Can I use AI to enhance my own Images?

Question

I understand AI art isn't copyright material. However, I am curious if the creator generates AI versions of the creation are those AI versions the copyright of the creator? I'm not sure how else to word this. I also didn't see any obvious answers.

Answer 1

AI neither creates nor removes copyright. Legally, an AI improving images is the same as a spellchecker improving written texts.

Answer 2

AIs create copies, not derivative works

If you have a photograph in which copyright exists, then the human photographer owns the copyright (barring transfers or work for hire). They are the only one who are allowed to make copies of that photograph.

Passing it through an automated enhancement, is making a copy and the copy has the same copyright as the original. It is not a derivative work because there is no human author, so it doesn’t have an independent copyright.

Answer 3

united-kingdom

Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 makes specific reference to the authorship of computer-generated artwork:

In the case of ... artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.

In this case, you are enhancing your own image. Without this, the AI enhanced image would not have been possible. This makes your contribution necessary, and therefore, you remain the author. The situation would be different if you had used AI to create an image without any creative input of your own.

Answer 4

AI is simply a tool, like a magic paintbrush.

Generative AI learns how to do what it does by looking at thousands of examples and learning what kinds of techniques those artists used. It then synthesizes output by combining your prompt with the general rules it learned.

This is comparable to a human artist going to many museums to study the techniques of the masters. They may pick and choose which artists to emulate when creating their own art.

Sometimes the AI might use verbatim bits and pieces of some of the art it studied. For example, you might conceivably get the smile of the Mona Lisa. But it's very unlikely you'd get the full portrait, even if you asked the AI for something in the style of Leonardo da Vinci.

Using these bits could be considered analogous to spritzing up a painting by adding a collage of images cut out from magazines.

The artist is still using their own creativity when designing the prompts to the AI and deciding whether to accept the AI's results in their final composition. The AI creators have a similar role as the manufacturers of the paint, brushes, and canvas -- they provide the raw materials, but the artist puts it all together.