Original Reddit post

I recently become aware of the Suno song creation AI tool when my niece sent me a song she made with lyrics she created to get my opinion. I’m kind of all over the place when it come to AI since it has far ranging uses and implications. But in this instance I’m very happy it exists because my niece, who I love dearly, suffers from Multiple Sclerosis. And Suno has given her a chance to take a part of her beautiful mind/soul and put it out into the world in a way that her condition might limit her. For that I am truly happy and grateful that AI exists. I even gave it a try, though not with my own lyrics. I gave Suno William Shakespeare’s 150th sonnet as lyrics and ask it to create an orchestrated song with an acoustic guitar lead and was blown away by what it created. This has lead me down a trail of thoughts and questions I figured might be interesting to share with this congregation. The sonnet song: https://suno.com/s/jYtrEh8XU3dNaaY2 Will AI let people create with material in the public domain? Yes, people can use AI to interact with, remix, and build upon public domain material, but the resulting pure AI outputs themselves cannot be copyrighted in the United States . [ 1 , 2 ] How AI Interacts with Public Domain Works Using Public Domain Data for AI Training: Public domain books, art, music, and historical records are frequently used to train generative AI models. Because these works are free of copyright restrictions, using them for data training avoids licensing fees, royalties, and direct infringement risks. [ 1 ] Generating New Content from Public Domain Inspiration: You can prompt an AI to write a story in the style of Shakespeare, generate an image based on an 18th-century painting, or reformat public domain text. [ 1 , 2 ] Ownership and Copyright Rules Pure AI Outputs Go to the Public Domain: Under U.S. Copyright Office policy and federal court rulings (such as Thaler v. Perlmutter ), copyright requires human authorship. Because an AI model generates output via statistical probability rather than human creative intent, purely AI-generated content is considered authorless and enters the public domain immediately . [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] Anyone Can Copy Your AI Output: Because pure AI-generated content cannot be protected by copyright, anyone else can copy, modify, redistribute, or monetize your AI-generated text, image, or audio without your permission and without legal recourse. [ 1 , 2 ] Human-Authored Elements Can Be Copyrighted: If you substantially modify, paint over, or creatively combine AI outputs with your own original human-created work, you can claim copyright protection— but only over the human-added portions , while the raw AI components remain unprotected in the public domain. [ 1 , 2 ] What are the rules that determine public domain? In the United States, works enter the Public Domain when their copyright term expires, when they fail to meet legal copyright requirements, or when they are never protected by copyright law in the first place The public domain | UC Copyright. [ 1 , 2 ] Ways Works Enter the Public Domain Copyright Expiration (Modern Works): For works created on or after January 1, 1978, the copyright lasts for the author’s life plus 70 years The public domain | UC Copyright . For anonymous, pseudonymous, or corporate works (works made for hire), the term is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation , whichever expires first The public domain | UC Copyright. [ 1 ] Copyright Expiration (Historical U.S. Works): Under the Copyright Term and the Public Domain Guide by Cornell University Library , works published in the U.S. before a certain age lose copyright after 95 years Copyright Term and the Public Domain . For example, all general works published in the U.S. in or before 1930 are now in the public domain Copyright Term and the Public Domain, and works from 1931 enter on January 1, 2027 Public domain in the United States - Wikipedia . [ 1 , 2 ] Failure to Comply with Formalities (Older Rules): Under older U.S. laws, works published before March 1, 1989, could fall into the public domain if they were published without a proper copyright notice and not registered within specific timeframes The public domain | UC Copyright, or if pre-1964 copyrights were not renewed Copyright Term and the Public Domain. [ 1 , 2 ] Ineligible Subject Matter: Some things can never be copyrighted and belong to the public domain immediately, including ideas, facts, raw data, scientific formulas, titles, short phrases, and U.S. government-produced works Welcome to the Public Domain - Copyright Overview by Rich Stim - Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center. [ 1 , 2 ] Important Distinction: Copyright vs. Trademark Characters or elements can be protected by both copyright and trademark law simultaneously. While the original copyright on a character (like early versions of Mickey Mouse) may expire, trademarks can last indefinitely as long as they are actively used in commerce for branding and merchandise. How did Walt Disney influence copyright law? The Walt Disney Company has heavily influenced U.S. copyright law by lobbying Congress to repeatedly extend the duration of copyright protections—most notably to prevent its mascot, Mickey Mouse, from entering the public domain. [ 1 ] Key Milestones in Disney’s Copyright Influence Copyright Act of 1976: Under the 1909 Act, copyright lasted for 56 years total, meaning Steamboat Willie (1928) was scheduled to enter the public domain in 1984. Backed by Disney’s lobbying, the 1976 Act extended corporate works to 75 years , pushing Mickey Mouse’s expiration to 2003. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998: Often nicknamed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” this legislation extended corporate copyright terms from 75 to 95 years . Disney spent millions on lobbying and campaign contributions to pass the bill, pushing Mickey Mouse’s copyright expiration from 2003 to 2023 . [ 1 , 2 ] Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003): Constitutional challenges against the 1998 term extension were brought to the U.S. Supreme Court by public domain advocates. Disney supported the law and filed amicus briefs defending it; the Supreme Court ultimately upheld Congress’s authority to extend copyright terms. [ 1 ] Transition to Trademark Strategies (Post-2023): On January 1, 2024 , the original 1928 black-and-white Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse officially entered the U.S. public domain. Because copyright terms have hit a practical ceiling, Disney now relies heavily on trademark law (which lasts indefinitely as long as a mark is actively used in commerce) to restrict unauthorized commercial uses or logos associated with its characters. