> these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist
I find this very reasonable and a great analogy. However, today, can one not copyright commissioned work? Can a company not own copyright for work produced by its employees?
I find the much closer analogue to be instructions for taking a photograph. And that IS considered copyrightable. There are how many free parameters for a photograph? Position in space (3 degrees of freedom), position in time and (if we're not talking 360deg cameras) 3 degrees of freedom for orientation. Maybe another degree of freedom for exposure time, etc, but for an automatic camera those are taken for you. So let's say 7-8 degrees of freedom.
32 bits each for position on the earth (64 bits total... and this is optimistic as vast majority of pictures are on land, near cities, etc), 16 bits for elevation (8 bits likely more than enough for most), 12 bits for each rotational degree of freedom (overkill), 32-36 bits for time. So about 150 bits of unique information? Add another 50bits if you have a manual camera (vast majority of pictures aren't taken that way nowadays), and you're left with 150-200bits. So about the same entropy as a sentence with a dozen or two words in it. All the rest is done by a machine. And this is considered enough for photography, but not enough for machine output. Doesn't make much sense to me. (A Haiku is also about 120 bits, and it is copyrightable.)
The actual GOOD prompt results I've seen typically require a lot more than a dozen words, whether ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion or whathaveyou, and typically involve quite a lot of trial and error.
In that scenario the original artist is granted copyright and assigns it to the company. Another option would be for the artist to 'license' the work to the company and keep copyright ownership themselves. Since there is no original artist to be granted copyright then there is no one to assign it to the company so no copyright under current statute. I and others got so many downvotes here for pointing this out previously.
> In that scenario the original artist is granted copyright and assigns it to the company.
Whoever paid you to create it is the copyright holder, the artist doesn't have to grant anything when commissioned to produce work for hire, as it's the employers'.
I find this very reasonable and a great analogy. However, today, can one not copyright commissioned work? Can a company not own copyright for work produced by its employees?