AI Daily - Artificial Intelligence News

View Original

Lights! Camera! AI!

Artificial Intelligence has already made a debut in a variety of arts such as painting, song writing and dance:

  • An AI program that was fed with data samples of hundreds of 17th century painting and upon analysing the data, the program designed its own painting. One of it paintings was called ‘Portrait of Edmond De Belamy’ and was sold at an extraordinarily lavish price of $432,500.

  • Another AI was able to showcase its songwrting skills by composing an original song titled ‘Blue Jeans and Bloody Ears’ after being fed data on hundreds of modern pop songs.

  • A computer program called ‘Shelley’ wrote an original horror novel upon meticulously analysing 140,000 horror stories written by a variety of authors.

Since AI already possesses the capabilities to write original stories, compose music and create visual images, it might not be long before all these skills are combined into one program to come up with its own screenplay. Furthermore, it may also be able to virtually cast existing actors into its production and possible even create its own digitally-generated actors.

Edmond De Belamy

However, along with the new generation of cinema this introduces, it also brings a new wave of legal issues such as the dilemma about who the director of such a film would be. Recently, the US Patent Office declined to recognise AI as the inventor of a patent. Hence, it may be assumed that the US Copyright Office may have a similar protocol. So who would be considered the author of the script? There are plenty of other sources that can claim ownership such as the person who designed the software, the person who owns the computer or even the person who owns the source material analysed by the AI.

Another issue that AI might bring forward in filmmaking is a large volume of copyright infringement claims. Although the screenplay devised by AI may be original, it is still inspired from a large number of similar script in the same genre and it may be possible that some aspects on a specific script may be copied into the screenplay created by the AI. Legally, it is permitted to copy an expression from another source but forbidden to copy a idea from another sources, which raises the question as to whether AI can draw the line between an expression and an idea.

Hence, a film industry that is dominated by AI is not too far off in the future, but it brings with it a whole new set of legal constraints.