Series: AI Page 37 of 43

As I continue on this train of trying to figure out how to build a low tech human powered version of the Elephant Robotics exoskeleton, I made an important discovery about historical robot types. My working definition of “robot” is of course somewhat broad, and some might argue that what I found is not really itself robotic… but I don’t care about that.

The more polite modern name for my discovery is a remote manipulator, and the older less politically correct name for it is a master-slave manipulator. They are also called waldos after a Heinlein short story. From the Wikipedia, as to origins around hazardous material handling:

In 1945, the company Central Research Laboratories was given the contract to develop a remote manipulator for the Argonne National Laboratory. The intent was to replace devices which manipulated highly radioactive materials from above a sealed chamber or hot cell, with a mechanism which operated through the side wall of the chamber, allowing a researcher to stand normally while working.

The result was the Master-Slave Manipulator Mk. 8, or MSM-8, which became the iconic remote manipulator seen in newsreels and movies, such as The Andromeda Strain or THX 1138.

For reference, here is the THX 1138 scene, though I barely remember that movie:

Note that a remote manipulator is distinct from a glovebox, like we see Homer Simpson using. In a glovebox, you stick your arms in, and they are shielded, but you’re using your own actual hands to manipulate objects. In remote manipulators – waldos – you are not. The action is at a distance, which is part of what makes this an intriguing thing to try to DIY.

I found a number of other videos on this topic of remote or telemanipulator systems, as they are also called. Or “Slave Hands” as they are called in the 1960 video:

Curiously, many of the promo materials for this technology often include the robotic hands lighting a cigarette for a woman, or serving her tea. In the one above, she’s even made to drink from the tea cup, which is a level of trust I would probably not have here were I them. The whole trend of that kind of imagery seems like a weird scientist sublimated puppetmaster/beauty & the beast erotic fantasy undercurrent somehow that I haven’t quite delved into, but definitely appears to be a “thing.” (It’s also on display here in another form in the 1948 GE Master-Slave Manipulator on Cybernetic Zoo – which has tons of related material, by the way).

A similar video from 1956:

1972, different form factor, but same basic idea:

Here’s a more modern demo of this type of technology from 6 years ago:

This heavy duty remote manipulator for large heavy objects is also amazing:

Okay, so the above is all well and good for industrial scale work, but I was hard pressed to find too many DIY examples of remote manipulators, with something that I might try to clone for home use. The below video demonstrates the closest analogue I’ve found to what I might try and build for the purposes of painting with it.

You can see the finished version of that My-Nuke coin operated nuclear reactor game machine by Tim Hunkins here.

For my purposes, the iteration he has around this form seems most relevant, labelled as Mark 2, starting around 0:32 in the video, here’s a still:

Just eyeballing it, that doesn’t look all that complicated… just some bar linkages to transmit forward/back motion. Unclear how the rest works exactly for the side to side motion – he kinda swings/rotates the arm? I can’t tell from the screen capture exactly how the grabber works, but now that I understand cable controls (kinda), that shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out. Anyway, a number of questions left here, but that’s the best simple DIY-style example I could find, and that gives me plenty of fuel for my own prototypes in this direction.

This one is new to me, despite being a kid in the 1980s, the Armatron, a robotic arm from Radio Shack. Here are some videos I’ve had open in tabs for weeks now, so offloading here for safe-keeping:

Apparently despite having some minimal electronic parts, the device is mostly mechanical.

There was also a mobile version:

This video shows the guts of how the mechanism and gearbox work:

All in all, seems like a really cool toy! I wish I had one in good working order to experiment with as a drawing tool.

Source:

Thus reproduction — mechanical or digital — is the source and vehicle for a work’s “aura.” A spectator’s encounter with a “famous” work as an object is distinctly different than their encounter with an unknown work because it is the wide dissemination of that work through reproduction that creates the particular experience: cultural tourism is based on this idea of encounters with originals whose aura is a function of their being widely reproduced. The more fully a work is disseminated, the greater its “aura.” Andy Warhol’s persona, and his construction of superstars who are “famous for being famous” demonstrates the transient, contingent nature of this conception of “aura,” its socially-constructed nature, and its reliance upon reproduction for existence.

Found via this 2023 Nettrice Gaskins piece on the concept of aura in AI art.

Apparently, my submission to the US Copyright Office public consultation on generative AI and copyright was cited in the recent report by that office on the copyrightability of gen-AI outputs. The relevant passage:

Some commenters drew analogies to a Jackson Pollock painting or to nature photography taken with a stationary camera, which may be eligible for copyright protection even if the author does not control where paint may hit the canvas or when a wild animal may step into the frame. However, these works differ from AI-generated materials in that the human author is principally responsible for the execution of the idea and the determination of the expressive elements in the resulting work. Jackson Pollock’s process of creation did not end with his vision of a work. He controlled the choice of colors, number of layers, depth of texture, placement of each addition to the overall composition—and used his own body movements to execute each of these choices.

