I’m giving away what is set up for a DS106 Daily Create scheduled for April 29 (the link will not work until then) “Monkey Prompt. Monkey Create. Monkey No Copyright.”
This is a fascinating, legendary, and before it happened, likely improbable story. I leave it for the unfamiliar to revert that situation with its detailed Wikipedia summary. But this came forward again recently, with a BBC story of what was originally a stake into what could not be copyrighted into a huge legal implication for generative AI, This monkey selfie will protect you from AI slop.
If you read URLs you might notice that the original title would have been “The monkey selfie that predicted the ai age” (your slug is showing, BBC editors).
For you, all this means that anything you create, from photos to drawings and writing, carries a special legal protection that machines can’t claim. In a world of endless AI output, your creativity counts as something distinct. When AI helps you along the way, the rules aren’t clear.
These cases will keep coming, and the conversation will shift along with them. But the work you love still needs to be made by a person for now, and in part, you can thank an Indonesian monkey with a perfect smile.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-selfie-that-predicted-the-ai-age
Let’s give some credit to Naruto or Ella as the article suggests the exact monkey who took the photos is not certain, making the story that much more interesting.
All in all, this was something that whispered to my brain, which could have been doing something more productive, “This would make for a great Daily Create. Maybe something like a meme image?” I have trouble ignoring that call. I need help?
The photo credit in the BBC story seems to suggest the photographer who wanted to retain copyright still gets credit. Thus this becomes one of those rarer occasions for me I will reach for ChatGPT.
Now I proudly claim that I am amongst the worst (if there are ratings) or least proficient at so called “prompt engineering”. I do not want to be good at it! So I thought I might get some weird or cartoon style goofy image with this prompt (please ridicule my skills here).
Create a selfie style image graphic style of the full face of a black monkey with a huge grin on its face.
https://chatgpt.com/share/69e24015-6514-832b-b906-ac09b6cc9eb7
I had hope “graphic” style would get me something non-photographic style. I am sure someone will tell me the “right” way to do this. That’s not the point. By acting as a Lousy Prompter I am closer to what most ordinary people will toss in, not what some Prompt God does.
How interesting then, or maybe predictable, that ChatGPT would return something indistinguishable from the original photo.
full face of a black monkey with a huge grin on its face” placed into the public domain cause
AI monkeys can’t claim copyright!
I made this as a template image with this attribution for use in the Daily Create along with two examples.
Psss here is a secret, the most rewarding part of the Daily Create is actually creating them and seeing how people respond. You get to do one response as an example, and maybe di it again as a response when published! Truly Creating Daily Creates > Doing Daily Creates (and the latter ranks high)
All of this leads one to wonder about how the machines hoover up all that content, slice and dice it into those 256 dimensional arrays, yet style, with the barest simple of prompts, spit out something almost indistinguishable from the original? You’d have to be something lower on the chain of intelligent creatures, far below monkeys, to grant copyright to that stuff.
I definitely cannot weigh on research that suggests the LLM models include original content or if it is just what comes out of the wash in the largest averaging machine created.
As one more experiment, I wondered if the original could be re-spawned with the most simple of prompts to the ChatGPT image generator “monkey selfie”. Hmmm, no.
What if I bump one more word in the prompt to be “black monkey selfie”. Now that one likes like Naruto, eh?
I believe I have “monkeyed around” too much with this. Maybe someone else can find a 2-3 word prompt that returns something iconic, well known.
But also, look! I gave you now 4 full days to think of your own meme message for an AI Generated Monkey! Wednesday! Be there at https://daily.ds106.us/tdc5220
Featured Image: The two monkey meme images made with an AI generated image that cannot be copyrighted- DING DING public domain, atop a screen shot of a Google image search for “monkey face”
