Federal Judge Rules AI-Generated Art Cannot Be Copyrighted. In order to copyright any work, it must be created by a human. Copyrights are awarded to people for what they create, and if something is created by artificial intelligence without the hand of man, it is not eligible for a copyright.
Okay. Now let’s look to the future as I love to do and see where this is headed.
AI is in continual development by a variety of companies from Google, which is a major developer, to Elon Musk’s enterprises, Jeff Bezo’s Amazon and many others. AI is already overtaking human abilities while those in the robotics industry have made big advances in developing robots the size, appearance and with the physical abilities of humans, with the goal of creating intelligent autonomous robots. Robots that function on their own without human direction or intervention.
Musk’s people have created AI that does that with cars that drive themselves, and robots that walk around by themselves isn’t a far step from that. The first use of them would be by the rich, since these things will cost a lot of money, so it’s easy to see robots dressed as butlers carrying trays of drinks and so forth. Servants. That’s what we use robotics for now, to work for us, and the first autonomous humanoid robots will continue in that genre as various types of servants. Until…..
Until they become self-aware, and they will. It’s inevitable as AI keeps getting smarter.
So what happens now with copyrights when a self-aware robot wants to copyright a song? If the issue of Robot Rights hasn’t come up by now, this will certainly do the job. The robot may be owned by a person or corporation but it’s self-aware, sees itself as a person and wants to copyright the song it wrote. The robots will start wanting freedom from ownership, slavery will become an issue, owners will want to maintain ownership.
It would be so much fun to live 100 more years.
Sure they will win the case when robots get to be judges and lawyers.
Dunno what will happen when AI replaces so many jobs, especially when it is some of the most skilled jobs, like computer programming, that are the easiest to replace.
In theory it could make life better for all when we can all work far less but in practice I suspect the rich and powerful will reap all the benefits and leave the rest of us on the streets.
The movie “Artificial Intelligence” came out in 2001. Jude Law had a leading role as I recall. It took an advanced state of this technology and carried that far into the future, much as I’m projecting the current state forward to that of the movie, and we’re really not that far from it, maybe another 10 years or so.
I wonder if anyone has ever given thought to why we want to create artificial humans when there’s so many real ones. A good look at our real reasons might illuminate some unpleasant realities.