What is human authorship? A decade ago, that was a straightforward and easy question to answer. In the days of generative AI, the definition is becoming much murkier.
Board game designer Jason Allen used AI image generator Midjourney to create an elaborate illustration of women wearing Victorian dresses and space helmets, attending a futuristic looking royal court, writes Forbes’ Rashi Shrivastava. The image was not something the AI platform conjured from a simple prompt, though. Allen says he spent more than 100 hours giving it specific information to create the image he wanted. But when Allen tried to copyright the image, the U.S. Copyright Office denied his application because it lacked “human authorship.” After reconsideration of the application was again rejected by the office, Allen sued the Copyright Office, asking a federal court to decide if it could be copyrighted.
At the heart of this case is a question of what creative, as a noun, truly means. Are the questions and indicators that prompted a computer system creative, or is something creative when only human hands and eyes have directly manipulated it? Midjourney and other AI platforms did not respond to Forbes’ requests for comment, but Midjourney’s website states that artists own what they create, but it also reserves the right to reproduce,license and distribute works created on the platform.
This lawsuit is also an interesting turnabout for AI companies, many of which are dealing with copyright litigation of their own. Authors, journalists, musicians, photographers and artists have sued big AI companies in the last year, arguing that the AI companies are illegally taking their copyrighted works to train their systems. The input, the creators argue, is all copyrighted.
Whether the output is copyrighted hasn’t been discussed much until now. This litigation may not force AI platforms to reckon with that issue, since it only involves the Copyright Office. But it’s a reckoning that is coming at some point. Some experts have said that copyright protections of data are the most important thing to regulate: There need to be rules governing who can use what and how, and ensuring that owners of copyrights can be paid.
As more brands use influencer marketing, there are more hazards to brand safety. I talked to Kevin King and Nicholas Spiro, chief revenue officer and chief product officer of the agency Viral Nation, about what CMOs should think about before starting to work with influencers. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.
Shoppers look at back-to-school items in a Walmart store.
While inflation is finally trending down and the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates last month, these trends aren’t fully recognized in consumer prices and wages yet. As a result, consumer confidence continues to weaken, with many Americans saying jobs are “hard to get.” That attitude extends to what consumers spend. Forbes senior contributor Pamela Danziger writes that the National Retail Federation saw a 5% drop in back-to-school spending, which was at $39 billion this year. There was a 7% decline in back-to-college spending, which tallied $87 billion. And NRF predicts a 5% decline in Halloween spending—from $12.2 billion last........