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Analysis and Technology

Who should own the copyright on AI-generated artwork?

Artificial intelligences can create images inspired by the human-generated art they train on. This is raising concerns over copyright and artists’ livelihoods

By Matthew Sparkes

27 September 2022

An image generated by the DALL-E 2 AI of

Inspired or generic? The DALL-E 2 AI generated this image when given the prompt “Teddy bears working on new AI research underwater with 1990s technology”

Copyright: public domain

Concerns over copyright and artists’ livelihoods have caused photography agencies to remove images created by artificial intelligence models from their databases.

The worries come from the fact that the AIs hoover up vast amounts of human-generated art to train themselves and use this database of knowledge to generate photorealistic images related to almost any text prompt. This has led to ethical debate and highlighted the legislative grey area about who owns the…

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