Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1525020
2 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Fall 2024 individual images themselves generated by Midjourney could not be protected by copyright because the authorship of the content is attributed to the AI model or the machine, not the person prompting it. Therefore, parts of the comic book are copyrightable, but because AI was used in the creation of the totality of the project, the finished product is not. I recom- mend reading the full document on the copyright website for more information. The current copyright laws mandate human authorship in the process of creation in order for corporations to apply and receive copyright. This is critical to the future of our industry. It ensures the need for human creativity—the very soul of what we bring to the table—to be a part of the process when producing works deserving of legal protection in our coun- try. This not only ensures a level of protection for our jobs in the future as more AI systems become available, but also ensures that the product we strive to make has the ability to connect with our audiences on a real and human level—For Humans, By Humans. This fall's presidential election results could change all of that though. AI and tech companies, as well as major corpora- tions, are lobbying to change the laws to economize labor and receive copyright protections for non-human authored work. This could do indescribable harm to our workers, our industry as a whole, and other industries like ours. When you vote this fall (and if you're not planning to vote, please vote this fall), it is important that you do so in a manner that reflects your stance on these laws and the need to keep our industry and its content safe. I have been working with International Political Affairs Director Tyler Macintosh and Local 695 Political Affairs Director James Delhauer to educate our members going into the 2024 election. Our Local will be releasing voter infor- mation guides outlining candidates supported by the IATSE, the California IATSE Council, and the California Federation of Labor for their worker-first records of service so that you know which candidates have your best interests at heart. UPDATE (and editorial plot twist): Five days later, I'm revis- ing my second pass at this article on the way back to Los Angeles, a day before the RNC commences. Producers of The Daily Show canceled our Milwaukee RNC shows three hours after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. FROM THE PRESIDENT Let's talk about Zarya of the Dawn. As I write this, I'm currently en route to work as the Recordist for The Daily Show's coverage of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee. In August, I'll fly home to Chicago to work the Democratic National Convention. These events have been a career bucket list item for as long as I can remember. Though I was supposed to check them off my list in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to post- pone endeavors until now. But this year's election seems to hit a little closer to home. For the past year, I have poured my heart and soul into my research on artificial intelligence (AI) for this year's Basic and Videotape Supplemental Agreement negotiations. A large part of that research revolved around copyright laws and how they pertain to our industry. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, AI or generative AI, models "train" on vast quantities of unstructured, preexisting human-authored data. A human "prompts" or creates a text instruction, which is converted into tokens that the AI model uses to find patterns within that data set to draw from. The machine then uses those inferences from the trained data set to generate new content or output. This output can be text, audio, or visual in format. The questions becomes who is the author of the output? The human who wrote the prompt or the AI model? The Copyright Act defines the scope of copyright protection as an "original work of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression." The term "original," according to the Supreme Court, consists of two components: independent creation and sufficient creativity. The work must be independently created by a human author and must possess sufficient creativity. "Works of authorship" have uniformly been limited to human creation. Therefore, an output from an AI system is authored by the machine, not by the human prompting it. Several case studies are available on the U.S. Copyright Office website (www.copyright.gov) for a leisurely Friday- night read. However, one stands out amongst the rest. Zarya of the Dawn is an eighteen-page comic book consisting of both text and visual material. Upon further investigation by the US copyright office, the comic book text was human authored, but the images were generated by a text-to-image AI service called Midjourney. Midjourney, which oper- ates on top of a third-party communication service called Discord, takes a user's input text and generates images based on Midjourney's individual server data. In February 2023, the Copyright Office concluded that Zarya of the Dawn was comprised of human-authored text, which did constitute a copyrightable work. However, the