{"id":5623,"date":"2026-04-17T18:23:58","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5623"},"modified":"2026-04-17T18:34:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:34:38","slug":"oy-vai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5623","title":{"rendered":"Oy vAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m seeing more and more indie book covers that are startlingly good, and yet give that now-familiar impression that they were drawn by an AI. I\u2019ve not studied prompt engineering but others have, and so I spent an hour using Musk\u2019s Grok AI to generate a cover for my fantasy novelette \u201cWhale Meat,\u201d which I recently rewrote heavily and republished<\/a>. Like an idiot I didn\u2019t save the prompt that created the image. What surprised me is that by generating a second image from exactly the same prompt, I got a distinctly different image. I asked for a middle-aged homeless man with a heavy beard and a floppy work cap on a city street, summoning a whale through hyperspace. Here\u2019s what I got:<\/p>\n

\"WhaleMeat<\/a>\"WhaleMeat<\/a><\/p>\n

I chose the one on the left, because it displayed more sense of menace on the man\u2019s face. I also liked the clear indication that he\u2019s the one doing the trick with the whale. The other image could represent a vision the man is having. (No more spoilers. It\u2019s only 99c; if you\u2019re curious, buy it<\/a>!) The real weirdness is that both images came from exactly the same prompt<\/em>. (Save your prompts\u2014but don\u2019t expect a given prompt to produce the same thing every time. So save each image that you create with any given prompt!)<\/p>\n

Now I had a cover. But\u2026is it mine? That was the first hint to me of the huge<\/em> problem of how copyright law applies to the output of generative AI.<\/p>\n

I see five big legal questions that need to be settled, probably in court:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Can material generated by an AI be copyrighted?<\/li>\n
  2. If material generated by an AI can be copyrighted, who owns the copyright?<\/li>\n
  3. If a piece of art created by an AI is incorporated into a larger work of art created by a human artist, does the AI art invalidate copyright on the work as a whole? <\/li>\n
  4. Does material generated by AIs trained on copyrighted material violate the copyright of the training material?<\/li>\n
  5. Is material generated by an AI trained on illegally obtained material (pirate downloads etc.) considered illegal?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There are smaller issues, but those are the important ones. #1 has supposedly been tried and resolved in the courts.  It went up to the Supreme Court, but the claim stands: Copyright requires human contribution<\/a>. (H\/T to Jim Strickland for sending me the link.) My problem with this is that a human crafted a prompt that created an image specified by the prompt. I consider prompt engineering a human contribution to AI art. If you use a stencil to craft letters on a sign, the stencil did not create the letters. You did. My guess is that #1 will be litigated further, and with any luck, a ruling will also answer #2. I don\u2019t think #3 is a yes\u2014but again, we have no decisions either way thus far.<\/p>\n

    The biggie is #4. Here\u2019s a scenario to ponder: Suppose an artist needs to draw a picture of a bichon frise dog but has never seen one. The artist thus looks at online photos of bichons and then draws a picture of a bichon. The dog in the drawing isn\u2019t identical to any of the dogs in the photos in terms of factors like size, pose, or hairdo. (Hairdo is a big deal with bichons, trust me. We\u2019ve had six.) So: Is the artist violating the copyright of the photos he scrutinized before drawing the bichon? He trained himself on somebody else\u2019s photos to get a sense for the breed, and then based on that training drew a dog not identical to any of the photos.<\/p>\n

    I think this much is clear: If you teach yourself enough about dogs to draw dogs, the dogs you draw are copyrightable, and you own the copyright. Furthermore, nobody can claim that drawing a dog violates the copyright of other pictures of similar dogs, barring methods like tracing a photo through tracing paper.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s a counter argument that I\u2019ve heard, don\u2019t recall where: Superman is copyrighted. If you draw Superman and the drawing isn\u2019t identical to any of the Superman copyright holder\u2019s drawings, is your drawing a copyright violation? I\u2019m pretty sure it is. God created dogs. Humans created Superman.<\/p>\n

    So which one applies to AI?<\/p>\n

    \"image(15)\"<\/a>I\u2019m not sure. I did some further experimenting with the Grok AI: I asked it to draw a bichon chewing on a bone. It did so, and the generated image (left) was photo-like and not cartoon-like as were the \u201cWhale Meat\u201d covers. I then did a Google image search on the created image, and got nothing remotely similar to the picture Grok had put together. Now, there are gazillions of photos of bichons online. Grok might have chosen one with a bone in its mouth and sent it back to me, unchanged. There\u2019s no way I could ever know if that supposedly generated image were a literal copy or truly generated according to training.<\/p>\n

    The more I research the issue, the muddier the whole thing gets. It\u2019s possible to copyright a recipe. However, the same steps in a recipe expressed in a different way are not a copyright violation, though the steps might be patentable. Fair use is the muddiest issue of all, made still muddier by questions of who (or what) is doing the using. Fair use still comes up in court cases, so it\u2019s hard to know if training an AI on copyrighted material but not using the AI to precisely duplicate any of the copyrighted material is fair use. That issue may not be settled for decades.<\/p>\n

    Although it\u2019s possible that an AI company would claim copyright on the images that its AI produces (point #2), that would light up our courtrooms in a big<\/em> hurry\u2014and possibly bring the curtain down on the company itself.<\/p>\n

    AI companies that pirate immense wads of copyrighted material for AI training<\/a> should be sued into the ground, but that\u2019s not really about AI. AI users who have no idea where the training material came from should not be held responsible for the piracy if they use the AI.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019m just bringing up the problems here. I\u2019m not a lawyer and even lawyers will probably admit that AI is a unique addition to the body of copyright law and that relevant law is not settled. I\u2019m just speculating about the problems that we as writers and artists face. How well AIs can write fiction is a question I haven\u2019t tried to answer, though I will run some experiments on that proposition as time permits.<\/p>\n

    I may or may not create another AI book cover. The \u201cWhale Meat\u201d cover was an experiment. I\u2019d rather pay a human artist for science fiction \/ fantasy cover art and doubtless will. What happens in the greater publishing community across the next ten years or so will be fascinating. Grab your popcorn. Let\u2019s watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I\u2019m seeing more and more indie book covers that are startlingly good, and yet give that now-familiar impression that they were drawn by an AI. I\u2019ve not studied prompt engineering but others have, and so I spent an hour using Musk\u2019s Grok AI to generate a cover for my fantasy novelette \u201cWhale Meat,\u201d which I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5623"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5625,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623\/revisions\/5625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}