This conversation explores the intersection of AI, copyright, and creativity, discussing the implications of recent legal rulings on AI-generated content. The speakers delve into the necessity of human intervention in creative processes, the philosophical dilemmas posed by AI in the arts, and the importance of documentation for protecting intellectual property. They also highlight tools available for safeguarding digital art and the ongoing challenges faced by creative industries in the age of AI.
I tried to catch fog earlier. I mist.
00:00 The Cheese Debate: Kraft Singles and Velveeta
03:04 AI and Copyright: The Legal Landscape
06:03 Human Intervention in AI Creations
08:55 The Philosophical Dilemma of AI and Creativity
12:06 The Impact of AI on Creative Industries
15:07 Documenting Your Creative Process
17:58 Tools for Protecting Digital Art
21:03 The Future of AI and Copyright
Jim (00:00.216)
Kraft Singles growing up, yes or no? Did you get them? But I know, did, were they in your household? Belvita? Belvita, no. But did you have those in your household? It's not cheese, it's a cheese product.
It's a cheese product is a perfect segue. Yeah. To today's theme of the episode, beginning with the joke. What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.
Knock,
Jim (00:22.638)
don't know what. Oh, okay. Guys, who did that? You do a little cheese, like mac and cheese, like cheese.
Yeah, well mac and cheese is real cheese.
No, it's not. No, Velveeta is mixed into some, some of that. cheese with. No, it's like, what's the little bunny, Annie's what's a little bunny ones. Yeah. That's Annie's. That's not really mac and cheese. It's like vegan. Is that vegan? Is that organic? Yeah. I say it with, no, nose turned up though. Okay. For business.
Get organic.
Jeremy (00:51.438)
There's nothing wrong with those things.
Jeremy (00:56.046)
This is AI Made Easy.
Jim (01:01.966)
All right, so break from tradition here. We're going to go with Reuters. Reuters had a really interesting... Reuters like AP has a lot of interesting things and they're free and easy to gain access to, which is why we like them. But really there was a good article that a piece of...
You're not paying for news. You're not doing the paywall thing.
I do that with a few newspapers actually. I say newspapers because none of them print anymore. Do they still print?
Jim (01:32.59)
local news then you could too. Yeah. It's it's from Reuters. It's about, it's about copyright, right? And dealing with copyright in, in everything going on right now in with AI, right? So cause obviously a lot of this stuff, everything almost is trained on other people's information. And so the article didn't just talk about that though. It basically all about the copy rate ability of AI generated
work, right? And like, so there's a major, uh, ruling that came out right from the U S patent and trademark office. So why is this relevant though? Like, you know, we'll get into that in a minute because it's like, Whoa, as you glaze over and you're like, wait, well, how does this fit?
Why is this relevant?
Jeremy (02:16.558)
I am am ultra curious about just really almost anything. But when you start talking law, I just
Patent and trademark office and like you envision somebody like from the 1800s like issuing out things for like who
Who do I revere lawyers and accountants because on both of those topics I go, my God, these people have iron wills. They stayed focused during their education and figure this stuff out and I really have no, yeah.
now they're all being replaced by AI tools, but that's not where we're going today. We're going today is just us patent and trademark office came out and ruled and said, look, we don't need new laws. We don't need new regulations right now. What we need to know new legislation or anything like that. What we need right now is to just enforce what exists. And here's our ruling. Ruling is basically that, that says, look, if you, that's like most, most things that go on in our country that people assume are like,
Very judiciary by the way
Jim (03:11.436)
you know, parts of legislation, right? Federally or at a state level aren't right there. They're just baked into like whatever a bureaucrat rules, right? And says, so in this case though, that's what they did. So they ruled and said, okay, this is, this is what we, you know, we released this and say, if you use AI exclusively, let's say you're a small business owner and you use AI exclusively or,
to generate something. Let's say it's a graphic or an image or a logo, right? And you don't, you or someone on your staff or someone you hire doesn't make human intervention. that human intervention isn't just like prompting, right? Cause that doesn't count. that's significantly altering it enough. And that's going to be hard for to gauge, that there's significant altering, not just of these images or videos that are generated, but if you do any hand, you know, hand or digital,
significantly altered.
