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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.

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.

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?

That doesn’t make much sense, in any digital art the computer is doing all the generation of the information. The human simply provides input as all these things are tools. For digital art the tool is something like Photoshop and the inputs are a series of tablet motion inputs, for 3D art the tool is Blender and the inputs are bit more complex but similar

It is not like these are just totally random outputs without any artistry behind them, even a single word prompt is enough to start guiding something in an artist direction. All these methods involve iterative refinement of ideas to reach some “goal” you have in your mind, they just use different methods of doing so.

This is why everyone here is an artist

An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art