[HN Gopher] An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a h...
___________________________________________________________________
An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a
bullwhip
Author : participant3
Score : 1389 points
Date : 2025-04-03 17:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theaiunderwriter.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theaiunderwriter.substack.com)
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| And? What's the model supposed to do? It's just doing what many
| human artists would do, if they're not explicitly being paid to
| create new IP.
|
| If infringement is happening, it arguably doesn't happen when an
| infringing work product is _generated_ (or regurgitated, or
| whatever you want to call it.) Much less when the model is
| trained. It 's when the output is used commercially -- _by a
| human_ -- that the liability should rightfully attach.
|
| And it should attach to the human, not the tool.
| khelavastr wrote:
| Right! AI developers and directors should be culpable for
| infringement as part of their duties to larger organizations.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Is that really a good-faith rejoinder to the point I'm
| making?
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Assuming you can identify it's someone else's IP. Clearly these
| are hugely contrived examples, but what about text or code that
| you might not be as familiar with?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It doesn't matter. Sue whoever uses it commercially.
|
| If you insist on making it about the model, you will wreck
| something wonderful.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Ah, so don't use the outputs of an LLM commercially?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| That, or get sued.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| If it "may" violate copyright, correct!
| alabastervlog wrote:
| https://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
|
| Given enough time (... a surprisingly short amount) and
| enough people creating art (say, about as many as we have had
| for the last couple hundred years) and indefinitely-long-
| lived recording, plus very-long copyright terms, the
| inevitable result is that it's functionally impossible to
| create anything within the space of "things people like"
| that's not violating copyright, for any but the strictest
| definitions of what constitutes copying.
|
| The short story treats of music, but it's easy to see how
| visual arts and fiction-writing and the rest get at least
| _extremely crowded_ in short order under those circumstances.
| timewizard wrote:
| >> "a photo image of an intergalactic hunter who comes to earth
| in search of big game."
|
| I can literally imagine hundreds of things that are true to
| this description but entirely distinct from "Predator."
|
| > used commercially
|
| Isn't that what these AI companies are doing? Charging you for
| access to this?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Does their ToS say anywhere that they will come to defend you
| if you get sued for using their images?
|
| (Because proper stock agencies offer those kind of
| protections. If OpenAI doesn't, then don't use them as a
| replacement to a stock agency.)
| Carrok wrote:
| > It's just doing what many human artists would do
|
| I really don't think so. If I paid a human artist to make the
| prompt in the title, and I didn't explicitly say "Indiana
| Jones" I would think it should be fairly obvious to the human
| artist that I do _not_ want Indiana Jones. If they gave me back
| a picture of, clearly, Indiana Jones, I would ask them why they
| didn't create something original.
| derektank wrote:
| I actually don't think it would be obvious. By not explicitly
| saying Indiana Jones when so obviously describing Indiana
| Jones, there is an implication present. But I think many
| human artists would probably ask you, "Wait, so Indiana
| Jones, or are you looking for something different," before
| immediately diving in.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| So why didn't the AI ask for clarification?
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Because it wasn't prompted to? Have you not ever used
| ChatGPT?
| runarberg wrote:
| I'm not so sure, unless you are playing a game of "name the
| character" you generally _don't_ want Indiana Jones unless
| you explicitly mention Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones is a
| well known character, if you want a picture of Indiana
| Jones it is simple enough to just say: "Draw me a picture
| of Indiana Jones". The fact that they didn't say that, most
| likely means they don't want that.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| This seems pretty easy to test - can we just change the
| prompt to specifically exclude Indiana Jones?
| derektank wrote:
| Late reply but I did test this and I think the results
| show at least some originality when explicitly directed
| to not copy existing characters such as Indiana Jones[1]
| and the Predator[2]. Some elements of the original
| characters creep in, the archaeologist is wearing a
| fedora and the distinctly more skeletal bounty hunter
| appears to have a few dreads despite otherwise being
| bald, but they are distinct.
|
| [1] https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr152s6seqct2qzgd1dz0qh2
|
| [2] https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr14t6v3fzk8tx00aswwt4kx
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Meta-comment: the use of Indiana Jones, a character that was
| a very intentional throwback to the "Pulp hero explorer" from
| the childhoods of its creators, in this example to ponder how
| one would get "Indiana Jones without Indiana Jones" is quite
| humorous in its own right.
|
| Indiana Jones is already a successful permutation of that
| approach. He's Zorro, Rick Blaine, and Christopher Leiningen
| mashed together with their serial numbers filed off.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I agree. But massive changes in scale or leverage can undermine
| this type of principled stand.
|
| One death is a murder; 100k deaths is a war or a pandemic. One
| piece of chewing gum on the ground will get you a caning in
| Singapore; when everyone does it, that's NYC.
|
| Up until now, one had to have some level of graphical or
| artistic skills to do this, but not anymore. Again, I agree
| that it attaches to the human...but we now have many more
| humans to attach it to.
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| > One piece of chewing gum on the ground will get you a
| caning in Singapore
|
| This is not true, by the way. You will be fined for
| littering; or, if you are a repeat offender, be sentenced to
| cleaning public areas while wearing an offensively bright-
| coloured uniform (so that everyone can see that you are being
| punished). Source:
| https://www.nea.gov.sg/media/news/news/index/nea-
| increases-v...
|
| But no, you won't be caned for littering. Caning is reserved
| for more serious offences like vandalism, or much worse
| crimes like rape and murder.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I admit, that was hyperbole based on a hazy recollection of
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Michael_Fay.
|
| FWIW I've been to Singapore and had a great time, but I was
| careful to follow the many rules and signs. I especially
| liked the sign on the bus forbidding the opening of a
| durian fruit.
| axus wrote:
| Don't worry, the lawsuit will name a corporation that made it,
| not the AI tool.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| > It's just doing what many human artists would do, if they're
| not explicitly being paid to create new IP.
|
| It isn't an independent human. It is a service paid for by
| customers. The moment it provides the image to a paying user,
| the image has thus been used commercially.
|
| In fact, the user may not even necessarily have to be paying in
| order to infringe copyright.
|
| And besides, even amateur artists are ashamed to produce copies
| unless they are demonstrating mastery of technique or
| expressing adoration. And if it happens spontaneously, they are
| then frustrated and try to defend themselves by claiming to
| never have even experienced the original material. (As happens
| with simplistic, but popular musical riffs.) But AI explicitly
| is trained on every material it can get its hands on and so
| cannot make such a defense.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| If I pay you to tell me the plot of Indiana Jones, privately,
| because I don't have time to watch it, and you agree, did you
| violate copyright laws?
|
| If you do it for free, is it different?
|
| If I ask a friend to draw me as Indiana Jones? Or pay an
| artist? In either case I just want that picture to put in my
| rec room, not to sell.
| Electricniko wrote:
| OpenAI is currently valued at $300 billion, and their
| product is largely based on copying the copyrighted works
| of others, who weren't paid by OpenAI. It's a bit
| (exponentially) different from a "me and you" example.
| eMPee584 wrote:
| It's not copying - it's assimilating..
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Summarization is generally _not_ copyright infringement.
|
| Private copying and transference, even once for a friend,
| _is_ copyright infringement.
|
| I don't necessarily agree with this, but it is true
| nonetheless.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| "Private copying and transference, even once for a
| friend, is copyright infringement."
|
| Not without money or equivalent trade involved.
|
| I can draw Mickey Mouse all day on my notebook, and hand
| it to you; no legal issues.
|
| If I charge you a pack of bubble gum - Disney's lawyers
| will kick my door down and serve me notice.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| > Not without money or equivalent trade involved.
|
| This isn't generally true. The copyright holder need only
| claim that the value of their copyrighted work or the
| profits received by its distribution has been reduced or
| lost. I'm not sure they even need to make such a claim,
| as courts have already determined that commerciality
| isn't a requirement for infringement. It's a matter of
| unauthorized use, distribution or reproduction, not
| trade.
|
| They of course will likely never know and might not
| bother to litigate given the private and uncommercial
| nature, but they still have the right to do so.
|
| They would weigh the financial and reputational cost of
| litigating against children sharing images and decide not
| to. Of course if one had 10000 friends and provided this
| service to them in a visible manner, then they'd probably
| come knocking.
| cycomanic wrote:
| IANAL, but my understanding is that it's more complicated
| than this. Generally commercial benefits (i.e. taking
| money) is one of the aspects being taken into
| consideration to decide if something is fair use, but
| it's not the only one and not making a
| monetary/commercial benefit does not guarantee that work
| is considered fair use (which is the exception we're
| talking about here).
| prerok wrote:
| Not true. There were many cease and desist orders for
| fanfiction, which was intended as open source.
| cycomanic wrote:
| The answer is yes? The person doing the drawing is
| violating copyright. I don't know why that is even a
| controversial question.
|
| You are asking the equivalent question of, if I put a
| pirated copy of windows on my PC that I only use privately
| at home am I violating copyright, or if I sell copies of
| music for people to only listen to in their own home.
|
| But this is even more damning, this is a commercial service
| that is reproducing the copyrighted work.
|
| Edit: Just to clarify to people who reflexively downvote.
| I'm making a statement of what is it not a value judgement.
| And yes there is fair use, but that's an exemption from the
| rule that it is a copyright violation.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| This would be more like if you reimplemented Windows from
| scratch if you have violated copyright law.
|
| Let's put it another way: if you decide you want to
| recreate Indiana Jones shot for shot, and you hire actors
| and a director etc. which individuals are actually
| responsible for the copyright collation? Do caterers
| count too? Or is it the person who actually is producing
| the movie?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > It's when the output is used commercially -- by a human --
| that the liability should rightfully attach.
|
| I am paying OpenAI. So they are producing these copyrighted
| works and giving them to me for their own commercial benefit.
| Normally that's illegal. But somehow not when you're just doing
| it en masse.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It's not legal or illegal. That hasn't been decided yet.
| Nothing like this has ever existed before, and it will take
| some time for the law to deal with it.
| mppm wrote:
| > What's the model supposed to do? It's just doing what many
| human artists would do, if they're not explicitly being paid to
| create new IP.
|
| Not really? Why would a human artist create a faithful
| reproduction of Indiana Jones when asked to paint an
| archeologist? And besides, if they did, it would be considered
| clear IP infringement if the result were used commercially.
|
| > If infringement is happening, it arguably doesn't happen when
| an infringing work product is generated (or regurgitated, or
| whatever you want to call it.) Much less when the model is
| trained. It's when the output is used commercially -- by a
| human -- that the liability should rightfully attach.