Jim (04:06.712)
processes or editing along the way, but even to something that's generated words that are generated, right? In that case, right? And that was the actual terminology used. Meaningful human editing. So basically that intervention happens and that's where then it becomes able to be copywritten at that point. If you think about it this way, if you just grab something that an AI tool generates and say, okay, I prompted it and therefore it's A couple of things.
for human edi-
Jim (04:36.258)
first probably won't be upheld in court, especially because it was, and it also probably won't be able to be copywritten because chances are there's going to be some new, new documents and new forms. You're to have to certify that says you had meaningful human intervention, but let's unpack it a little further, right? It's almost like how, how do you, how do you get into this though? And, and deal with it as a small business owner, knowing that a,
your content or your items that you generate, whether it's visual or written or audio and your work product could be able to be not upheld and protected in any way, or form. And then you start running down that road and generating income from it and putting it out into the public sector. And all of a sudden people are using it or acknowledging it and it's building a brand or at least getting some kind of commerce out of it. And now other people can just steal it.
because it's not able to be copyrighted, it's in the public domain. And then the second thing is how do you make sure as a business owner you don't grab something from one of these AI tools that learned off of, was trained off of copywritten material and now you get a cease and desist from a major corp or anyone who's now says, well, that's indicative you learned off of my dime and off of all my creativity and the investment we made as a corporation and now we're gonna come after you.
You know, I...
We summarized that well.
Jeremy (06:06.744)
Please don't know. It was.
Rude. Very. Blah, blah. Accounting, blah, blah, blah. Business stuff. Blah, blah, blah.
I think you at the risk of diverging slightly from from this.
I do. I think that's usually where I come
I'm bringing out my inner gym. I think it's worth going down a slight philosophical rabbit hole for a second and just talking about the fact that organic mac and cheese is real mac. No, I appreciate the deliberation here that the courts have made and the specific language because ostensibly what they're saying is in order to patent something, in order to have intellectual property,
Jim (06:37.175)
That's not accurate.
Jeremy (06:50.848)
it needs to be human created. And I know that, know, we're sitting here talking and having a little fun, you know, mostly at our own expense about the fact that, you know, AI is replacing so many things, but the courts have now ruled that AI cannot replace human ingenuity as an ownable asset in that way.
So this isn't the courts. This is just a, this is just an administrative ruling of the US Patent and Trademark Office. And the only reason I bring that up is because it can very easily be overruled or your new legislation can be passed.
important distinction. I also like your passing comment about in America blah blah blah because globally there are different courts that assign different rules of ownership and different rules about intellectual property so if we're going to copyright something in America that doesn't necessarily mean that it's defensible elsewhere or vice versa you might in other countries and I don't know form intellectual property
I'm sorry.
I know enough about US intellectual property law to just be effective for the things I need. if I were to go overseas somewhere where this is allowed and spin up 15 bots to create content for me in that country, it might be patentable or copyrightable assets. So I do think that that's important. The other thing that I thought was interesting about this whole conundrum is it is a bit paradoxical that you can copyright
Jeremy (08:18.776)
potentially the prompt, but not the output from the.
Kind of interesting. Yeah, I see what you're saying right because crew the creativity of creating the prompt right and that was kind of touched on but not really
I mean, would be sort of like saying, the paintbrush painted the painting. And if you make your own paintbrush, you could potentially patent the idea, but then your painting couldn't be copyrighted, even though.
If it was only if you let an AI tool actually right utilize it right unless they used your paintbrush. I don't know. We're getting it down a rabbit hole, but I say we're gonna get on around not go too far
But I think it's it is a philosophical conundrum. There's something paradoxical about being able to copyright the creative component because it precedes the output, but the output because it's based on an LLM, which, you know, robot created blah blah blah.
Jim (09:10.894)
think about it this way too, maybe like someone who's trying to do a side gig or launch a new venture or do some sort of content based business and startup, if there's a side gig or a new or new business, think about this way, right? A lot of digital products, right? I'm going to sell a digital product. I'm going to build a community and build an audience on social media and then launch a digital product. You hear that a lot from people and it's like, okay, great. But you, all you, if all you do is generate some sort of PDF or white paper or document that's just
predominantly, let's say, derived from a prompt that you created that spit, that was spit out by an AI tool, an LLM or something like ChatGPT or Perplexity, and then boom, it spits it out. That is not able to be copyrighted. So you could sell a bunch of them and somebody could literally just take it and say, I'm selling them too. And by the way, for half as much or quarter. It's kind of like when products are inspired here or created here,
by our creativity in the US, right? A lot of times, or in Europe. And then tools and dyes are made and the manufacturing occurs overseas, let's say in China, theoretically. And all of a sudden, what happens right after that? All the knockoffs, right? For a tenth or a millionth of the cost. And that's where things like patents would come in. In this case, though, something with a copyright, it gets trickier even, because again, if these are digital products, use that example that I mentioned.
That's it, just unless you have human intervention where you've edited or curated or further enhanced words or sound or images or video, you're gonna really struggle to get copyright protection, especially online right now with these AI tools. Not just online, but in person too. Let's say you created a book, an actual printed book, which nobody really does anymore either for the most part, but same deal, you could be in the same situation.
There's a lot to talk about.