I haven’t read the full report yet, but I stand by my original statements, even if they don’t fully agree with my conclusions. Nice to be (partially) heard anyway, I guess!

Following up on being mentioned in a footnote in the document, amongst some 10K other commenters, I wanted to jot down initial notes and reactions as I skim through the rest of the document.

Page iii has key takeaways, and begins with recommendation of no change needed to current US copyright law. But the second point is, in my opinion, as clear as mud:

The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.

Perhaps it will get clearer later in the document, but “assist rather than stand in for” is so… well, let’s just leave it at unclear for now. But this exact bridge is near where I’ve been trying to tie my horse (metaphorically) these past months in my work creating low tech human-powered robots and drawing machines without any electronics or motors or software. I think people who haven’t gotten out and explored this terrain carefully from an artistic/observer POV on the actual ground are much more likely to think there’s some clear either/or demarcation bright line between these two states, but there’s simply not. It’s a continuum with robotics and mechanical drawing machines, just like it is with generative AI… just how many linkages in a drawing arm do I need to add – precise count, please! – before the resulting artwork becomes no longer copyrightable? When does a tool become a stand-in? This is an extremely blurry – and I think vital! – question to explore more deeply, rather than say case closed…

This is another high-level takeaway, same page:

Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

I understand why, in their framework, this is likely the case. But to me as someone who has had to both write & enforce content policies, it sort of suggests that maybe they don’t have clear enough rules to apply. Often-times doing things on a “case by case basis” in a large queue workflow like they must certainly have for new copyright submissions, it can mean that you end up re-inventing the wheel again and again. Maybe that’s not the case here, but glossing over it as an outsider, that’s the impression I get. It doesn’t, at the very least, *sound* very efficient. [Insert obligatory Dept. of Govt. Efficiency reference… btw here is its titular head’s take on AI & copyright… make of it what you will.]

On that note, I’ve grown more accustomed and see the wisdom in Canada’s arrangement where the IPO does not review or assess submissions, everything is automatically approved. If it’s contested, it is a matter for the courts. Given that so many copyright cases go to court anyway, in one way of looking at things, it seems possibly more efficient to just let it be decided there on a case-by-case basis, rather than having this other secondary body doing *another* layer of case-by-case analysis, which itself becomes open to being challenged in court.

Well, seeing as how wound-up I got only just off a few lines here, this might be a wise place to stop for the night.

Decent short video about the process of moving a Sol Lewitt piece in a museum:

Some context from his wiki page:

According to the principle of his work, LeWitt’s wall drawings are usually executed by people other than the artist himself. Even after his death, people are still making these drawings. He would therefore eventually use teams of assistants to create such works. Writing about making wall drawings, LeWitt himself observed in 1971 that “each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently”. Between 1968 and his death in 2007, LeWitt created more than 1,270 wall drawings. The wall drawings, executed on-site, generally exist for the duration of an exhibition; they are then destroyed, giving the work in its physical form an ephemeral quality. They can be installed, removed, and then reinstalled in another location, as many times as required for exhibition purposes. When transferred to another location, the number of walls can change only by ensuring that the proportions of the original diagram are retained.

There’s a famous quote that is attributed to Lewitt, and which appears to originate in this 1967 Artforum piece, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, which I’ll quote just a short version of here:

When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Presumably, that article is an extension of his original piece ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art,’ the text from which is visible here. I’m trying to figure out how Sol Lewitt’s artwork presages some of what we see in generative & algorithmic art today… Are Lewitt’s full-scale wall drawings that are executed by crews of artists & craftspeople considered copyrighted to him?

Like any good conceptual artist, I asked ChatGPT for its opinion, and it gave me this:

Sol LeWitt’s conceptual art practice directly parallels the AI copyright debate, particularly regarding authorship, execution, and human intervention. LeWitt created instruction-based artworks, where he provided precise, often algorithmic guidelines for others to execute his pieces—sometimes without his direct involvement. Despite this, LeWitt was still granted copyright over these works because the creative idea and system of execution were his intellectual property, even if the physical realization was carried out by others.

This raises key contradictions in AI-generated art:

• LeWitt’s logic applies to AI prompting: If a human provides structured prompts or generative rules, why is the resulting image considered AI-authored rather than human-authored?

• Does execution matter? If human assistants executing LeWitt’s instructions didn’t negate his copyright, why does AI “executing” a prompt remove authorship?

• Minimal human intervention: LeWitt’s wall drawings are often executed by fabricators with no creative input of their own—similar to an AI merely realizing pre-set human parameters.

If LeWitt’s purely conceptual authorship was enough for copyright, then AI-assisted art following structured human direction should logically qualify as well. The US Copyright Office’s position contradicts the art historical precedent set by LeWitt’s work.