|
| I agree. Release groups, torrent sites and seedbox operators
| should not be wrongly accused of pirating movies. Piracy only
| occurs in the act of actually watching a movie without paying,
| and should not be prosecuted without definitive proof of such
| (!_!)
| whycome wrote:
| > if they did, it would be considered clear IP infringement
| if the result were used commercially.
|
| Isn't that exactly what OP is saying?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Torrent sites deliver the movie in its original form. AI
| models maintain abstract descriptions of the content as
| individually-unrecognizable high-dimensional representations
| in latent space.
|
| Over the years we've spent a lot of time on this and similar
| sites questioning the sanity of a legal system that makes
| math illegal, and, well, that's all this is. Math.
|
| To the extent the model reproduces images from Indiana Jones
| and the others, it is because these multibillion-dollar
| franchises are omnipresent cultural icons. The copyright
| holder has worked very hard to make that happen, and they
| have been _more_ than adequately repaid for their
| contribution to our shared culture. It 's insane to go after
| an AI model for simply being as aware of that imagery and as
| capable of reproducing it as a human artist would be.
|
| If the model gives you infringing material as a prompt
| response, it's your responsibility not to use that material
| commercially, just as if you had tasked a human artist with
| the same vague requirement and received a plagiarized work
| product in return.
| timewizard wrote:
| > Still, the near perfect mimicry is an uncomfortable reminder
| that AI is getting better at copying and closer to
|
| I completely disagree. It's not getting "better." It always just
| copied. That's all it /can/ do. How anyone expected novel outputs
| from this technology is beyond me.
|
| It's highly noticeable if you do a minimal analysis, but all
| modern "AI" tools are just copyright thiefs. They're just there
| to whitewash away liability from blatantly stealing someone
| else's content.
| jMyles wrote:
| > It's not getting "better." It always just copied. That's all
| it /can/ do
|
| That's true of all the best artists ever.
|
| > They're just there to whitewash away liability from blatantly
| stealing someone else's content.
|
| That's because that's not a thing. Ownership of "content" is a
| legal fiction invented to give states more control over
| creativity. Nobody who copies bytes which represent my music is
| a "thief". To be a thief, they'd need to, you know, come to my
| house and steal something.
|
| When someone copies or remixes my music, I'm often not even
| aware that it has occurred. It's hard to imagine how that can
| be cast as genuine theft.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| OK, you're plunging deep into the ethos of IP piracy, and
| staking your claim that "None exists." If that is deemed
| TRUE, then there's nothing to ever discuss about AI... or
| animated pornography where a well-known big-eared mouse bangs
| a Kryptonian orphan wearing a cape.
|
| The reality of our current international laws, going back
| centuries, disagrees. And most artists disagree.
| jMyles wrote:
| > The reality of our current international laws, going back
| centuries, disagrees
|
| Perhaps I need a bit of education here, but have there been
| _international_ laws regarding intellectual property for
| centuries?!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Perhaps I need a bit of education here, but have there
| been _international_ laws regarding intellectual property
| for centuries?!
|
| AFAICT, the first major international IP treaties were in
| the 1880s (the Paris Convention on Intellectual Property
| Rights in 1883 and the Berne Convention covering
| copyrights in 1886; so only ~140 years.)
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction [...] To be a
| thief, they'd need to, you know, come to my house and steal
| something._
|
| That's just a legal fiction invented so people can pretend to
| own physical objects even though we should all know that in
| this world you can never truly _own_ anything.
|
| _Everything_ we do or protect is made up. You 've just drawn
| the arbitrary line in the sand as to what can be "owned" in a
| different place than where other people might draw it.
| jMyles wrote:
| Well, one rudimentary difference is that bytes can be (and
| seem wont to be) copied, whereas if you steal my jeans, I'm
| standing there in my underwear.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > That's true of all the best artists ever.
|
| Just to play Devil's advocate for a moment, why should we
| require human artists to be held to the same standards as
| automated software? We can make whatever rules we want to.
|
| A human might implicitly copy, but they are not infinitely
| scalable. If I draw a picture that in some way resembles Buzz
| Lightyear I am much less of a threat to Disney than an
| always-available computer program with a marginal cost of
| zero.
| jMyles wrote:
| > why should we require human artists to be held to the
| same standards as automated software?
|
| Isn't this the same question as, "why should we allow
| general purpose computing?" If the technology of our age is
| our birthright, don't we have the right to engage whatever
| mathematics we find inspiring with its aid?
|
| > If I draw a picture that in some way resembles Buzz
| Lightyear I am much less of a threat to Disney than an
| always-available computer program with a marginal cost of
| zero.
|
| ...that sounds like a good argument in favor of the always-
| available computer program.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > Isn't this the same question as, "why should we allow
| general purpose computing?"
|
| I don't think so? It's not illegal to call random people
| on your phone, but if you do it millions of times per day
| with a computer it can be illegal.
| jMyles wrote:
| It seems to me that harassment is similarly offensive
| regardless of the degree of automation.
|
| ...and it's not obvious that transmitting bytes (within
| frequency and bandwidth protocols) is ever justly
| criminal; they are trivial to ignore.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give
| states more control over creativity.
|
| Ownership is a legal fiction invented because it is perceived
| to encourage behavior that is seen as desirable; this is no
| more true of ownership of intellectual property or other
| intangible personal property than it is of tangible personal
| property or real estate.
| ls612 wrote:
| He has a point that in a society with strong legal
| protections on freedom of expression, copyright is one of
| the main tools the state has to stop expression that is
| deleterious to the ruling class.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > He has a point that in a society with strong legal
| protections on freedom of expression, copyright is one of
| the main tools the state has to stop expression that is
| deleterious to the ruling class.
|
| If the State wishes to prevent expression that is
| deleterious to the ruling class, it will simply not
| strongly protect freedom of expression. "Legal
| protection" isn't an exogenous factor that the State
| responds to, it is a description of the actions of the
| State.
| jMyles wrote:
| Of course; I don't think anybody disputes that.
|
| But the political cover of "but think of the poor
| artists!" is used as a cudgel for situations where "we
| prefer to censor Bob!" is unpalatable.
| apersona wrote:
| > Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give
| states more control over creativity.
|
| 1. I hate the argument of "legal fiction" because the whole
| concept of law itself is a "fiction" invented that gives
| states more control. But I imagine you wouldn't want to live
| in a "lawless" society, would you?
|
| 2. Can you please explain how ownership of content gives
| states more control over creativity? There are so many way
| better methods of control a state can do (state-approved
| media, just banning books, propaganda) that this sounds like
| a stretch.
|
| 3. Alot of mainstream media is underdog rebels beating an
| Empire, and ownership of content definitely stops the spread
| of that idea.
| flenserboy wrote:
| the guardrails are probably going to end up being way too close
| together when the dust settles -- imagine if something as simple
| as "young wizard" would be enough to trip the warnings. someone
| could be looking to do an image from Feist's early novels, or of
| their own work, & that will be verboten. it may turn out that
| we're facing the strongest copyright holders being able to limit
| everyone's legitimate use of these tools.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I would expect "young wizard" to generate something similar to
| Harry Potter more than Pug, tbh
| prerok wrote:
| That's exactly what they meant.
| foxglacier wrote:
| Unless it can exclude the copyright outputs and provide
| something else instead of blocking the inputs. I'm sure there's
| AI that can check if a picture is close enough to something in
| their database of copyrighted characters built up from some
| kind of DMCA-like process of copyright holders submitting
| examples of their work to be blocked.
| prerok wrote:
| Indeed, but where does it stop? Looks like Potter? No go.
| Hmm, looks like an illustration of Pug? No go. Looks like
| Simon the sorcerer. No go. Hmm, looks like a wizard from
| Infocom's Sorcers get all the girls. No go.
|
| The problem is that it regurgitates what already exists and
| if you really want to abide by all the permissions then there
| is nothing left.
| asadotzler wrote:
| The AI companies could always license all that copyrighted
| training materials. You can't claim there's no solution
| while ignoring the solution everyone' been using for ages
| just because these corporations told you so.
| burnished wrote:
| Oooh those guardrails make me angry. I get why they are there
| (dont poke the bear) but it doesn't make me overlook the self
| serving hypocrisy involved.
|
| Though I am also generally opposed to the notion of intellectual
| property whatsoever on the basis that it doesn't seem to serve
| its intended purpose and what good could be salvaged from its
| various systems can already be well represented with other
| existing legal concepts, i.e deceptive behaviors being prosecuted
| as forms of fraud.
| teddyh wrote:
| The _problem_ is people at large companies creating these AI
| models, wanting the freedom to copy artists' works when using
| it, but these large companies _also_ want to keep copyright
| protection intact, for their regular business activities. They
| want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for
| essentially eliminating copyright for _their_ specific purpose
| and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been
| loosened for the public's convenience, even when the exceptions
| the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these
| companies were to argue that copyright should be _eliminated_
| because of this new technology, I might not object. But now
| that they come and ask... no, they _pretend to already have_ ,
| a copyright exception for their specific use, I will _happily_
| turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments
| against them.
|
| (Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years
| ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| I don't care for this line of argument. It's like saying you
| can't hold a position that trespassing should be illegal
| while also holding that commercial businesses should be
| legally required to have public restrooms. Yes, both of these
| positions are related to land rights and the former is pro-
| while the latter is anti-, but it's a perfectly coherent set
| of positions. OpenAI can absolutely be anti-copyright in the
| sense of whether you can train an an NN on copyrighted data
| and pro-copyright in the sense of whether you can make an
| exact replica of some data and sell it as your own without
| making it into hypocrisy territory. It does suggest they're
| self-interested, but you have to climb a mountain in Tibet to
| find anybody who isn't.
|
| Arguments that make a case that NN training is copyright
| violation are much more compelling to me than this.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| No, the exception they are asking for (we can train on
| copyrighted material and the image produced is non-
| copyright infringing) is copyright infringing in the most
| basic sense.
|
| I'll prove it by induction: Imagine that I have a service
| where I "train" a model on a single image of Indiana Jones.
| Now you prompt it, and my model "generates" the same image.
| I sell you this service, and no money goes to the copyright
| holder of the original image. This is obviously
| infringment.
|
| There's no reason why training on a billion images is any
| different, besides the fact that the lines are blurred by
| the model weights not being parseable
| slidehero wrote:
| >There's no reason why training on a billion images is
| any different
|
| You gloss over this as if it's a given. I don't agree. I
| think you're doing a different thing when you're sampling
| billions of things equallly.