Jeremy (11:07.392)
So there's a lot of talk amongst musicians, household musicians. My wife is a professional musician. I've been around musicians my whole life and there's a lot of talk in those circles about how AI generated music is not real music, but real in quotes, is not artistic music, fake music. And I think that's an interesting thought. I'm not sure where I sit on that. I do think that there's
space for all of it, but I also think that context matters. So when and which am I going to employ, you know, one type of music versus another? Generally speaking, from what I've heard today, I like organic music. I like that's not to say that it's not created with electronic instruments, but I appreciate, you know, real singing voices. And I can tell the difference between today, even when things are vocoded and,
You know who you are out there. If you're vocoding your voice, I actually like the nuances of hearing those slight very human fluctuations in voice. So there's a quantitative element to this in the judiciary when you're saying how much human makes it something that you can own that copyrightable versus how much something is robot generated or electronic generated, and therefore it is not protected by.
This is interesting to go down for a minute and let's use whether it's music or or let's use learning. Let's use lyrics actually. Okay. Use lyrics or the written word or like if it's an author or a poet, I've used AI to write poetry. I've never written a poem. Well, maybe I wrote a poem once in my life or twice. I don't know, but I used AI to write poetry. Help me write, take my thoughts and say, you know, here's the rhythm. Here's the beat. Here's kind of what I to follow and do it in this kind of tone.
So are you writing poetry these days?
Jim (13:01.674)
And that was kind interesting because I've never done that. And then I asked it to convert it now to a song and with this kind of pattern and whatever. My point is I have done that. And what's interesting is it allowed me to be creative where normally I probably would have been like, well, who am going to do this with? Right. And I kind of had now a partner to do it with a digital partner with an AI tool, but I'm bringing it up for this reason. Let's say I'm an author. We're both connected to, you know, to authors or to different authors. and I know you recently had a conversation with one that's a mutual, you know, that's now a mutual friend of ours. And.
I guess I'm thinking like, let's use that particular author as an example. All of their work that's been written, even in draft form, all their notes, all their rough, everything was fed into an LLM, right? We fed into some kind of tool, right? So something, you know, where it's trained just on that, just on this author's work. And now he or she takes that work, right? And now generates a new work by prompting themselves and working through their own work to shape a new work about something.
That's human intervention. Now the question is it was trained on its own work, not on others. who owns that? This will be the legal conundrum.
the creative contribution threshold. So where is that line? How much human synthesis versus robot synthesis really qualifies as human creation? And one of the pieces that I queued in on that's important in not just today's discussion, but when we're considering AI and copyright ownership, is the same thing
for no AI copyright ownership, which is documentation. Document the hell out of whatever you're making, your steps along the way, because that's what's gonna help you create a defensible position. So even if you're just, like for me, I spend an hour on a prompt that somebody else might spend three minutes, but I'm iterating and I'm iterating. I saved every single draft all along the way as I'm iterating. Now you're smiling at me, you're thinking.
Jim (15:07.717)
I mean, we're going to, we're going to get to that later. We're to get to that in our meeting. We're going to get into the big staff meeting later, but no, get where you're going. But you know, one of the other big things that I think, you know, just any business owner can, we're talking about musicians and authors and whatever. And that's fine. And graphic designers and visual artists, all very nice, but all that stuff crosses over.
What you're
Jim (15:33.804)
to any business owner or any person that's doing anything that they want to protect someday because they think it might have some value in their business or in their personal life. so I think, you you talk about documenting for sure being transparent, right? And in that documentation or even with your clients or customers or potential customers or the public. So to disclose and say, look, we did use some AI tools to generate this, but we also spent X amount of hours doing this. I know we're finding that with that,
distinguishing that is getting harder and harder. talked early on almost two years ago when maybe when we first talked about the idea of ultimately that handcrafted words and music and you know, or anything really at this point that where AI tools aren't used are going to be the luxury good of the future in my opinion. And I think that's where as business owners, we need to maybe
especially small business owners set our minds to think, hmm, well, maybe we're not going to be Walmart and that's okay or Amazon, but maybe we can be, maybe we could be like the niche player in, maybe it's, you know, maybe it's Hermes or, or I'm going to throw out different high-end retailers cause I'm not that familiar with them. Cause that's not really my vibe, but whatever it may be, be that niche or that niche, like it's Gucci, right? Whatever it might be. That's very niche or very specific at a higher end. That's more handcrafted. I use the car.
concept, right? Instead of turning out Ford's Ford, Taurus's do this. I don't even know if they still make them, but like a Rolls Royce, right? Like handcrafted. Okay, fair. But they're, they become luxury items. think the same thing's already becoming true, but going to be very true here in the not too distant future where the more you drill down and become handcrafted, the better. But that comes back to disclosure, right? Which I think should go both ways. Whether you're using AI or not, we don't all do it.
of those cars I've ever owned or looked at.
Jim (17:31.074)
but I think we should more. I think we should get to that point and that becomes an ethical, some ethical boundaries.
