AI, Creativity, and Authorship

1. The Case Study: Google DeepMind and A24

  • A24 is an artist driven film studio like UA or Orion
  • A24 has partnered with Google's DeepMind

    • What "AI-Assisted" Filmmaking Means

  • Production tools (VFX, crowd scenes, translations)
  • Script development (plot suggestions; pacing; dialog variations)
  • Casting and audience prediction
  • Generative visual development (concept art; storyboards)
    • Continuum of AI involvement-
  • Tool use: AI performs a technical task under human direction.
  • Suggestion: AI proposes options; humans choose and revise.
  • Co-creation: AI generates substantial expressive material that humans curate and modify.
  • Delegation: AI generates the central creative substance while humans mainly approve or package it.
  • Autonomous generation: AI produces the work with little or no human creative contribution.

    • At what point does the human stop being the author and become more like an editor, curator, producer, or consumer?

    2. What Is Creativity?

    Margaret Boden's three types of creativity:
  • Combinatorial- novel combinations of familiar ideas.
  • Exploratory- generating new ideas by systematically exploring the possibilities within an established conceptual space.
  • Transformational- rarest and most significant; generating ideas that are genuinely new by transforming the conceptual space itself like jazz and cubism.

    • Current AI systems have not clearly demonstrated transformational creativity of an entirely new artistic form.

    Process, Product, or Experience?

  • Product accounts- evaluate creativity by the novelty and value of the output.
  • Process accounts- evaluate creativity by the nature of the generating process; statistical pattern completion is not creative regardless of how good the output is.
  • Experience accounts- Based on this view, AI cannot be creative because there is no subjective experience of creation taking place

    • 3. Current U.S. Copyright Law and AI

    Thaler v. Perlmutter- Copyright office and courts have refused to copyright Stephen Thaler's A Recent Entrance to Paradise with the AI as the creator

    Copyright office will copyright AI-assisted work

    Current rules-

  • Fully AI- no copyright
  • AI elements with fully human contributions- partial copyright
  • AI assistance- ordinary copyright

    • Copyright Office also requires applicants to disclose AI-generated material when registering works. The copyright claim should cover only the human-authored contribution, not the AI-generated material.

    Can AI companies train models on copyrighted works without permission or payment? Not settled.

    4. Does It Matter Who (or What) Made It?

    5. The A24 / DeepMind Partnership as Philosophical Test Case

  • What counts as "human-led"? If an AI system generates 500 script concepts and a human selects one, is the resulting film "human-led"?
  • What is A24's comparative advantage in this partnership? Does A24's brand remain distinct from the AI that contributed to its films?
  • Who benefits and who bears the cost? What do writers, directors, cinematographers, composers, and actors get out of this?