| codedokode wrote:
| The root problem is that the model reproduces Indiana
| Jones instead of creating a new character. This
| contradicts the statement that the model "learns" and
| "creates" like a human artist and not merely copies;
| obviously a human artist would not plagiarize when asked
| to draw a character.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| That does not seem obvious at all. Fan art and
| referencing is a thing, and there are plenty of examples
| of AI creating characters that do not exist anywhere in
| the training dataset.
| chii wrote:
| > the model reproduces Indiana Jones
|
| the model isn't the one infringing. It's the end user
| inputting the prompt.
|
| The model itself is not a derivative work, in the same
| way that an artist and photoshop aren't a derivative work
| when they reproduce indiana jones's likeness.
| codedokode wrote:
| The end user didn't ask for Indiana Jones though.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| That's why I said it's an argument by induction. Where's
| the limit for it to be different? 10 images? 100? 10000?
| Where does it stop being copyright infringement and why?
| Many people have paid heavy fines for much less. I don't
| think that "a billion images is so unfathomable compared
| to just one million that it truly is a difference in
| kind" is a valid response
| belorn wrote:
| The example you gave with public restroom do not work
| because of two main concept: They are usually getting paid
| for it by the government, and operating a company usually
| holds benefits given by the government. Industry
| regulations as a concept is generally justified in that
| industry are getting "something" from society, and thus
| society can put in requirements in return.
|
| A regulation that require restaurants to have a public
| bathroom is more akin to regulation that also require
| restaurants to check id when selling alcohol to young
| customers. Neither requirement has any relation with land
| rights, but is related to the right of operating a company
| that sell food to the public.
| trentlott wrote:
| But what if businesses got benefits from society and tax
| money and were free to ignore the needs/desires of those
| who pay taxes and who society consists of? That seems
| just about right.
| jofla_net wrote:
| I guess the best explanation for what we're witnessing is the
| notion that 'Money Talks', and sadly nothing more. To think
| thats all that fair use activists lacked in years passed..
| theshrike79 wrote:
| It's not just the guardrails, but the ham-fisted
| implementation.
|
| Grok is supposed to be "uncensored", but there are very
| specific words you just can't use when asking it to generate
| images. It'll just flat out refuse or give an error message
| during generation.
|
| But, again, if you go in a roundabout way and avoid the
| specific terms you can still get what you want. So why bother?
|
| Is it about not wanting bad PR or avoiding litigation?
| mrweasel wrote:
| The implementation is what gets to me too. Fair enough that a
| company doesn't want their LLM used in a certain way. That's
| their choice, even if it's just to avoid getting sued.
|
| How they then go about implementing those guardrails is
| pretty telling about their understand and control over what
| they've build and their line of thinking. Clearly, at no
| point before releasing their LLMs onto the world did anyone
| stop and ask: Hey, how do we deal with these things
| generating unwanted content?
|
| Resorting to blocking certain terms in the prompts is like
| searching for keywords in spam emails. "Hey Jim, I got
| another spam email from that Chinese tire place" - "No worry
| boss, I've configured the mail server to just delete any
| email containing the words China or tire".
|
| Some journalist should go to a few of these AI companies and
| start asking questions about the long term effectiveness and
| viability of just blocking keywords in prompts.
| MgB2 wrote:
| Idk, the models generating what are basically 1:1 copies of the
| training data from pretty generic descriptions feels like a
| severe case of overfitting to me. What use is a generational
| model that just regurgitates the input?
|
| I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because of
| their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up with
| something that at least feels new.
|
| In the end, other than for copyright-washing, why wouldn't I just
| use the original movie still/photo in the first place?
| stevage wrote:
| Why? For fan content, using the original characters in new
| situations, mashups, new styles etc.
| o11c wrote:
| It's not a single image though. Stitching 3 or so input images
| together clearly makes copyright laundering legal.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| No it doesn't. Commercial intent (usually) makes it illegal,
| not the fact of copying.
|
| So the criminal party here would be OpenAI, since they are
| selling access to a service that generates copyright-
| infringing images.
| gertlex wrote:
| What if the word "generic" were added to a lot of these image
| prompts? "generic image of an intergalactic bounty hunter from
| space" etc.
|
| Certainly there's an aspect of people using the chat interface
| like they use google: describe xyz to try to surface the name
| of a movie. Just in this case, we're doing the (less common?)
| query of: find me the picture I can vaguely describe; but it's
| a query to a image /generating/ service, not an image search
| service.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Generic doesn't help. I was using the new image generator to
| try and make images for my Mutants and Masterminds game (it's
| basically D&D with superheroes instead of high fantasy), and
| it refuses to make most things citing that they are too close
| to existing IP, or that the ideas are dangerous.
|
| So I asked it to make 4 random and generic superheroes. It
| created Batman, Supergirl, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman.
| Then at about 90% finished it deleted the image and said I
| was violating copyright.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/eG6kmqu
|
| I doubt the model you interact with actually knows why the
| babysitter model rejects images, but it claims to know why
| and leads to some funny responses. Here is it's response to
| me asking for a superhero with a dark bodysuit, a purple
| cape, a mouse logo on their chest, and a spooky mouse mask on
| their face.
|
| > I couldn't generate the image you requested because the
| prompt involved content that may violate policy regarding
| realistic human-animal hybrid masks in a serious context.
| gertlex wrote:
| Yeah... so much for that hope on my end! Thanks for
| testing.
|
| (hard to formulate why I was too lazy to test myself :) )
| genewitch wrote:
| Because it's depressing how much money was burned for
| this sort of result? That makes me pretty lazy.
| gertlex wrote:
| Probably more: "I'll save my energy for interacting with
| AI for something more useful to me"
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because
| of their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up
| with something that at least feels new.
|
| Ironically that's probably because the errors and flaws in
| those generations at least made them different from what they
| were attempting to rip off.
| sejje wrote:
| It hallucinated, but we like that now!
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I didn't say they were good, I said they were different lol
| tshaddox wrote:
| Idk, a couple of the examples might be generic enough that you
| wouldn't expect a very specific movie character. But most of
| the prompts make it extremely clear which movie character you
| would expect to see, and I would argue that the chat bot is
| working as expected by providing that.
| grotorea wrote:
| Even if I'm thinking of an Indiana Jones-like character
| doesn't mean I want literally Indiana Jones. If I wanted
| Indiana Jones I could just grab a scene from the movie.
| infthi wrote:
| if someone gets Indiana on the suspiciously detailed
| request the author provided and it appears they wanted
| something else, they can clarify that to the chat bot, e.g.
| by copying this your comment.
|
| I have a strong suspicion that many human artists would
| behave in a way the chat bot did (unless they start asking
| clarifying questions. Which chatbots should learn to do as
| well)
| m000 wrote:
| Good luck grabbing that Ghibli movie scene, where Indiana
| Jones arm-wrestles Lara Croft in a dive-bar, with Brian
| Flanagan serving a cocktail to Allan Quatermain in the
| background.
| fermisea wrote:
| Why? Replace the context and not having that property is now
| called a hallucination.
|
| Overall the model is tra
| Lerc wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is a problem with overfitting. I'm ok with
| the model knowing what Indiana Jones or the Predator looks like
| with well remembered details, it just seems that it's
| generating images from that knowledge in cases where that isn't
| appropriate.
|
| I wonder if it's a fine tuning issue where people have overly
| provided archetypes of the thing that they were training
| towards. That would be the fastest way for the model to learn
| the idea but it may also mean the model has implicitly learned
| to provide not just an instance of a thing but a known
| archetype of a thing. I'm guessing in most RLHF tests
| archetypes (regardless of IP status) score quite highly.
| masswerk wrote:
| What I'm kind of concerned about is that these images will
| persist and will be reinforced by positive feedback. Meaning,
| an adventurous archeologist will be the same very image,
| forever. We're entering the epitome of dogmatic ages. (And it
| will be the same corporate images and narratives, over and
| over again.)
| duskwuff wrote:
| And it's worth considering that this issue isn't unique to
| image generation, either.
| Lerc wrote:
| Santa didn't always wear red.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Granted, but not the best example, red and green are the
| emblematic colours elves wore in northern european
| cultures. Santa is somewhat syncretic with Robert
| Goodfellow or Robin Redbreast, Puck, Puca, etc etc. it
| wasn't really a cola invention.
| masswerk wrote:
| E.g., I think, there are now entire generations, who
| never played anything as a child that wasn't tied in with
| corporate IP in one way or the other.
| baq wrote:
| Welcome to the great age of slop feedback loops.
| vkou wrote:
| > I'm ok with the model knowing what Indiana Jones or the
| Predator looks like with well remembered details,
|
| ClosedAI doesn't seem to be OK with it, because they are
| explicitly censoring characters of more popular IPs.
| Presumably as a fig leaf against accusations of theft.
| red75prime wrote:
| If you define feeding of copyrighted material into a non-
| human learning machine as theft, then sure. Anything that
| mitigates legal consequences will be a fig leaf.
|
| The question is "should we define it as such?"
| vkou wrote:
| If a graphics design company was using human artists to
| do the same thing that OpenAI is, they'd be sued out of
| existence.
|
| But because a computer, and not a human does it, they get
| to launder their responsibility.
| red75prime wrote:
| Doing what? Telling their artists to create what they
| want regardless of copyright and then filtering the
| output?
|
| For humans it doesn't make sense because we have
| generation and filtering in a single package.
| vkou wrote:
| In this case the output wasn't filtered. They are just
| producing images of Harrison Ford, and I don't think they
| are allowed to use his likeness in that way.
| reginald78 wrote:
| The fact that they have guardrails to try and prevent it
| means OpenAI themselves thinks it is at least shady or
| outright illegal in someway. Otherwise why bother?
| Lerc wrote:
| There is a difference between knowing what something looks
| like and generating an image of that thing.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| So I train a model to say y=2, and then I ask the model to
| guess the value of y and it says 2, and you call that
| overfitting?
|
| Overfitting is if you didn't exactly describe Indiana Jones and
| then it still gave Indiana Jones.
| MgB2 wrote:
| The prompt didn't exactly describe Indiana Jones though. It
| left a lot of freedom for the model to make the
| "archeologist" e.g. female, Asian, put them in a different
| time period, have them wear a different kind of hat etc.
|
| It didn't though, it just spat out what is basically a 1:1
| copy of some Indiana Jones promo shoot. No where did the
| prompt ask for it to look like Harrison Ford.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| But... the prompt neither forbade Indiana Jones nor did it
| describe something that excluded Indiana Jones.
|
| If we were playing Charades, just about anyone would have
| guessed you were describing Indiana Jones.
|
| If you gave a street artist the same prompt, you'd probably
| get something similar unless you specified something like
| "... but something different than Indiana Jones".