Like many things ChatGPT, I’m not sure how accurate that all is in the specifics. It depends heavily on the assumption that Lewitt’s third-party produced drawings were/are copyrightable to/by/for him, something I have not yet been able to independently establish proof of.

I did find someone asking some related questions here on Reddit around Lewitt’s work and copyright. They point to the practice of Lewitt’s of issuing certificates of authenticity for a given work, a copy of one of which is presumably viewable here:

I haven’t dug too deep or verified much of this outside of the above fragments, as I’m during a speedrun through art history, but this is a good follow-on:

Free Sol LeWitt is a workshop producing copies of the work by Sol LeWitt, Untitled (Wall Structure), 1972. The workshop produces exact replicas of the artwork in metal and distributes them to the public, free of charge. 

LeWitt famously wrote that “I believe that ideas, once expressed, become the common property of all. They are invalid if not used, they can only be given away and not stolen.” Taking the artist’s word seriously, Free Sol LeWitt questions the restrictions of copyright, the relevance of originality, and the tendency to safeguard art in museums, distant from people’s daily lives. Through a lottery system, the works are “set free” from the museum or gallery setting, to take up residence in people’s homes.

Separately, this blog post seems to contradict ChatGPT’s ‘confidently wrong’ assertions above:

The international TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement—the treaty with the most nation signatories—puts the matter perhaps most succinctly: “Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such.” The expression is the formal thing—the words, the shapes, the sounds. This is the thing(to use the language of the U.S. Copyright Act) that is “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” This, so far as the law is concerned, is the thing that is protected: those shapes and those colors in that arrangement. Insofar as Erased de Kooning Drawing is a work of conceptual art—and insofar as a work of conceptual art is not a final product but a process, a project, an idea—it isn’t protected by copyright. What is protected is what I like to call the authored work—the more impoverished thing with which copyright concerns itself: the merely formal thing—the visual composition, the arrangement of shapes and colors, the end result.

Copyright might also protect documentation of the work’s creation or instantiation, or the instructions for making that work. Where the construction of such a work is photographed or filmed, the photograph or film would be protected by copyright in the same way that, say, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination is protected: as the capturing of some moment in history, some fact from some perspective. The fact is not protected, only the document. The instructions for instantiating such a work, meanwhile—like Sol LeWitt’s wall-drawing instructions—would be protected in the same way that a recipe or the instructions for a game are protected, which is to say “thinly”. Those precise words in that precise order would be protected against illicit copying, but the method, system, or process they describe would not.

Anyway, a good enough place to end this ramble for tonight…

I’m still sifting through the new AI + copyrightability report put out by the USCO, the one my submission was cited in regarding Jackson Pollack. Have been combing like articles, like the one from Artnews cited below, to try to get a foothold into it before continuing to comb through the document line by line.

The report illustrated how easily matters of authorship can be muddled with AI using the example of a Gemini-generated cat smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. Gemini, the reported noted, ignored select prompt instructions and added elements of its own, including the cat’s “incongruous human hand.”

The unpredictability of Gemini was then contrasted with examples of human spontaneity, like the splatter technique of Jackson Pollock. The artist did not manage where or how the paint landed, but “controlled the choice of colors, number of layers, depth of texture, placement of each addition to the overall composition — and used his own body movements to execute each of these choices.”

“The issue is the degree of human control, rather than the predictability of the outcome,” the office concluded.

However, the department said that using such technology to assist in “human” creative expression does not necessarily preclude a work’s eligibility for copyright protection. Like a writer asking AI to create an outline for a book, the user is “referencing, but not incorporating, the output,” the report explained.

To me, when I read that as an artist, I almost take it as a challenge. My brain starts formulating “Oh yeah? Well, what if I ______ and used ____ to ____?” Like literally every criteria they mention above, I can think of half a dozen interesting ways to tear it all down and remake it into something new… And speedrunning through videos on historical art movements has given me tons of new (well, old, since most of its historical – but new to me) references and art historical contexts to flesh out my understanding of how we arrived at this moment, and what relevant things artists have already said about these issues many times over during at least the last 125 years, perhaps longer. More on that another time though, as those project ideas simmer on the back of the stove.

One thing I’ve spotted in media coverage around that report has been that in terms of purely reading headlines about it in Google News, it’s about a 50/50 split, it seems, as to whether or not the position championed by the Copyright Office enables something (like copyrighting art that is assisted by but not purely generated by AI), or restricts something (like registering copyright for, I guess, purely AI generated works). So I wonder if that is a success or failure in terms of public messaging? I would guess maybe it shows success in finding some middle position that much of the public is likely to be able to live with… we shall see.

Excellent video from a year ago:

It’s a “high level” art think piece, not just a bunch of anime gen AI images or whatever. Capital A Art.