And I think that there's this notion of voting with your wallet, right? Like shop your values. And I think where you decide to put your business interests and personal interests are an important part of this equation. You were talking about, you know, human creative versus AI, you know, a good game that we might create or play could be, you know, is it artisanal or is it AI? I that's, but I do think my last planned philosophical, you know,
Yeah, that's really crafted or artisanal. Yeah.
Jeremy (18:04.814)
consternation of the day is the impact to creative industries. Unchecked AI content does threaten, it devalues human creativity, particularly in the arts, where if we want to have artisans who can create high quality art, then we have to create infrastructure that supports those artisans. Otherwise we won't have that anymore. We won't have people who are, you know, those
the education's cultivations along the way, those, the scaffolding that can create artists and artisans will not exist if we don't also, I'm not saying bad AI, I'm saying, you know, balance, and there has to be one with the other, not one.
And the same thing is true for critical thinking, not just for creatives, but for critical thinkers and strategic thinkers. Cause look, we cannot just assume that some AI tool as great as it can be is going to replace the most inventive creative thinking minds we have or strategic thinking minds we have. And so that's where we have to ourselves be strategic and thoughtful and take a pause and say, all right, for us and our organizations, the companies that we run or are a part of, what do we want?
And how do we want to move forward? Because yes, you can use AI even today and certainly over the course of the next year or so, in, in, ever more advancing way to make yourselves better, to improve your, your time management, your efficiency, your, your operational, fluidity, but, and even to make you more money. And yes, you can help it create, you know, help it create with you and think strategically with you. But in the end,
I think we have to be really careful to make sure that we don't think that we can just outsource all of our creative thoughts and strategic thinking to an AI tool or the AI tools who will just now do all the thinking for us. I have a bad feeling that we're already doing that with in a lot of cases now. And especially for a younger generation, this is not to kind of talk down about it because obviously I'm a huge believer in these AI tools, but using them wisely and especially training the next generations to use them ever increasingly wisely.
Jeremy (20:16.226)
Back in our day, you know, the...
In our day we walked uphill in snow both ways. We couldn't just dream up some AI way of getting up and down that hill. Maybe one of the biggest takeaways here though is that this is all still very fluid and gray. The law is gray in this area right now, both for anyone with a copyright, but also for anyone who is hoping to get copyright protection.
That AI helped.
Jim (20:46.528)
always mindful of the fact that with every tool, with every piece of legislation, with everything we're doing in this space, it's very fluid with AI right now. And we have to just be consciously aware of that and stay on top of it as much as possible or surround ourselves with people who do, legal experts, accounting experts and technological.
and document the hell out of whatever you make.
Absolutely.
Let's talk about it from the other side of the equation. The tool that I wanted to call attention to was something that actually got a lot of headlines about six months or a year ago, which is Glaze, a project that came out of the University of Chicago. And I love this tool and I think, sure, it's been out for a while now, but I think it's worth calling attention to in light of today's conversation. It is a tool that algorithmically injects
imperceptible pixel changes to digital artwork, to traditional artwork or digital artwork. You scan a photo of your painting or a work of art or illustration, logo, whatever you want. It injects humanly imperceptible changes to pixels that make it really hard for AI to replicate those images.
Jim (21:42.478)
Sorry.
Jim (22:01.432)
So instead of a watermark or a little logo or something on the corner that could be cropped out, instead of any of that, this becomes almost, not quite impenetrable, but almost impossible to get around or at least able to be traced and checked or easily tracked by the copyright owner.
Right, mean there are countermeasures in press, which is a noisy upscaler type attack that can be used to de-scramble and then to scale up. there are black hatters, white hatters, there's all sides of this equation, but I appreciate that there are people fighting the good fight.
kinda like scramble.
Jim (22:30.584)
Ways around.
Jim (22:42.606)
So an example would be a business owner takes creates some kind of image or something that they video image whatever and and that that they like and consider for course Yeah, or right or or even a product let's say let's say you're a retailer right or a restaurateur and you take a great picture of Food, you know that you created and now you post it somebody just grabs and says yeah, that looks good I'm gonna use that for my own purposes. You can embed this into that
Small business photography.
Jim (23:12.294)
You could use this glaze, this tool and embed it into the image or the video so that now it won't be able to be, it could be replicated but basically then if you were to search it or have a tool to kind of grab and look for it, you could easily now show that that was your material.
It makes it that much harder to do it.
Yeah, and that's good thing to know for any business owner, but in particular, like you said, the visual ones, the ones that are dealing with this as their primary product or service. Always, always good versus evil. That's what everything's about. That's why we need, you know, name the company Polarity, right? There's ups and downs to all this. Is that why? I don't know. No, there's other reasons, but we won't get into that today.
gives me hope there are people fighting a good fight.