slate.com: What do Suda the elephant and e-David the robot have in common? Both are capable of creating beautiful paintings, free(ish) of human intervention—one uses its trunk to clutch the brush, the other a mechanical arm (though whether Suda is truly “free” when she paints is a matter of serious contention). Each can even sign their work. The quality of their paintings does vary slightly, though of course, beauty is in the visual sensor of the beholder. Suda, who lives in a Thai elephant camp, paints self-portraits, simple outlines of elephants and trees, while e-David, a German robot, paints portraits of others with detailed shading, strokes tailored even down to the choice of brush. Despite their artistic differences, e-David and Suda have another thing in common: dubious rights to legal authorship of the fruits of their labor. Neither is able to hold copyright under current U.S. law.
4 comments:
How interesting! When I originally saw the title of this article, I didn't think it was going to be about copyrights. Instead, I was thinking that this article was going to be examining the realistic androids with super advanced AI technology and their rights versus animals that we farm for meat. AI has been gaining rights rapidly. Nearly as rapidly as the AI technology is being produced. Anyway, I think this debate between copyrights for animal art and AI art is a little silly. These elephants that paint on canvas and not losing monetization from any funding or grants when their art isn't credited to them from any source. And the same for AI. If anything, the coders and engineers who created this AI with the ability to create art should be credited with anything the AI creates. I honestly think this a waste of resources, but that's just me. I'm sure this is important to some people.
This is an incredibly interesting discussion. I think that the most logical idea comes up at the end of the article. They mention that one solution to whether or not AI can gain copyrights is to give the copyright to the human creator, “copyright by human proxy.” I think that this makes the most sense with the rise of sentience in AI. For example, if an AI is created that becomes the new Rembrandt but has the cognitive ability of a four year old, are you going to give it all the money it is getting from those copyrights? Or would it make more sense to give the copyrights to the people that made this AI who are, presumably, full grown human adults with fiscal knowledge? I think the reason that we are more comfortable with giving AIs copyrights instead of animals is simply because we feel that we hold more power over AIs than animals. After all, we are the ones who created them.
I think the title of this article is a little misleading to me-- when I first read it, I imagined the issue of robots having more rights than animals as some panicked idea that robots will soon overtake all the natural aspects of our world as we enter a fully dystopian society. However while the details of these copyright cases the article mentions might seem silly, I do think they stand to represent a larger issue-- that we as a society may be paying more attention to A.I and technology than our environment. This may seem obvious in the wake of all the recent news about natural disasters and global warming, but I think it starts with small things like these copyright laws when society will start becoming more and more accepting of technology taking precedence over nature. It all comes down to how much value we place on artificial intelligence, and whether they will have abilities in the future that we can only dream of now.
I really don't know what to think of this. It is bizarre that technology has gotten to the point that it is more valuable than animals. It is bizarre that we are now asking to give technology rights. I am not sure if technology deserves these rights though, especially over animals. I find it difficult to not support animals because they are creatures, just as much as us most times. They think for themselves, act for themselves, and can even support themselves. Just because we are unable to understand them doesn't mean we can treat them lesser than what we treat any other living thing. I know if some sort of other animal was in our position of living in what we considered to be a civilized society, we would be begging for them to leave us alone and to stop destroying our homes. Of course animals can't be treated exactly like us, they can't pay taxes and have a job, depriving them of something like copyright is a very strange topic, honestly I don't think they care as long as they are treated right. I think that is what we should focus on more than anything else with animals, and I do hope people understand that...but clearly some do not.
-Pablo Anton
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