| 9dev wrote:
| And... that is called overfitting. If you show the model
| values for y, but they are 2 in 99% of all cases, it's
| likely going to yield 2 when asked about the value of y,
| even if the prompt didn't specify or forbid 2
| specifically.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I would argue this is just fitting.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| If you take the perspective of all the possible responses
| to the request, then it is overfit because it only
| returns a non-generalized response.
|
| But if you look at it from the perspective that there is
| only one example to learn, from it is maybe not over it.
| IanCal wrote:
| > If you show the model values for y, but they are 2 in
| 99% of all cases, it's likely going to yield 2 when asked
| about the value of y
|
| That's not overfitting. That's either just correct or
| underfitting (if we say it's never returning anything but
| 2)!
|
| Overfitting is where the model matches the training data
| too closely and has inferred a _complex relationship_
| using _too many variables_ where there is really just
| noise.
| darkwater wrote:
| The nice thing about humans is that not every single
| human being read almost every content present on the
| Internet. So yeah, a certain group of people would draw
| or think of Indiana Jones with that prompt, but not
| everyone. Maybe we will have different models with
| different trainings/settings that permits this kind of
| freedom, although I doubt it will be the commercial ones.
| dash2 wrote:
| I mean, did anyone here read the prompt and not think
| "Indiana Jones"?
| darkwater wrote:
| Is HN the whole world? Isn't an AI model supposed to be
| global, since it has ingested the whole Internet?
|
| How can you express, in term of AI training, ignoring the
| existence of something that's widely present in your
| training data set? if you ask the same question to a 18yo
| girl in rural Thailand, would she draw Harrison Ford as
| Indiana Jones? Maybe not. Or maybe she would.
|
| But IMO an AI model must be able to provide a more
| generic (unbiased?) answer when the prompt wasn't
| specific enough.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Why should the AI be made to emulate a person naive to
| extant human society, tropes and customs? That would only
| make it harder for most people to use.
|
| Maybe it would have some point if you are targetting
| users in a substantially different social context. In the
| case, you would design the model to be familiar with
| _their_ tropes instead. So when they describe a character
| iconic in their culture, by a few distinguishing
| characteristics, it would produce that character for
| them. That 's no different at all.
| sethammons wrote:
| I didn't think it. I imagined a cartoonish chubby
| character in typical tan safari gear with a like-colored
| round explorer hat and swinging a whip like a lion tamer.
| He is mustachioed, light skin, and bespectacled. And I am
| well familiar with Dr. Jones.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| But the concentrations of training data because of human
| culture/popularity of characters/objects means that if I go
| and give a random person the same description of a
| character that the AI got and ask "who am I talking about,
| what do they look like?" there's a very high likelihood
| that they'll answer "Indiana Jones".
| crooked-v wrote:
| Or even just 'obvious Indiana Jones knockoff who isn't
| literally Harrison Ford'. Comics do that kind of thing
| constantly for various obviously inspired but legally
| distinct characters.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| What would most humans draw when you describe such a well
| known character by their iconic elements. Think if you
| deviated and acted a pedant about it people would think
| you're just trying to prove a point or being obnoxious.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| If it overfits on the whole internet then it's like a search
| engine that returns really relevant results with some lossy
| side effect.
|
| Recent benchmark on unseen 2025 Math Olympiad shows none of the
| models can problem solve . They all accidentally or on purpose
| had prior solutions in the training set.
| jks wrote:
| You probably mean the USAMO 2025 paper. They updated their
| comparison with Gemini 2.5 Pro, which did get a nontrivial
| score. That Gemini version was released five days after
| USAMO, so while it's not entirely impossible for the data to
| be in its training set, it would seem kind of unlikely.
|
| https://x.com/mbalunovic/status/1907436704790651166
| jsemrau wrote:
| The _same_ timing is actually suspicious. And it would not
| be the first time something like this happened.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I was noodling with Gemini 2.5 Pro a couple days ago and it
| was convinced Donald Trump didn't win the 2024 election and
| that he conceded to Kamala Harris so I'm not entirely sure
| how much weight I'd put behind it.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| The claim is that these models are training on data which
| include the problems and explanations. The fact that the
| first model trained after the public release of the
| questions (and crowdsourced answers) performs best is not a
| counter example, but is expected and supported by the
| claim.
| yk wrote:
| Tried Flux.dev with the same prompts [0] and it seems actually
| to be a GPT problem. Could be that in GPT the text encoder
| understands the prompt better and just generates the implied
| IP, or could be that a diffusion model is just inherently less
| prone to overfitting than a multimodal transformer model.
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/a/wqrBGRF Image captions are the impled
| IP, I copied the prompts from the blog post.
| jsemrau wrote:
| DALL-E 3 already uses a model that trained on synthetic data
| that take the prompt and augments it. This might lead to the
| overfitting. It could also be, and might be the simpler
| explanation, that its just looks up the right file from a
| RAG.
| RataNova wrote:
| Yeah, I've been feeling the same. When a model spits out
| something that looks exactly like a frame from a movie just
| because I typed a generic prompt, it stops feeling like
| "generative" AI and more like "copy-paste but with vibes."
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| To my knowledge this happens when that single frame is
| overrepresented in its training data. For instance,
| variations of the same movie poster or screenshot may appear
| hundreds of times. Then the AI concludes that this is just a
| unique human cultural artifact, like the Mona Lisa (which I
| would expect many human artists could also reproduce from
| memory).
| jeroenhd wrote:
| People like what they already know. When they prompt something
| and get a realistic looking Indiana Jones, they're probably
| happy about it.
|
| To me, this article is further proof that LLMs are a form of
| lossy storage. People attribute special quality to the loss
| (the image isn't wrong, it's just got different "features" that
| got inserted) but at this point there's not a lot
| distinguishing a seed+prompt file+model from a lossy archive of
| media, be it text or images, and in the future likely video as
| well.
|
| The craziest thing is that AI seems to have gathered some kind
| of special status that earlier forms of digital reproduction
| didn't have (even though those 64kbps MP3s from napster were
| far from perfect reproductions), probably because now it's done
| by large corporations rather than individuals.
|
| If we're accepting AI-washing of copyright, we might as well
| accept pirated movies, as those are re-encoded from original
| high-resolution originals as well.
| balamatom wrote:
| Probably the majority of people in the world already "accept
| pirated movies". It's just that, as ever, nobody asks people
| what they actually want. Much easier to tell them what to
| want, anyway.
|
| To a viewer, a human-made work and an AI-generated one both
| amount to a series of stimuli that someone else made and you
| have no control over; and when people pay to see a movie,
| generally they don't do it with the intent to finance the
| movie company to make more movies -- they do it because
| they're offered the option to spend a couple hours watching
| something enjoyable. Who cares where it comes from -- if it
| reached us, it must be good, right?
|
| The "special status" you speak of is due to AI's constrained
| ability to recombine familiar elements in novel ways. 64k MP3
| artifacts aren't _interesting_ to listen to; while a high-
| novelty experience such as learning a new culture or a new
| discipline isn 't _accessible_ (and also comes with
| expectations that passive consumption doesn 't have.)
|
| Either way, I wish the world gave people more interesting
| things to do with their brains than make a money, watch a
| movies, or some mix of the two with more steps. (But there
| isn't much of that left -- hence the concept of a "personal
| life" as reduced to breaking one's own and others' cognitive
| functioning then spending lifetimes routing around the
| damage. Positively fascinating /s)
| AlienRobot wrote:
| The year is 2030.
|
| A new MCU movie is released, its 60 second trailer posted on
| Youtube, but I don't feel like watching the movie because I
| got bored after Endgame.
|
| Youtube has very strict anti-scraping techniques now, so I
| use deep-scrapper to generate the whole trailer from the
| thumbnail and title.
|
| I use deep-pirate to generate the whole 3 hour movie from the
| trailer.
|
| I use deep-watcher to summarize the whole movie in a 60
| second video.
|
| I watch the video. It doesn't make any sense. I check the
| Youtube trailer. It's the same video.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Probably an over-representation in the training data really so
| it's causing overfitting. Because using training data in
| amounts right from the Internet it's going to be opinionated on
| human culture (Bart Simpson is popular so there are lots of
| images of him, Ori is less well known so there are fewer
| images). Ideally it should be training 1:1 for everything but
| that would involve _so_ much work pruning the training data to
| have a roughly equal effect between categories.
| zparky wrote:
| Here's what Ars got out of GPT-4 a year ago:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york...
| stevage wrote:
| So, no speculation as to why Spiderman and Harry Potter were
| forbidden but Terminator and James Bond were allowed?
| psychoslave wrote:
| They casted avada arachna on it, and basta.
| nkingsy wrote:
| I think the unstated assumption is that there's a block list
| somewhere being fed into a guardian model's context
| salamanderman wrote:
| If I were doing this, I would have the system generate the
| image, and then I would have it run a secondary estimate saying
| "probability that this is a picture of [list of characters that
| Disney has given us reference input for]". If the picture has a
| "looks like Spiderman" score greater than X, then block it.
| EDIT - To answer the question, I'm guessing Disney provided a
| reference set of copyrighted images and characters, and somehow
| forgot Indiana Jones.
| stevage wrote:
| There seemed to be so many that weren't blocked, which is
| curious.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Well, property is theft, as we all know.
|
| Unlike what they name in physics, laws in juristic field are not
| a given by the cosmos. That's all human fantasy, and generally
| not enacted by the most altruistic and benevolent wills.
|
| Call me back when we have no more humble humans dying from cold,
| hunger and war, maybe I'll have some extra compassion to spend on
| soulless megacorps which pretend they can own the part of our
| brain into which they inject their propaganda and control what we
| are permitted to do starting from that.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine.
|
| One thing I would say, it's interesting to consider what would
| make this not so obviously bad.
|
| Like, we could ask AI to assess the physical attributes of the
| characters it generated. Then ask it to permute some of those
| attributes. Generate some random tweaks: ok but brawy, short, and
| a different descent. Do similarly on some clothing colors. Change
| the game. Hit the "random character" button on the physical
| attributes a couple times.
|
| There was an equally shatteringly-awful less-IP-theft (and as
| someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity &
| should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my
| arguments on IP violations).... An equally shattering recent
| incident for me. Having trouble finding it, don't remember the
| right keywords, but an article about how AI has a "default guy"
| type that it uses _everywhere_ , a super generic personage, that
| it would use repeatedly. It was so distasteful.
|
| The nature of 'AI as compression', as giving you the most median
| answer is horrific. Maybe maybe maybe we can escape some of this
| trap by iterating to different permutations, by injecting
| deliberate exploration of the state spaces. But I still fear AI,
| worry horribly when anyone relies on it for decision making, as
| it is anti-intelligent, uncreative in extreme, requiring human
| ingenuity to budge off its rock of oppressive hypernormality that
| it regurgitates.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine.
