 news radio seven hundred WLW. So in the midst of I think it's clear there is a revolution of sorts when it comes to technology and the idea of AI whether it's writing stories for magazines and newspapers online to creations of all sorts of things and maybe in many cases the idea that the machines could take us over. Elon Musk and other experts in that field have asked for a pause a delay in any further development of such for like six months or more as they try to figure out I guess what the future may hold and to maybe keep the machines from taking over but something that maybe is a little bit more relatable that maybe is a little bit more of a danger than the the machines taking us out. It is people using this artificial intelligence to create things that they would not have been able to otherwise and then maybe cashing in and who has ownership to this and where the ethics associated with it and a guy who deals with patents and an interesting piece talking about the creation of things with AI is John Rizvies an attorney kind of to give us some time dealing with he's known as a we call yourself there John welcome to 700 WLW with Sterling you are like the patent guy right the patent professor yes the patent professor well let's get some education I think it makes sense we're due for some education in this where is the line and I guess that part of this conversation is there's a woman who put out a book and allowed the art to be created by artificial intelligence and then the question is who owns the art who should get paid and and what what is the allowable use of arts created by the machines right yeah absolutely there might be a little bit of history might help to really understand the context I don't know if you remember a few years ago there's that monkey selfie case that it's known where a photographer had forgotten their cell phone it was picked up by a monkey who took a bunch of selfies that ended up being incredibly valuable went viral and because it was his cell phone that was used he filed for the copyright and the copyright office said that you know based on the word of the law-derived constitutionally an author has to be a human being and the the copyright was denied so that's kind of the the crux of the issue with computer generated art and computer generated content whether it's text or or graphics is how much of the creativity is done by a human being and how much of it is done I wouldn't know I wouldn't even know if I'd call it creativity or how much of the work is done by the computer I say it's not creativity because they're basically crawling the internet and a database of billions of of documents that are already created and that's the base material so there's and the human in this aspect is just putting in a simple query into the program and not doing the actual work now the the proponents who are claiming that there should be copyright protection for this are saying that the computer is no different than a paintbrush would be for a painter it's just a tool and the actual creativity is still with the human being and that you know that I don't know what you think about that but I certainly think there's a difference between a paintbrush a painter using a paintbrush versus the sophistication of some of these AI programs where you simply would put in what you want drawn and while I in two minutes you have the whole art piece done oh absolutely I agree with that I mean there's a difference between you know utilizing that brush and letting your hand do the work rather than it being someone else and you putting your name on it or but if you buy the computer you buy the software and it creates it as an architect and still with using software helping to design my home or my business or my yard and landscaping or is that then the computers and then you have to say well who created the concept in the program that those people are using their talents to create something else with it it is a tool but it gets weird it gets weird because it's a tool way more powerful than anything we've seen I mean there's some people would say well you know what you know photoshop is a program and people use photoshop to create to manipulate images all the time and I think the difference is the creative control you actually have the mouse in your hand your keyboard you're making direct edits your there's a lot more activity you're not simply putting in a query like you know draw me a frog with a horse's head and then two minutes later while I it's there like there's there's a fundamental difference between a tool such as a paintbrush they also use the example of a chisel well that you know it this is way more sophisticated than a chisel whereas every single hit is done but with your hands with a hammer and there's a lot more creativity involved here that you know that that's that's the difference like is this who is the actual author and is it a human because if not then a machine cannot own rights to a copyright John risby by the way is the patent professor talking about the issues of artificial intelligence creating art or things stuff and who owns the right to what that creation is generally speaking with sterling on a Wednesday night 700 wlw so as we look at this what is the say for instance I buy a 3d printer and you know they're building houses with 3d printers they're doing a lot of things with 3d printers and you can get programs that would then help design things and so forth and there are elements that you may pick and choose from one place or another to go with it I guess it gets deep as far as who has ownership if you I mean who owns the technology that is the artificial intelligence and is then that who is chasing money or a copyright for say like the story about the girl who put the story out there and it created like the artwork to go along with it that sort of was the crux of this initial conversation yeah so she's kind of testing that the limits of you know in the the original application was granted for a copyright and then the copyright office did a 180 they changed course and said well wait a minute there's no there's no human authorship here and therefore there's there's no copyrights because in that case there literally was you know almost no control creative control on her part of the output so now what she's doing is is going through and now it's going to be this is really what's going to test is how much is enough there's a new program called stable diffusion where you scan in your own drawings so the initial drawings are extremely rough hand drawings that you scan in and then you do put some queries some terms in and it manipulates your original hand drawings and this is really going to tell kind of if that's enough because now there is that element of creative control where you have a lot more input at the beginning it's still an incredibly powerful tool so it's nowhere nowhere close to you know like a paint brush or a chisel but it's still still a lot more creativity than simply putting in the terms and asking you to draw like going back to my example of a frog with a horse's head right in this case with a stable diffusion you could do a rough sketch with you know it could look like a kindergartner's crayon drawing of a frog with a horse's head scan it into this program and then use a text query to explain what you're trying to draw the artificial intelligence would look at your hand drawn sketch look at the query and based on those would create a final drawing and the hope is that this would then be enough creative control on the part of a human to to provide authorship for the creator and therefore copyrights will apply man I can see all kinds of ways this could be argued and manipulated John Rizvi is a patent professor talking about well who can own art created by or anything created by artificial intelligence was sterling on the big one so say for instance and