An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
It reminds me of surrealist paintings crossed with the darker stuff Fuseli and Goya painted. It gives me a feeling of nostalgia for things I really enjoyed but haven’t thought of for a long time, by reminding me of all of them at once even though whatever the prompt was, probably is not directly related to any of them.
Specifically, just looking at it the first time reminded me of a bunch of fantasy and science-fiction story arcs I like all mixed together, with world-building magic or tech, like the Cosmere universe of Sanderson, or the Discworld, or the Hainish Cycle, or Dune; all the portals to different worlds and ways to fold time or space, like the wardrobe to Narnia + the Subtle Knife rifts + The Ways & Telaranrhiod + the Dark Portal to Draenor + the machine in Primer + ansibles and NAFAL travel + spice. The 3 main figures remind me of the Dathomir witches, but also the 3 witches (at a time) in Discworld, the main Maiar in LotR, etc.
It makes me think about all those at once intertwined and how much I enjoyed getting lost in each story the first time through, but how it doesn’t conform to any of them individually, and then try to imagine what kind of different world-building series could come out of it without completely ripping off any one of them. Like, how Shelley and Polidori and Byron inspired each other and spawned both Frankenstein and every modern vampire saga, how Robert Jordan talked about being inspired by Tolkien, how Tolkien and Lewis ran their stories past each other as they wrote, how Sanderson was inspired by Jordan and even completed his WoT saga, how basically every school of young witches/wizards series and instant communication across space was inspired by Le Guin, and makes me look forward to discovering the next author who writes like any of them who I haven’t yet stumbled on, or the next game or movie or show that mimics that style well.
Wheneved I look at the abstract circles & triangle triptychs, I think of Abbot’s Flatland, so I like those ones a bit more than the still lifes, but not as much as something like this image. I do really enjoy Mondrian’s colorful straight lines and I can’t explain why, and tbh that might be the easiest style for AI to replicate. And I’m fine with that, bc a nice quality Mondrian print was obscenely expensive up until about a decade ago, due to moronic copyright laws that didn’t benefit him or even his children at all, since he didn’t have any. I would love for the programmers and prompt writer of this image to be able to make money off its creation/copyright while they’re alive, so they would be inspired to make more like it.