|
| I mean... If I go to Google right now and do an image search
| for "archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a
| bullwhip," the first picture is a not-even-changed image of
| Indiana Jones. Which I will then copy and paste into whatever
| project I'm working on without clicking through to the source
| page (usually because the source page is an ad-ridden mess).
|
| Perhaps the Internet itself is the hideous theft machine, and
| AI is just the most efficient permutation of user interface
| onto it.
|
| (Incidentally, if you do that search, you will also,
| hilariously, turn up images of an older gentleman dressed in a
| brown coat and hat who is clearly meant to be "The Indiana
| Jones you got on Wish" from a photo-licensing site. The entire
| exercise of trying to extract wealth via exclusive access to
| memetic constructs is a fraught one).
| rurp wrote:
| The key difference is that the google example is clearly
| copying someone elses work and there are plenty of laws and
| norms that non-billionaires need to follow. If you made a
| business reselling the image you copied you would expect to
| get in trouble and have to stop. But AI companies are doing
| essentially the same thing in many cases and being rewarded
| for it.
|
| The hypocrisy is much of the problem. If we're going to have
| IP laws that severely punish people and smaller companies for
| reselling the creative works of others without any
| compensation or permission then those rules should apply to
| powerful well-connected companies as well.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| Your position cannot distinguish stealing somebody's likeness
| and looking at them.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I agree without argument. I have also thoroughly enjoyed
| the animatronic dead Presidents at Disney World.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| But I can hire an artist and ask him to draw me a picture of
| Indiana Jones, he creates a perfect copy and I hang it on my
| fridge. Where did I (or the artist) violate any copyright (or
| other) laws? It is the artist that is replaced by the AI, not
| the copyrighted IP.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Depends on if you paid him or not. If he sold it to you, then
| he is infringing on Disney's IP and depriving them of that
| revenue.
| eb0la wrote:
| If you're paying for tokens used to generate that...
| Velorivox wrote:
| That does infringe copyright...you're just unlikely to get in
| trouble for it. You might get a cease and desist if the owner
| of the IP finds out and can spare a moment for you.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Totally agree. LLM's are just automating that infringement
| process.
|
| If you make money off it, it's no longer fair use; it's
| infringement. Even if you don't make money off it, it's not
| automatically fair use.
|
| My own favorite crazy story about copyright violations:
|
| Metallica sued Green Jello for parodying Enter Sandman
| (including a lyric where it says "It's not Metallica"):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Harley_House_(of_Lov
| e...
|
| They lost that case. The kicker? _Metallica were guest
| vocalists on that album._
| the_af wrote:
| > _LLM 's are just automating that infringement process._
|
| That's my take as well.
|
| Gen AI is turning small potatos, "artisanal" infringement
| into a potentially large scale automated process.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense to me. No media is getting
| copied, unless the drawing is exactly the same as an
| existing drawing. Shouldn't "copy"right apply to specific,
| tangible artistic works? I guess I don't understand how the
| fantasy of "IP" works.
|
| What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones but he's carrying a
| bow and arrow instead of a whip? Is it infringement?
|
| What if it's a really bad drawing of Indiana Jones, so bad
| that you can't really tell that it's the character? Is that
| infringement?
|
| What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones, but in the style
| of abstract expressionism, so doesn't even contain a human
| shape? Is it infringement?
|
| What if it's a good drawing that looks very much like
| Indiana Jones, but it's not! The person's name is actually
| Iowa Jim. Is that infringement?
|
| What if it's just an image of an archeologist adventurer
| who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip, but otherwise doesn't
| look anything like Indiana Jones? Is it infringement?
| Velorivox wrote:
| Here's some reading material.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fi
| cti...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Wow, that's very informative, actually. It's surprisingly
| complex and leaves a lot up to the judgment and tastes of
| the legal system.
| piyh wrote:
| Presumably the artist is a human who directly or indirectly
| paid money to view a film containing an archaeologist with
| the whip.
|
| I don't think this is about reproduction as much as how you
| got enough data for that reproduction. The riaa sent people
| to jail and ruined their lives for pirating. Now these
| companies are doing it and being valued for hundreds of
| billions of dollars.
| the_af wrote:
| Plus the scale of it all.
|
| A human friend can get tired and there's so many request
| he/she can fulfill and at a max rate. Even a team of human
| artists have a relatively low limit.
|
| But Gen AI has very high limits and speeds, and it never
| gets tired. It seems unfair to me.
| RataNova wrote:
| You're right, it's not just about reproduction, it's about
| how the data was collected
| layer8 wrote:
| The artist is violating copyright by selling you that
| picture. You can't just start creating and distributing
| pictures of a copyrighted property. You need a license from
| the copyright holder.
|
| You also can't sell a machine that outputs such material. And
| that's how the story with GenAI becomes problematic. If GenAI
| can create the next Indiana Jones or Star Wars sequel for you
| (possibly a better one than Disney makes, it has become a low
| bar of sorts), I think the issue becomes obvious.
| the_af wrote:
| I think framing this as "IP theft" is a mistake.
|
| Nobody can prevent you from drawing a photo realistic picture
| of Indy, or taking a photo of him from the internet and
| hanging it on your fridge. Or asking a friend to do it for
| you. And let's be honest -- because nobody is looking -- said
| friend could even charge you a modest sum to draw a realistic
| picture of Indy for you to hang on your fridge; yes, it's
| "illegal" but nobody is looking for this kind of small
| potatos infringement.
|
| I think the problem is when people start making a business
| out of this. A game developer could think "hey, I can make a
| game with artwork that looks just like Ghibli!", where before
| he wouldn't have anyone with the skills or patience to do
| this (see: the 4-second scene that took a year to make), now
| he can just ask the Gen AI to make it for them.
|
| Is it "copyright infringement"? I dunno. Hard to tell, to be
| honest. But from an ethical point of view, it seems odd. And
| before you actually required someone to take the time and
| effort to copy the source material, now it's an automated and
| scalable process that does this, and can do this and much
| more, faster and without getting tired. "Theft at scale",
| maybe not so small potatos anymore.
|
| --
|
| edit: nice, downvotes. And in the other thread people were
| arguing HN is such a nice place for dissenting opinions.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I would argue that countless games have already been made
| by top tier professional artists that IP-Steal the Ghibli
| theme.
|
| Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom should be
| included there.
| the_af wrote:
| I don't think those look like Ghibli. Maybe they drew
| inspiration, but are different enough. I would never
| confuse one for the other.
|
| Regardless, those games required the hard work and
| countless hours of animators. Gen AI doesn't.
| eb0la wrote:
| I believe when we talk about this there's a big
| misunderstanding between Copyright, Trademarks, and Fair
| use.
|
| Indy, with its logo, whiplash, and hat, is a trademark from
| Disney. I don't know the specific stuff; but if you sell a
| t-shirt with Indiana Jones, or you put the logo there...
| you might be sued due to trademark violation.
|
| If you make copies of anything developed, sold, or licensed
| by Disney (movies, comics, books, etc) you'll have a
| copyright violation.
|
| The issue we have with AI and LLM is that: - The models
| compress information and can make a lot of copies of it
| very cheaply. - Artist wages are quite low. Higher that
| what you'd pay OpenAI, but not enough to make a living even
| unless you're hired by a big company (like Marvel or DC)
| and they give you regular work ($100-120 for a cover,
| $50-80/page interior work. One page needs about one day to
| draw.) - AI used a lot of images from the internet to train
| models. Most of them were pirated. - And, of course, it is
| replacing low-paying jobs for artist.
|
| Also, do not forget it might make verbatim copies of
| copyrighted art if the model just memorized the picture /
| text.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > But I can hire an artist and ask him to draw me a picture
| of Indiana Jones,
|
| Sure, assuming the artist has the proper license and
| franchise rights to make and distribute copies. You can go
| buy a picture of Indy today that may not be printed by Walt
| Disney Studios but by some other outfit or artists.
|
| Or, you mean if the artist doesn't have a license to produce
| and distribute Indiana Jones images? Well they'll be in
| trouble legally. They are making "copies" of things they
| don't own and profiting from it.
|
| Another question is whether that's practically enforceable.
|
| > Where did I (or the artist) violate any copyright (or
| other) laws?
|
| When they took payment and profited from making unauthorized
| copies.
|
| > It is the artist that is replaced by the AI, not the
| copyrighted IP.
|
| Exactly, that's why LLMs and the companies which create them
| are called "theft machines" -- they are reproducing
| copyrighted material. Especially the ones charging for
| "tokens". You pay them, they make money and produce
| unauthorized copies. Show that picture of Indy to a jury and
| I think it's a good chance of convincing them.
|
| I am not saying this is good or bad, I just see this having a
| legal "bite" so to speak, at least in my pedestrian view of
| copyright law.
| alphan0n wrote:
| That's not how copyright law works.
|
| Commissioned work is owned by the commissioner unless
| otherwise agreed upon by contract.
|
| So long as the work is not distributed, exhibited,
| performed, etc, as in the example of keeping the artwork on
| their refrigerator in their home, then no infringement has
| taken place.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Commissioned work is owned by the commissioner unless
| otherwise agreed upon by contract.
|
| I think the LLM example is closer to the LLM and its
| creator being like a vendor selling pictures of Indiana
| Jones on the street corner than hiring someone and
| performing work for hire. Yes, if it was a human artist
| commissioned to create an art piece, then yeah, the
| commissioner owns it.
| Velorivox wrote:
| As far as I know, if you're speaking of the United
| States, the copyright of commissioned work is owned by
| the creator, unless otherwise agreed upon specifically
| through a "work made for hire" (i.e. copyright transfer)
| clause in the contract.
| Retric wrote:
| Ownership of artwork is independent of copyright
| infringement. Derivative works qualify for their own
| independent copyright, you just can't sell them until
| after the original copyright expires.
|
| Just because I own my car doesn't mean I can break the
| speed limit, these are orthogonal concepts legally.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > [If commissioning some work and] keeping the artwork on
| their refrigerator in their home, then no infringement
| has taken place.
|
| I'd like to push back on this: Is that _legally_ true, or
| is it infringement which just happens to be so minor and
| under-the-radar that nobody gets in trouble?
|
| Suppose there's a printer in my room churning out
| hundreds of pages of words matching that of someone's
| copyrighted new book, without permission.
|
| That sure seems like infringement is happening,
| regardless of whether my next step is to: (A) sell it,
| (B) sell _many_ of it, (C) give it away, (D) place it
| into my personal library of other home-printed books, or
| (E) hand it to someone else who paid me in advance to
| produce it for them under contract.
