Kris Kashtanova has obtained a US copyright registration
According to her Instagram feed, a New York-based artist named Kris Kashtanova has gotten US copyright registration for her graphic novel that has AI-generated art made by latent diffusion AI. This is a first. The registration is for a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn, and it starts on September 15. Kashtanova made the artwork for Zarya by using a commercial service called Midjourney.
"I listed it as a work of visual art"
Kashtanova wrote a post about the news, "I got Copyright from the US Copyright Office for my AI-generated graphic novel." I was honest about how it was made and put "Midjourney" on the cover page. No other changes were made to it. Just like it looked here. I tried to show that when we use AI to make something, we do own the copyright. I put it down as a piece of visual art. My certificate is in the mail, and I got the number and an approval notice today. This idea came from a lawyer friend, and I decided to set a precedent."
The story was not made entirely with AI
Based on what they said, Kashtanova told the registration that the art was made with help from AI and not entirely by AI. Kashtanova wrote the story for the comic book, made the layout, and chose how to put the pictures together in an artistic way.
A first for a work produced by stable diffusion
Since generative art has been around since the 1960s, it's likely that artists have already registered works made by machines or algorithms. But this is the first time that an artist has registered a copyright for art made by the recent round of image synthesis models powered by latent diffusion, which has been a controversial topic among artists.
Getty Images has banned AI-generated art from its site
In the past few months, there have been a lot of articles about whether or not AI-generated art can be protected by copyright. Getty Images banned AI-generated art from its site because there are still unanswered questions about copyright and ethics. Contrary to what most people think, the US Copyright Office has not ruled against copyright on AI artworks. Instead, it ruled out registering copyright to an AI instead of a person.
The AI Comic Books website gives away free copies of the comic Zarya of the Dawn, whose main character looks a lot like the actress Zendaya. Since there are a lot of celebrity photos in the data set used to train Midjourney, AI artists often use celebrity names in their prompts to make the images look similar.
Selena Mattei