The Conversation recently had an article tangentially related to the concept of AI art. In this case, it is players of video games creating art out of the virtual landscapes in which they play.

For a couple decades now, video games have offered players the opportunity to pause things and grab a picture. Among the basic features tend to be removing elements of the user interface so the view won’t be obstructed by buttons, etc. In other games, the player gets a camera object with which to frame things rather than just perform a screenshot. The article mentions Red Dead Redemption 2, which is set in the 19th Century American West has an era appropriate 1898 Kodak camera available in game.

Other games allow players to tweak weather and lighting sources to get the picture they want.

While I don’t play a wide variety of video games, I can attest to the beauty of the game worlds the artists create. One game I played allowed players to use hang gliders. I would go to the highest elevation I could find and glide down just admiring the night sky or sunrise/sunset.

More recently I was playing in the alpha-stage of a game when the developers started to upgrade lighting elements and was amazed at how accurately the sunlight progressed along the landscape as the sun rose from behind the mountains. You could be riding your mount and transition from light into shadow and back or just sit still for awhile and eventually have the light pass over your spot.

So it may not come as a surprise that people are assembling art exhibits based on “photos” they have taken in game. Some have focused on images from places they have glitched into like walls, rocks, trees, etc. Not the most attractive views, but sometimes very amusing. As some players can attest there are times when you might fall through the ground watching the underside of fields, mountains, and houses recede into the distance above you.

This practice of players taking photographs of other people’s art work from within the game raises questions about who owns the copyright. Back in 2014 there was the question about whether Bradley Cooper or Ellen DeGeneres owned the copyright on a picture Cooper took with DeGeneres phone. What is the situation when the person who designed the world also designed the camera that took the picture?

The article mentions a situation where an artist assembled and manipulated photos other players took into an exhibit. There was some suggestion that only the game developer had standing to press a copyright claim against the artist for the use of its intellectual property.

This is going to be one of the situations, among many to come, (including a case about AI created art the Supreme Court heard a week ago) that will likely cause a shift in the definition of copyright ownership.