Whether Artificial Intelligence Image Generators Pose a Threat to Moral Rights for Creative Works in The United States?

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, a distinctive future known as Image Generator has raised significant legal and ethical concerns in our lives. Image Generators can generate photos and pictures from a person’s imagination, as described in the chat input, and produce almost anything using its extensive database that leverages connections to the worldwide web. Theoretically, an image generator can access to any image on its database and create dozens, if not thousands, of different versions of that specific picture, along with meeting the user’s demands. In recent years, many scholars have addressed to number of concerns surrounding Artificial Intelligence and copyright. However, there has been limited attention to the risks that image generators pose to moral rights in the United States, which offers limited, narrow and “fragile” moral rights protection. This article delves into the unique framework of moral rights in the United States, examining how AI image generators can potentially infringe those rights and contradict the purpose they serve. The analysis is divided into four main parts. Part I will provide a brief review of the relevant history of artificial intelligence, image generators, and moral rights in the United States. Part II will focus on the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, exploring its legislative history, interpretation, and applicability to intangible forms of visual works. Part III will explore the mechanisms of AI and its system, the types of infringements by AI during training and through user manipulation, including conducting related experiments. Lastly, the article aims to clarify if artificial intelligence systems pose a threat to moral rights in the United States.