The AI copyright battle is heating up but can it be enforced?

When it comes to the debate as to whether AI can be creative, the conversation usually goes something like this; "how do we define creativity anyway?" and " isn't creativity just a case of awareness followed by iterative pattern matching?" or "what actually is 'originality' or 'imitation' anyway?" I have a few days off for the first time this year and so I'm going to take a punt at it (not just to do that hopefully) Wish me luck.

This was the story that inspired me to crack the creativity and AI nut, and is one corner of the debate around the implications of 'AI production and creativity' (or the lack thereof).

The gist is that a bipartisan House bill in the US, the CREATOR Act, would give visual artists a federal right to sue when generative AI is used to commercially imitate their signature style, not by copying a specific image, but by reproducing the aesthetic itself.

This would be a meaningful shift as copyright has traditionally protected expression so you could own a work, but not the idea of “painting in the manner of Monet” for instance. The CREATOR Act would push that boundary by letting artists challenge people who train models on their body of work and then sell outputs marketed in that artist’s style. Feel like that's fair challenge tbh.

The carve-outs seem sensible enough so parody, fan art and AI research survive. What the bill is really targeting is the growing business of prompting your favourite illustrator’s aesthetic at scale. Adobe, interestingly, is out in front backing stronger protections, which is either principled or a very tidy bit of positioning ahead of regulation...the pessimist (realist) in me says the latter.

What makes this more than a niche copyright story is that it forces a very old human law to deal with a non-human imitator and once the law starts drawing that line, it is no longer just settling a copyright question, it's beginning to answer the much bigger one that I’ve been avoiding around the definition or original creative content and AI's ability to do it (according to the law at least)

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