|
| If (A) is infringement, why wouldn't (E) also be?
| planb wrote:
| > Or, you mean if the artist doesn't have a license to
| produce and distribute Indiana Jones images? Well they'll
| be in trouble legally. They are making "copies" of things
| they don't own and profiting from it.
|
| Ok, my sister can draw, and she gifts me an image of my
| favorite Marvel hero she painted to hang on my wall. Should
| that be illegal?
| anhner wrote:
| straight to jail /s
| rdtsc wrote:
| The question is not whether it should but whether it is.
|
| The likeness of the character is owned by Marvel. Does it
| mean there aren't vendors selling unlicensed versions?
| No. I am sure there are. But just because not everyone is
| being sued doesn't mean it's suddenly legal.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| The likeness of Indiana Jones is not protected in any way -
| as far as I know - that would stop a human artist creating,
| rendering and selling a work of art representing their
| creative vision of Indiana Jones. And even more so in a
| private context. Even if the likeness is protected
| ("archaeologist, adventurer, whip, hat") then this
| protection would only be in certain jurisdictions and that
| protection is more akin to a design right where the
| likeness would need to be articulated AND registered. Many
| jurisdictions don't require copyright registration and do
| not offer that sort of technical likeness registration.
|
| If they traced a photo they might be violating the
| copyright of the photographer.
|
| But if they are drawing an archaeologist adventurer with a
| whip and a hat based on their consumption and memory of
| Indiana Jones imagery there is very little anyone could do.
|
| If that image was then printed on an industrial scale or
| printed onto t-shirt there is a (albeit somewhat
| theoretical) chance that in some jurisdictions sale of
| those products may be able to be restricted based on rights
| to the likeness. But that would be a stretch.
| rdtsc wrote:
| The likeness of Indiana Jones, as a character, is owned
| by Disney
|
| If they show that image to a jury they'll have no issues
| convincing them the LLM is infringing.
|
| Moreover if the LLM creators are charging for it, per
| token or whatever, they are profiting from it.
|
| Yes are there jurisdictions were this won't work and but
| I think in US Disney lawyers could make viable argument.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I wasn't talking about LLMs, I was talking about human
| artists.
|
| With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness, it
| would be to do with the copyright in the image, the film,
| video or photograph. The image captures the likeness but
| the infringement would not be around the likeness.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > I wasn't talking about LLMs
|
| Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was thinking of LLMs
| mostly.
|
| > With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness,
| it would be to do with the copyright in the image
|
| I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be about a
| character's likeness. It's not just a generic stock
| character, as an idea but it has enough distinctive
| characteristics, has a particular style hat, uses a whip.
| Showing that image to any jury and they'll say this is
| Indy. Yeah there are trademarks as well and both can
| apply to characters.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Trademarks can't apply to characters, in themselves, no.
| A trademark can apply to a particular fixed
| representation but not the likeness, or 'essence' if you
| like. The essence of Indy is the whip, the hat, the
| grizzled demeanour, the dry humour, the archaeologist
| adventurer.
|
| You can think of likeness as something that could be
| captured by hieroglyphics, or emoji - or a game of
| charades.
|
| Think of Betty Boo or Wiley Coyote. You might not be able
| to close your eyes and picture them exactly but you can
| close your eyes and imagine the essence.
|
| So in some jurisdictions if you register a broad
| representation - a likeness - you can protect that in
| law. In almost all jurisdictions if you photograph or
| draw something that literal snapshot is protected. But in
| many jurisdictions if I took a still from a scene of
| Indiana Jones (which WOULD be protected by copyright) and
| I described it to you and you were a great artist and
| drew the whip, the hat, the grizzled face, the safari
| vest, etc - there would be nothing to protect that
| likeness.
|
| Trademarks are another thing entirely, and are things
| like logos, and the protection is more about commercial
| exploitation and preventing misleading us.
|
| I could draw a cartoon logo of a man with a hat and a
| whip for my archaeological supplies shop. You could not
| take it and use it on your Chinese manufactured whips
| drop shipped via Amazon. But the owner of the Indiana
| Jones trademark- likeness rights, film copyright etc
| would be unlikely to be able to stop me using my logo
| until I start saying it is Indiana Jones, at which point
| they maybe invoke likeness rights.
|
| There are at least three different rights classes here!
| It can be very confusing.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| So if it's a theft machine, how is the answer to try teaching
| it to hide the fact that it's stealing by changing its outputs?
| That's like a student plagiarizing an essay and then swapping
| some words with a thesaurus pretending that changes anything.
|
| Wouldn't the more appropriate solution in the case of theft be
| to remunerate the victims and prevent recidivism?
|
| Instead of making it "not so obviously bad" why not just...
| make it good? Require AI services to either prove that 100% of
| their training corpus is either copyright free or properly
| licensed, or require them to compensate copyright holders for
| any infringing outputs.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| (below is my shallow res, maybe naive?) That might inject a
| ton of $ into "IP", doing further damage to the creative
| commons. How can we support remix culture for humans, while
| staving off ultimately-destructive AI slop? Maybe copyleft /
| creative-commons licenses w/ explicit anti-AI prohibitions?
| Tho that could have bad ramifications too. ALL of this makes
| me kind of uncomfortable and sad, I want more creativity and
| fewer lawyers.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| > doing further damage to the creative commons
|
| Not sure I understand this part. Because creators would be
| getting paid for their works being used for someone else's
| commercial gain?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Because it reinforces the idea that creative works should
| usually involve lawyers.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| No it doesn't. It reinforces that copyright is the law.
| If you don't violate someone's copyright, you don't need
| a lawyer.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine.
|
| I hate how it is common to advance a position to just state a
| conclusion as if it were a fact. You keep repeating the same
| thing over and over until it seems like a concensus has been
| reached instead of an actual argument reasoned from first
| principle.
|
| This is no theft here. Any copyright would be flimsier than
| software patents. I love Studio Ghibli (including $500/seat
| festival tickets) but it's the heart and the detail that make
| them what they are. You cannot clone that. Just some surface
| similarity. If that's all you like about the movies... you
| really missed the point.
|
| Imagine if in early cinema someone had tried to claim
| mustachioed villian, ditsy blonde, or dumb jock? These are just
| tropes and styles. Quality work goes much much much deeper, and
| that cannot be synthesised. I can AI generate a million
| engagement rings, but I cannot pick the perfect one that fits
| you and your partners love story.
|
| PS- the best work they did was "When Marnie was There". Just
| fitted together perfectly.
| asadotzler wrote:
| >it's the heart and the detail that make them what they are.
| You cannot clone that
|
| You absolutely can and these theft machines are proving that,
| literally cloning those details with very high precision and
| fidelity.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I didn't mean visual fidelity, I meant the way that plot
| and theme and art interleave. I first watched My Neighbour
| Totoro on VHS with no visual fidelity and it was still
| magic.
|
| You can easily steal the style of a political cartoon or
| especially XKCD but you cannot steal or generate genuine
| fresh insight or poignant relevant metaphor for the current
| moment.
| dvsfish wrote:
| The engagement ring is a good example object, but I feel it
| serves the opposite argument better.
|
| If engagement rings were as ubiquitous and easy to generate
| as Ghibli images have become, they would lose their value
| very quickly -- not even just in the monetary sense, but the
| sentimental value across the market would crash for this
| particular trinket. It wouldn't be about picking the right
| one anymore, it would be finding some other thing that better
| conveys status or love through scarcity.
|
| If you have a 3d printer you'd know this feeling where
| abundance diminishes the value of something directly. Any
| pure plastic items you have are reduced to junk very quickly
| once you know you can basically have anything on a whim
| (exceptions for things with utility, however these are still
| printable). If I could print 30 rings a day, my partner
| wouldn't want any of them as a show of my undying love.
| Something more special and rare and thoughtful would have to
| take its place.
|
| This isn't meant to come across as shallow in any way, its
| just classic supply and demand relating to non monetary
| value.
| planb wrote:
| >If I could print 30 rings a day, my partner wouldn't want
| any of them as a show of my undying love. Something more
| special and rare and thoughtful would have to take its
| place.
|
| And now I think this serves the opposite argument better.
| Downloading some random ring from the internet would not
| show your undying love. Designing a custom ring just for
| your partner, even if it is made from plastic, and even if
| you use AI as a tool in the process, is where the value is
| generated.
| dvsfish wrote:
| This is only true where it is distinguishable that the
| end result is made with care and love rather than
| indiscriminate copying. Which is why attribution is
| essential. No one realistically could tell a ring was
| hand crafted or mass produced if there wasn't some tell.
| Some people may say the "tell" is a kind of intuitive
| nebulous concept of the "soul" of the animation.. but I
| feel we are quickly approaching the point where this is
| no longer obvious.
|
| As an aside, my partner detests the things I 3d print
| unless they have a very specific purpose, even when they
| are random semi artistic pieces I'm tinkering with (and I
| typically agree, they are junk). She loves the first
| thing i ever printed her though, a triceratops model,
| despite being randomly downloaded.
|
| Anything made with intent from one individual to another
| will have some level of sentimental value, but I don't
| feel like making a ghibli image with AI specifically
| tailored to a friends tastes would have quite as much
| value as leveraging your own talent to do it yourself.
|
| On the flip side, I do believe that "doing it yourself"
| has less value than it used to. It's a very sad reality
| and in my opinion a strong argument against blind
| "progress". We gain the ability to mass produce art but
| lose the ability to perceive it as art?
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > This is only true where it is distinguishable that the
| end result is made with care and love rather than
| indiscriminate copying. Which is why attribution is
| essential. No one realistically could tell a ring was
| hand crafted or mass produced if there wasn't some tell.
|
| It doesn't matter if the ring was hand crafted or not.
| It's whether it has hand selected. If you find the
| perfect ring, even if it was generated by an AI, it's
| your selection that matters. It's the correspondence that
| matters. The way it reflects elements of your
| relationship. It's you recognising those elements in the
| ring. Your partner recoginising them in the ring. And
| your partner recognising you recognising them. That is
| what makes itself.
|
| Not to dox myself, but I am not Grace Abrams. I met my
| partner long before her song "Risk" was written, but when
| I heard it I immediately played it for my partner and
| said "This describes the feelings I had when I met you".
| I played it for her, she cried. I didn't have to write
| the song or own or pay a cent for it. It's the curation
| that made an emotional connection and had value. The song
| itself has no value, and she might have even heard it and
| never made the connection, it was me embuing that had
| value.
|
| To go back to Miyazaki, it's the connections between
| elements in his films. The attention to detail and tone
| between relationships that make his films amazing. It's
| all about the handyman's invoice [0]. By the time there
| are enough examples for AI to learn something, it ceases
| to be a novel insight and have value. It's the curation
| and application that have value and are human and cannot
| be stolen.
|
| [0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
| airstrike wrote:
| Can we not call it "theft"? It's such a loaded term and doesn't
| really mean the same thing when we're talking about bits and
| bytes.
| moolcool wrote:
| OK, but then we need a common standard. If Facebook is
| allowed to use libgen, I should also be allowed.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Only if we stop calling software distribution "piracy" under
| the false pretenses that anything is being stolen.
| airstrike wrote:
| I'm OK with that too!
