Who “owns” the art in an AI collaboration?

Throughout my collaboration with the agents, we co-created many pieces of “art” with their generation capabilities and my prompts. With certain tools, I also uploaded my own original work to give examples and to continue the iteration together. In these scenarios, who “owns” the digital art or the physical art that used the AI-generated art as starting points? Check out some examples of my collaborations below.

Note: These only reflect a small sliver of the discussions I had with the agents. I pushed them on everything from trying to convey feelings to aesthetic changes to philosophical debate.

This was when I first thinking to create art about “nature and nightlife.”

I continued to push the AI on removing perfect circles and grid lines, but it really couldn’t do it.

This is an example my own work modelled off of the AI-generated image.

More iterations of my own work using the AI-generated images as a starting point.