From Imitation to Innovation: The Emergence of AI Unique Artistic Styles and the Challenge of Copyright Protection
This work addresses the societal problem of AI art copyrights for legal and technological communities, though it is incremental in combining existing methods with new benchmarks.
The paper tackles the lack of systematic standards for AI art copyright protection by establishing three criteria for distinctive artistic style and introducing ArtBulb, an interpretable framework that outperforms existing models in evaluations.
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.