It is a sad day when an artist who makes work of his image and likeness and voice cuts corners to undermine the work of other artists. What am I talking about? Jeremy Renner released a music album and the album cover, which is Gen AI created and then tweaked by a human artist, was copyrighted (well, the non-AI parts were copyrighted bc the AI ones can’t bc they are created by piecing together stolen content from real artists).
So you save money and maybe create some buzz for your whatever album (I didn’t listen to it so I don’t know) by making your album cover using AI. Did you need to? No, you can afford to pay a real artist. So why? And why even put in for a copyright when the AI generated parts can’t be copyrighted and so are Fair Use/Public Domain by anyone who wants to use those parts.
The interesting thing is, if you look at the copyright, they list out what is AI generated and what is human generated and so what exactly are you copyrighting? To quote what is covered, “author modified the abstracted bird at the top center of the image; author removed and replaced the text in the image with new text; author created an entirely new bottom portion of the outer roundel; author refined and enhanced the heart in the middle of the image; and author reduced and refined computer generated anomalies throughout the image.” So, the text, “modifications to the bird” but not the bird itself, “bottom portion of the outer roundel” (whatever a roundel is), refinements and enhancements (but not the actual thing), and fixing “anomalies”. Seriously, what is actually copyrighted?
PS AI Generated image brought to you by Jeremy Renner’s copyright of nothing and Fair Use for commentary on the fact that an AI album cover had smudges and tweaks copyrighted.