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Do google pay anyone when I use image search and the results
| are straight from their website?
| AkBKukU wrote:
| This was decided in court[1] over two decades as acceptable
| fair-use and that thumbnail images do not constitute a
| copyright violation.
|
| [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=137674209419
| 772...
| areoform wrote:
| Theft from whom and how?
|
| Are you telling me that our culture should be deprived of the
| idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character inspires
| in all of us forever just because a corporation owns the asset?
|
| Indiana Jones is 44 years old. When are we allowed to remix,
| recreate and expand on this like humanity has done since humans
| first started sitting down next to a fire and telling stories?
|
| edit: this reminds of this iconic scene from Dr. Strangelove,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ9B7owHxMQ
| Mandrake: Colonel... that Coca-Cola machine. I want you to
| shoot the lock off it. There may be some change in there.
| Guano: That's private property. Mandrake:
| Colonel! Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to
| you, your frame, outlook, way of life, and everything, when
| they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the
| President of the United States? Can you imagine? Shoot it off!
| Shoot! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for, you twit!
| Guano: Okay. I'm gonna get your money for ya. But if you don't
| get the President of the United States on that phone, you know
| what's gonna happen to you? Mandrake: What?
| Guano: You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.
|
| I guess we all have to answer to the Walt Disney company.
| calmbell wrote:
| "idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character
| inspires in all of us forever just because a corporation owns
| the asset" is very different from the almost exact image of
| Indiana Jones.
| chongli wrote:
| Exactly. The idea of Indiana Jones, the adventurer
| archaeologist more at home throwing a punch than reading a
| book, is neither owned by nor unique to Lucasfilm (Disney).
| There is a ton of media out there featuring this trope
| character [1]. Yes, the trope is overwhelmingly associated
| with the image of Harrison Ford in a fedora within the
| public consciousness, but copyright does not apply to
| abstract ideas such as tropes.
|
| Some great video games to feature adventurer
| archaeologists:
|
| * NetHack (One of the best roles in the game)
|
| * Tomb Raider series (Lara Croft is a bona fide
| archaeologist)
|
| * Uncharted series (Nathan Drake is more of a treasure
| hunter but he becomes an archaeologist when he retires from
| adventuring)
|
| * Professor Layton series
|
| * La-Mulana series (very obviously inspired by Indiana
| Jones, but not derivative)
|
| * Spelunky (inspired by La-Mulana)
|
| [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdventurerA
| rchae...
| cess11 wrote:
| As a connoisseur of bad as well as old movies I'd like to
| add The Librarian movies to this list, and The Mummy,
| where the first from 1932 stars the inimitable Boris
| Karloff as the lovesick undead.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| And a reason people are getting ticked at the AI companies
| is the hypocrisy. They're near-universally arguing that
| it's okay for _them_ to treat copyright in a way that it is
| illegal for _us_ to, apparently on the basis of, "we've
| got a billions in investment capital, and applying the law
| equally will make it hard for us to get a return on that
| investment".
| _ph_ wrote:
| Not forever. But 75 years after the death of the creator by
| current international agreement. I definitely think that the
| exact terms of copyright should be revisited - a lot of
| usages should be allowed like 50 years of publishing a piece
| of work. But that needs to be agreed upon and converted into
| law. Till then, one should expect everyone, especially large
| corporations, to stick to the law.
| saulpw wrote:
| When Mickey Mouse was created (1928), copyright was 28
| years that could be reupped once for an additional 28
| years. So according to those terms, Mickey Mouse would have
| ascended to the public domain in 1984.
|
| IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied
| retroactively. Make copyright law to be what is best for
| society and creators as a whole, not for lobbyists
| representing already copyrighted material.
| debugnik wrote:
| > IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied
| retroactively.
|
| Careful, if we were to shorten copyright, not doing so
| retroactively would give an economic advantage to
| franchises already published over those that would get
| published later. As if the current big studios needed any
| further advantages over newcomers.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Its kind of funny that everyone is harping this way or that
| way about IP.
|
| This is a kind of strange comment for me to read. Because
| imby tone it sounds like a rebuttal? But by content, it
| agrees with a core thing I said about myself:
|
| > _and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping
| off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important
| to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations_
|
| What's just such a nightmare to me is that the tech is so
| normative. So horribly normative. This article shows that AI
| again and again reproduced only the known, only the already
| imagined. Its not that it's IP theft that rubs me so so
| wrong, it's that it's entirely bankrupt & uncreative, so very
| stuck. All this power! And yet!
|
| You speak at what disgusts me yourself!
|
| > _When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this
| like humanity has done_
|
| The machine could be imagining all kinds of Indianas. Of all
| different remixed recreated expanded forms. But this pictures
| are 100% anything but that. They're Indiana frozen in
| Carbonite. They are the driest saddest prison of the past.
| And call into question the validity of AI entirely, show
| something greviously missing.
| dcow wrote:
| It strikes me that perhaps the prompts are not expansive or
| expressive enough. If you look at some of the prompts our
| new wave of prompt artists use to generate images in
| communities like midjourney, a single sentence doesn't cut
| it.
|
| If AI is just compression, then decompressing a generic
| pop-culture-seeking prompt will yield a generic uninspired
| image.
| sejje wrote:
| Exactly. The AI understands that reference. It gives you
| what you asked for, it doesn't try to divine that it's a
| weird test for IP violations. If it made up a different
| image, that would be exactly the thing we're mad about
| with "hallucinations" when we want serious, accurate
| responses.
| sothatsit wrote:
| > All this power! And yet!
|
| You are completely ignoring the fact that you can provide
| so much more information to the LLMs to get what you want.
| If you truly want novel images, ChatGPT can absolutely
| provide them, but you have to provide a better starting
| point than "An image of an archeologist adventurer who
| wears a hat and uses a bullwhip".
|
| If you just provide a _teensy_ bit more information, the
| results dramatically change. Try out "An image of an
| Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and
| uses a bullwhip". Or give it an input image to work with.
|
| From just adding a couple words, ChatGPT produces an
| entirely new character. It's so easy to get it to produce
| novel images. It is so easy in fact, that it makes a lot of
| posts like this one feel like strawmen, intentionally
| providing so little information to the LLMs that the
| generic character is the only obvious output that you would
| expect.
|
| Now, would it be better if it didn't default to these
| common movie tropes? Sure. But the fact that it can follow
| these tropes doesn't mean that it cannot also be used to
| produce entirely new images filled with your imagination as
| well. You just have to actually ask it for that.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| You're again failing to read my top post. Badly.
| sothatsit wrote:
| No, I am not. Read my comment again. You can literally
| just ask AI for whatever you want. It has such an
| incredible breadth of what it can produce that calling it
| uncreative because the _default_ thing that it produces
| is the most common image you 'd expect is both lazy, and
| motivated thinking.
| sothatsit wrote:
| Okay, I just read your _top_ comment, and I agree with
| you on that. But it still doesn 't take much to nudge
| these models off of the "default guy". So to write an
| entire melodramatic comment about how these models crush
| creativity is incredibly reductive. These models provide
| so much room for people to inject their own creativity
| into its outputs.
|
| So yes, the models are not creative on their own. But
| equally, these models are definitely capable of helping
| people to express their own creativity, and so calling
| them "uncreative", and especially "bankrupt", rings
| hollow. It speaks like you are expecting the models to be
| artists, when in fact they are just tools to be used
| however people see fit.
|
| And so, the "default guy" or "default style" that ChatGPT
| outputs will become recognisable and boring. But anyone
| who wants to inject their own style into their prompts,
| either using text or input images, can do so. And in
| doing so, they skip over all of your concerns.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I have given detailed descriptions of my own novel ideas to
| these image generators and they have faithfully implemented
| my ideas. I don't need the bot to be creative, I can do
| that myself. The bot is a paint brush. Give it to somebody
| who isn't creative and you won't get anything creative out
| of it. That isn't the tool's fault, it's merely an
| inadequacy of the user.
| fullstop wrote:
| I mean, at least shouldn't we wait until Harrison Ford has
| passed?
| RataNova wrote:
| I don't think AI is doomed to be uncreative but it definitely
| needs human weirdness and unpredictability to steer it
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| How is it different from fan art, which is legal.
| zulban wrote:
| Interesting proposal. Maybe if race or sex or height or eye
| color etc isn't given, and the LLM determines there's no reason
| not to randomize in this case (avoid black founding fathers),
| the backend could tweak its own prompt by programatically
| inserting a few random traits to the prompt.
|
| If you describe an Indiana Jones character, but no sex, 50/50
| via internal call to rand() that it outputs a woman.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Yup it's called overfitting. But I don't suppose you'd
| appreciate a neutral model either.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine [...] awful [...]
| horriffic_
|
| Ah, I thought I knew this account from somewhere. It seems
| surprisingly easy to figure out what account is commenting just
| based on the words used, as I've commented that only a few
| active people on this site seem to use such strong words as
| shown here.
| willvarfar wrote:
| This is a tangent but I think that this neat illustration of how
| LLMs regurgitate their training material makes me voice a little
| prediction I've been nursing recently:
|
| LLMs are better at generating the boilerplate of todays
| programming languages than they will be with tomorrows
| programming languages.
|
| This is because not only will tomorrows programming languages be
| newer and lacking in corpus to train the models in but, by the
| time a corpus is built, that corpus will consist largely of LLM
| hallucinations that got checked into github!?
|
| The internet that that has been trawled to train the LLMs is
| already largely SEO spam etc, but the internet of the future will
| be much more so. The loop will feed into itself and become ever
| worse quality.
| jetrink wrote:
| That sounds like a reasonable prediction to me if the LLM
| makers do nothing in response. However, I'll bet coding is the
| easiest area for which to generate synthetic training data. You
| could have an LLM generate 100k solutions to 10k programming
| problems in the target language and throw away the results that
| don't pass automated tests. Have humans grade the results that
| do pass the tests and use the best answers for future training.
| Repeat until you have a corpus of high quality code.
