The Future is Now

The issue of copyright law, artificial intelligence, art, and what is an is not "art" is going to be with us for many more years to come.  This is just the opening few letters of the first sentence of a very long book that will unfold in the years to come. 

I remember several years ago I had a personal website where I had a page contemplating what Art looks like on a computer screen.  The science of seeing black and white colors along with colors on a computer screen is the same as it is for everywhere else.  Art in real life is seen by the human eye the same as it is on a computer screen.  

The internet includes words, pictures, videos that are all also considered "Art"

To be classified as art it must have a human hand involved in the creation of it.  For example a sculpture, painting, dancing, playing a musical instrument are all forms of artistic expression and are copyrightable.

But artistic only own the copyright for a certain period of time (that's an entire field of legal problems and solutions that should also be addressed.) A musician playing Beethoven today has no worries about being sued by Beethoven. 

But there is also a legal oddity with this entire thing.  Food and culinary works are 100% created by hand, but nobody can copyright entirely food products, a pig is a pig, a carrot is a carrot, but there are some protections given to some places to maintain their reputation, for example Champagne in France, Parmesan Reggiano in Italy, wine sold in Sonoma or Napa Valley, and others.  These are a form of "copyright" protections placed on food goods in certain parts of the world to maintain their reputation.  

However, recipes are not copyrightable, this is why chefs often times guard their recipes as prized secrets and get upset when a former employee opens a new restaurant in the same area using the same recipes.  Chipotle's rivalry with QDoba is an example of this very same practice.  Everything that encompasses the word "Open Source" on the internet are a little like food and recipes and are not copyrightable.  I'm sure some coder somewhere created whatever <iframe> is but it is used by countless companies on countless videos and photos on the internet.  HTML is kind of like water and heat for the internet, nothing is finished without it doing its thing in ways we hardly every notice, and nobody owns it, just like nobody owns water and heat in the kitchen. 

So what is to say that working on a computer screen is not art? there are countless numbers of works of art created by graphic designers and website developers that exist on the internet that were created by some human hand somewhere.  

Just think of all the letters that have been smashed on keyboards to produce all the words that exist in all the blogs on the internet.  The shear amount of "art" on the internet is astounding.  So why isn't the work of artificial intelligence that is influenced by all of this art not the work of an artist? 

There are roughly 109 keys on an  Magic Keyboard and only 9 of them are numbers, and 26 of them are letters.  About 40% of the keyboard is designed to be either math or language. However, 100% of  keys on a keyboard are pressed by a human hand.  

And the entire internet including the creation of the artificial intelligence has been created by humans all over the place smashing the keys and clicking the mouse over many many years.  

All of which is part of the wonderful world that encompasses the word "ART"