I’m trying to prompt for a very specific image, but the AI interprets it wrong and comes up with something different, but way better than what I had in mind, does it make it make me a good artist for getting good looking results, or a bad artist for not getting the results I wanted?