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] “There is nothing new under the sun.” breakdown as it relates to human creativity and derivation. The phrase There is nothing new under the sun originates from Ecclesiastes 1:9 ( “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again” ), meaning that human history, patterns, and experiences operate in a continuous, cyclic loop. [ 1 , 2 ] When applied to human creativity and derivation , this proverb does not mean art and science lack effort; instead, it reframes creation as an act of recombination rather than immaculate conception . The Myth of “Pure Originality” Zero ex nihilo creation: Humans cannot create something completely out of nothing ( ex nihilo ). Every idea, story, melody, or visual work is built out of pre-existing components stored in the creator’s memory, culture, and environment. The illusion of the lone genius: Figures like Shakespeare, Mozart, or Kandinsky did not invent in a vacuum. They absorbed the idioms, structures, and cultural conversations of their eras, synthesized them, and pushed them one step further. [ 1 ] Derivation as the Engine of Art All creation is re-derivation: Creative work is fundamentally the process of taking old elements—words, colors, chord progressions, narrative tropes—and remixing them in a fresh context. The “Hero’s Journey” and archetypes: Virtually every modern blockbuster or novel relies on ancient structural archetypes first mapped out thousands of years ago. The surface details change (spaceships instead of horses, lasers instead of swords), the underlying human pattern remains identical. T.S. Eliot’s view on tradition: As Eliot argued, bad poets imitate while good poets steal; they transform what they absorb into something that feels distinct, even though the raw materials are ancient. Innovation vs. Invention Repetition of human dilemmas: Technology changes (from the scroll to the printing press, to the internet, to AI), yet the underlying human questions—love, grief, ambition, betrayal, boredom—do not. Novelty is a shift in arrangement, not essence: A smartphone is a radically new object , yet it serves ancient human desires: communicating, gossiping, recording status, and seeking connection. Creativity is the continuous repackaging of eternal human drives into modern containers. [ 1 , 2 ] Why Creativity Still Matters Under the Axiom Subjective newness: Even if the universe contains a finite set of building blocks, the combination of those blocks experienced by an individual consciousness is infinite. Resonance through re-telling: Hearing an old truth told through a contemporary voice makes it feel “new” again to a new generation trapped in the same cyclic loop. “There is nothing new under the sun.” breakdown as it relates to human creativity and derivation. Include the current use of AI. To analyze the phrase “there is nothing new under the sun” (originally from the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes) through the lens of human creativity, derivation, and artificial intelligence, we have to look at how ideas are constructed. At its core, all creativity—whether human or machine—is derivative, relying on the rearrangement, synthesis, and recontextualization of existing information. 🧠 1. The Anatomy of Human Creativity Human beings do not create ideas out of a vacuum. Instead, human creativity operates like an advanced recycling system. In his structural breakdown of innovation, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson famously noted that all creativity relies on three fundamental steps: Copy: Subconsciously or consciously mimicking the styles, techniques, and structures of those who came before us to learn the mechanics of a craft. Transform: Taking an existing idea, breaking it down, and changing its form, tone, medium, or scale. Combine: Merging two or more completely unrelated concepts to create a seemingly novel intersection. When we call an artwork “original,” we usually just mean that the source material is well-hidden or the combination of elements is uniquely unexpected. 🔄 2. Derivation as the Engine of Art History Artistic movements are a continuous chain of reaction and derivation. No genre or medium stands entirely alone: Musical Evolution: The blues derived from African spirituals and work songs; rock and roll derived from the blues; hip-hop derived from funk and soul breaks via sampling. Literary Archetypes: Shakespeare regularly borrowed plotlines from classical mythology and history; modern storytelling still relies heavily on Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” archetype. Subcultural Context: Cultural movements, like the 1980s punk rock underground, emerged as a direct, raw transformation of stripped-down garage rock, combined with a visual DIY aesthetic reacting against mainstream commercialism. 🤖 3. How Generative AI Fits the Paradigm Generative AI tools (like LLMs and image generators) are the ultimate, hyper-accelerated manifestation of “nothing new under the sun.” They do not possess a mystical creative spark; they are mathematical mirrors of human history. AI functions as a mechanical synthesizer . It cannot invent a completely new pixel, color, or linguistic concept that hasn’t been mapped in its training data. Instead, it excels at the “Combine” and “Transform” stages of creativity at a scale and speed that humans cannot match. ⚖️ The Critical Difference: Intent and Imperfection If both humans and AI are just rearranging old parts, what separates them? The Power of Flaws: Human derivation is messy. When a human tries to copy an existing style, their unique physical limitations, emotional state, and imperfect memory cause them to fail upward into a distinct “signature style.” The Paradox of Choice: AI requires human intent (the prompt) to establish direction. Without a human to select, curation becomes meaningless. AI can generate thousands of derivative iterations, but a human must decide which specific combination resonates emotionally. submitted by /u/krishnabrodhi

Originally posted by u/krishnabrodhi on r/ArtificialInteligence