From Imitation to Innovation: The Emergence of AI Unique Artistic Styles and the Challenge of Copyright Protection

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new framework, ArtBulb, for evaluating AI-generated art styles to address copyright issues, supported by a new dataset and legal criteria.

Contribution

It introduces ArtBulb, an interpretable, quantifiable method for AI art copyright judgment, and presents AICD, the first benchmark dataset annotated by experts.

Findings

ArtBulb outperforms existing models in evaluations.

Legal criteria for AI art style distinction are established.

AICD dataset facilitates AI art copyright research.

Abstract

Current legal frameworks consider AI-generated works eligible for copyright protection when they meet originality requirements and involve substantial human intellectual input. However, systematic legal standards and reliable evaluation methods for AI art copyrights are lacking. Through comprehensive analysis of legal precedents, we establish three essential criteria for determining distinctive artistic style: stylistic consistency, creative uniqueness, and expressive accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce ArtBulb, an interpretable and quantifiable framework for AI art copyright judgment that combines a novel style description-based multimodal clustering method with multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We also present AICD, the first benchmark dataset for AI art copyright annotated by artists and legal experts. Experimental results demonstrate that ArtBulb outperforms existing models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our work aims to bridge the gap between the legal and technological communities and bring greater attention to the societal issue of AI art copyrights.