what's the classic story like the guy who came up with like carbon paper or whatever it was or even post-it notes I think that they they come up with it they may have gotten a small bonus it was a part of their job for a company that they worked for then the company owns what they created and then for whatever period of time has ownership of that correct that that's correct if you're uh and a lot of that depends on the employment agreement but most employment agreements do include a clause that any intellectual property you you produce during the course of your employment belongs to the employer and as far as say for instance like right now if you're looking to write something you can go into like the open chat AI or whatever and give them ideas come up with questions come up with the writing I mean at this point I have friends who are educators and they have to basically check their students work to see if it's been heisted from someplace now they have software to search for something that could have been stolen elsewhere not just reworded works and thoughts to something that they're regurgitating I mean there are so many levels of layers to this it gets very complicated I mean it's it's really hard to fathom this Christina Kastanova who is the graphic novelist behind this in the zarea of the dawn which is in the midst of this conversation about the art and the words so she owns the words to what she wrote in those stories but the creative portion in the art which was artificially created then is that open source now like open licensing for like art or photos that's on the internet that people use and if you're not careful if you post it on social media or otherwise someone can come at you I mean that that's an area where you know somebody like you looks to get some billable hours right yeah well and and oh my god there's there's there's just so much uh so many different angles to this one is whether the uh Christina for example whether she can get a copyright protection herself but another completely different issue is uh all of the there's a lot of lawsuits because all of that existing material that exists that's being uh you know utilized to create this that's that's uh there's a class action claiming infringement that there's there's there's gotta be uh compensation for the original artist because the computer doesn't have its own creativity it's simply compiling from existing material that's out there one big distinction in in Casanova's case is that the the copyright office when they denied the copyright one big factor was that the software program was called mid journey it does not allow any editing after the computer spits back uh you know the the image so there's no human interaction at all uh that that's a potential weakness um in the copyright offices uh stance deny denying copyrights for uh AI generated material because uh you know clearly these companies are learning from this case they're following it and their the later programs allow for editing after the computer generates the you know the content so for chat gpt for example uh if you get if you if you put in terms that say give me a 150 word essay about photo synthesis and how it works it's going to generate content it's going to give that to you uh one way to to become the author is you take that raw material and reword it yeah reword it yeah and and it doesn't take a lot before you've edited it and now you've got the human control and you now you can follow for a copyright so that that was one of the big drawbacks in mid journey which prevented uh you know the copyright office from finding any authorship is that there's no editing permitted after the final product this is all crazy talk you know i mean but to a certain extent it it seems so out there but it is so now at this point and law is behind technology and science it has always been that way but it seems like it's really behind in some ways i gotta ask because i mean i know you put out books like escaping the gray thinking grow risk for investors you got the patent professor dot com you were one of the original sharks as i understand under the shark tank uh i mean you been around you know issues of patenting and so forth we have problems enforcing that with China nation states other than that let alone courts and other countries we have agreements with where they don't follow along with our trade trademarks and copyrights and infringed upon those not even for knockoff goods just for other things in their markets as well that i mean just with russia recently with all the stuff that went down you know with ukraine as far as mcdonalds and so on selling more or less the same product but yanking the golden arches off and a lot of weird stuff like that this is the same type of concept it's just a machine creating all of it right it it is it's um and it just brings you know it's it's funny that the uh to go back to the original constitutional basis for intellectual property for protecting the rights of authors and and it's going back you know what did the founders envisioned by authors uh they clearly did not envision an author to be a computer uh you're right they didn't and as a monkey selfie case kind of shows us that they didn't envision an author to be a monkey either an author is a human being and there has to be creative control exerted by by a human in creating content uh the question just becomes one of degrees like when at which point does the tool become so incredibly powerful that it is doing a lot of the creative work that otherwise the human would be like this is like you know some of these these new ai-based programs are like like photoshop on steroids because your your the human element is input is is minor and most of the work most of the uh creative control is in the part of the machine now there's that loophole that i mentioned is if these uh if this ai uh software allows for the human after the content is fully created to go back and make edits now you're talk now now you're now it's a the copyright office is in a tough position like who's to determine that the editing is not enough creative control well yeah but i mean look i can pay an editor to help me fix a paper i've written i'm still going to turn the paper and the the person who edited just get a couple bucks right so what's the difference if it's technology doing the editing and me doing the creation that it's being edited right right well the big difference would be now if you edit it yourself you own the copyright to it and and now they can't use the they can't reject it based on uh they're not being enough creative control by human being because if the programs allow the human to step in once it's done uh and make changes you know then then they can still get the copyright and we all know it's a lot easier as you know like the it's always easier being a critic uh than it is to create the original work so to come back after the computer's done it and go back and make some minor inconsequential changes uh that's easy and and if that's what all it takes to entitle someone to a copyright then that's a really low bar for them to meet in order to get entitled to protection yeah i mean at this point i mean there's so much work that in the creative realm that is somewhat derivative anyway it gets deep and people fight those issues for service mark copyright trademarking et cetera too which obviously you know a lot about the patent professor dot com the web page john risby thank you for making time i don't know if i'm in a better place of figuring out what's my work and what somebody else is but it gets deep and would be interesting to see how it plays out right now before the machines take over and we all have a lot of free time on our hands exactly take care of yourself appreciate your time hope to have you back again soon the patent professor dot com john risby was sterling on the big one