The situation is ironic to say the least. Jason M. Allen, founder of a video game start-up, caused a sensation and much discussion in 2022 by winning first place in an art competition thanks to an image generated by Midjourney AI. This tool is criticized by many artists for the alleged exploitation of copyrighted works. Last week, this American in his forties filed an appeal in the federal court of Colorado, challenging the decision of the American Copyright Office to refuse the registration of “Space Opera Theater”.
The height? Jason M. Allen complains about not being able to make enough profit from this creation, while denouncing that other people are profiting from it instead of him. “There have been cases where people have outright stolen my work, incorporating the entire work into a new work,” he denounces on the American channel 9news. “There are people who have literally put my work up for sale as prints or crypto art and are trying to sell it on OpenSea or Etsy.”
Jason M. Allen defended his creative process, saying he spent dozens of hours to create his image submitted in the digital works category in the competition. After feeding the Midjourney AI with hundreds of prompts (instructions given to an AI model to obtain a response) to generate the desired result, he claims to have then spent time modifying the image with Photoshop, as well as another tool, Gigapixel AI.
“I think it’s a mistake to attribute human characteristics to something that isn’t human,” Mr. Allen said, challenging the U.S. Copyright Office’s ruling that the true creator of the work is the AI and not him. “It is as ridiculous, in my opinion, as attributing the authorship of a work to a brush,” he adds. Mr. Allen’s lawyer, Tamara Pester, pointed out that the Copyright Office had challenged technologies in the past, such as with photography in the 1880s. The camera had been considered the author.
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