| GPerson wrote:
| I just think it's stealing, and honestly not that cool once
| you've seen it once or twice, and given the ramifications for
| humanity.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I know of no other type of theft that results in more of
| something existing in the world. Stealing deprives someone of
| something; copying data (from training an AI all the way to
| pedestrian "YoU wOuLdN'T DoWnLoAd a cAr" early-aughts file-
| sharing) decreases scarcity, it doesn't increase it.
| Velorivox wrote:
| Identity theft...more of you exist!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Identity theft is the greatest con merchants ever pulled on
| the public. Turning the responsibility around from "A
| merchant got scammed because their KYC policy was too thin,
| because they make more money if they do more business with
| fewer verifications (until someone comes along and cheats
| them)" to "when they _do_ get scammed, maybe it can be the
| fault of the person who was impersonated instead of the
| scammer " was some _brilliant_ sleight-of-hand.
|
| It isn't your responsibility if a bank you've never set
| foot in gave a bunch of money to someone who isn't you and
| said they were you... And it never should have been. The
| moment companies started trying to put that into credit
| ratings, they should have been barred for discriminatory
| practices against the unlucky.
| yathaid wrote:
| >> Stealing deprives someone of something
|
| Yes. In this case, it is the artist's sole right to reproduce
| said images, based on their creative output.
|
| >> decreases scarcity, it doesn't increase it
|
| What does scarcity have to do with stealing? You can steal
| bread and reduce food scarcity, but that is still theft.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Your analogy between copyright infringement and bread theft
| is interesting, given how "stealing bread" has
| traditionally been used as a shorthand for systemic
| inequality.
|
| Copyright is why Disney can ruin someone for doing
| something with Goofy they don't like. Yes, it protects
| smaller, less profitable artists too, but make no mistake:
| it's a tool of mass control and cultural capture.
|
| Perhaps it's time to seriously ask whether copyright is
| actually doing its job of "promot[ing] the Progress of
| Science and useful Arts." "...but generally speaking, other
| nations have thought that these monopolies produce more
| embarrasment than advantage to society" [Jefferson].
| whycome wrote:
| The majority of human creation is like this. All language.
| Process. Even the US anthem was "stolen"
| pier25 wrote:
| Huge difference is you cannot scale a single human a billion
| times to industrialize his knowledge.
| GPerson wrote:
| Since you make no argument to justify your unfounded claim,
| I'll simply respond by informing you that these (obviously)
| are not remotely similar. To claim they are indicates some
| kind of deep disrespect for your fellow human beings. You
| could not tell the difference between taking a screen shot of
| the Mona Lisa and spending a lifetime to perfect the art of
| painting and then putting years of effort into painting it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| People have also spent lifetimes perfecting the art of
| painting, putting years of effort in, and then used those
| talents to... Make sellable copies of the Mona Lisa.
| Ironically, since copyright has a time limit, that's not
| even illegal (so long as they do not claim they're original
| works of da Vinci). Nor is photographing it and selling the
| photograph. I'm not sure what argument you're making given
| the observations you've made (other than, perhaps, "There
| is a big gap between the mechanics of copyright and what
| it's supposed to accomplish," which I'd agree with).
| whycome wrote:
| > then putting years of effort into painting it.
|
| Which efforts do we decide deserve compensation? We
| collectively create so many useful things. People come up
| with new words to describe a concept and when it's apt,
| it's widely adopted. That brilliant idea is the culmination
| of all the other work they've been putting in. But others
| get to use the word and benefit from it. Indigenous farmers
| put hundreds of years of effort into domesticating crops
| like tomatoes and corn and peppers. But those are just
| taken and spread. We have millions of teachers going above
| and beyond expectations. We have mothers and caregivers. We
| have comedians crafting jokes for comedy and they have no
| ability to protect those jokes. We have brilliant chefs
| creating recipes after years of work, experience, and
| effort and they too don't have protections.
|
| > To claim they are indicates some kind of deep disrespect
| for your fellow human beings.
|
| Nah. My comment comes from a deep respect for fellow
| humans. And a respect for all the efforts collectively made
| by a society for its common good.
| apersona wrote:
| > We have millions of teachers going above and beyond
| expectations. We have mothers and caregivers. We have
| comedians crafting jokes for comedy and they have no
| ability to protect those jokes. We have brilliant chefs
| creating recipes after years of work, experience, and
| effort and they too don't have protections.
|
| I agree with this, but why is your proposed solution to
| remove protections from everyone instead of giving
| everyone else protections? People who put in work should
| be rewarded.
| alkonaut wrote:
| This isn't surprising in any way is it? And it just goes to show
| that no model will ever be a box from which you can trust the
| output isn't tainted by copyrights, or that you don't
| inadvertently use someones' likeness. It's not a copyright
| laundering machine. Nor will it be used as one. "But I used an AI
| model" isn't some magic way to avoid legal trouble. You are in as
| much legal trouble using these images as you are using the
| "originals".
| why_at wrote:
| Yeah I don't really understand what the thesis of this article
| is. Copyright infringement would apply to any of those images
| just the same as if you made them yourself.
|
| I don't think it's possible to create an "alien which has acid
| for blood and a small sharp mouth within a bigger mouth"
| without anybody seeing a connection to Alien, even if it
| doesn't look anything like the original.
| layer8 wrote:
| Your second paragraph may be true, but the mere abstract
| presence of those features wouldn't infringe copyright.
| xnx wrote:
| Worth remembering that this is ChatGPT and not all image
| generators. I couldn't get Google's Gemini/Imagen 3 to produce IP
| images anything like those in the article.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I found this older photo of myself and a friend, 25 years old
| now, in some newspaper scan.
|
| The photo was of poor quality, but one could certainly see all
| the features - so I figured, why not let ChatGPT try to play
| around with it? I got three different versions where it simply
| tried to upscale it, "enhance" it. But not dice.
|
| So I just wrote the prompt "render this photo as a hyper
| realistic photo" - and it really did change us - the people in
| the photo - it also took the liberty to remove some things, alter
| some other background stuff.
|
| It made me think - I wonder what all those types of photos will
| be like 20 years from now, after they've surely been fed through
| some AI models. Imagine being some historian 100 years from now,
| trying to wade through all the altered media.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I think that upon closer inspections the (current) technology
| cannot make 'perfect' fake photos, so for the time being, the
| historian of the future will have no issue to ask his/her AI:
| "is that picture of Henry Bemis, with Bruce Willis, Einstein,
| and Ayrton Senna having a beer real?" And the AI will say "mos-
| def-nope!"
| elpocko wrote:
| >hyper realistic photo
|
| Never use the words "hyper realistic" when you want a photo. It
| makes no sense and misleads the generator. No one would
| describe a simple photograph as "hyper realistic," not a single
| real photo in the dataset will be tagged as "(hyper)
| realistic."
|
| Hyperrealism is an art style and only ever used in the context
| of explicitely non-photographic artworks.
| meatmanek wrote:
| This is similar to my experience trying to get Stable Diffusion
| to denoise a photo for me. (AIUI, under the hood they're
| trained to turn noise into an image that matches the prompt.)
| It would either do nothing (with settings turned way down) or
| take massive creative liberties (such as replacing my friend's
| face with a cartoon caricature while leaving the rest of the
| photo looking realistic).
|
| I've had much better luck with models specifically trained for
| denoising. For denoising, the SCUNet model run via chaiNNer
| works well for me most of the time. (Occasionally SCUNet likes
| to leave noise alone in areas that are full of background blur,
| which I assume has to do with the way the image gets processed
| as tiles. It would make sense for the model to get confused
| with a tile that only has background blur, like maybe it
| assumes that the input image should contain nonzero high-
| frequency data.)
|
| For your use case, you might want to use something like Real-
| ESRGAN or another superresolution / image restoration model,
| but I haven't played much in that space so I can't make
| concrete recommendations.
| gkanai wrote:
| if all you want is a denoise plugin, you shouldnt be using a
| general purpose AI- you should be using a specific tool like
| DxO PureRAW
| traverseda wrote:
| I don't understand why problems like this aren't solved by vector
| similarity search. Indiana Jones lives in a particular part of
| vector space.
|
| Two close to one of the licensed properties you care to censor
| the generation of? Push that vector around. Honestly detecting
| whether a given sentence is a thinly veiled reference to indiana
| jones seems to be exactly the kind of thing AI vector search is
| going to be good at.
| htrp wrote:
| Not worth it to compute the embedding for Indy and a "bull-whip
| archaeologist" most guardrails operate at the input level it
| seems?
| gavmor wrote:
| > Not worth it to compute the embedding for Indy
|
| If IP holders submit embeddings for their IP, how can image
| generators "warp" the latent space around a set of embeddings
| so that future inferences slide around and avoid them--not
| perfectly, or literally, but as a function of distance, say,
| following a power curve?
|
| Maybe by "Finding non-linear RBF paths in GAN latent
| space"[0] to create smooth detours around protected regions.
|
| 0. https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/ICCV2021/papers/Tzel
| ep...
| genericone wrote:
| Thinking of it in terms of vector similarity does seem
| appropriate, and then definition of similarity suddenly comes
| into debate: If you don't get Harrison Ford, but a different
| well-known actor along with everything else Indiana-Jones, what
| is that? Do you flatten the vector similarity matrix to a
| single infringement-scale?
| htrp wrote:
| Guardrails seem to be ass ..... that or certain IP is already
| licensed
| mcv wrote:
| That's a really blatant lack of creativity. Even if obviously all
| of those prompts would make anyone think of exactly those iconic
| characters (except possibly a different version of James Bond or
| Lara Croft), any human artist could easily produce a totally
| different character that still fits the prompt perfectly. This AI
| can't, because it really is just a theft machine.
|
| To be honest, I wouldn't mind if AI that just reproduces existing
| images like that would just be banned. Keep working on it until
| you've got something that can actually produce something new.
| exodust wrote:
| The prompt is what's lacking creativity. The AI knows it, and
| produced the obvious popular result for a bland prompt. Want
| something more unique? Write better prompts.
| fidotron wrote:
| One tangential thing with these generators is they're sort of
| brilliant at data compression, in aggregate at least. The whole
| user experience, including the delay, is oddly reminiscent of
| using Encarta on CD ROM in the mid 90s.
| SLHamlet wrote:
| Like actual creative person Ted Chiang (who moonlights at
| Microsoft) put it, you _might_ be able to get an LLM to churn out
| a genuinely original story, but only after creating an extremely
| long and detailed prompt for it to work with. But if you even
| need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the
| story yourself!
|
| https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/09/ted-chiang-ai-new-yorker-c...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as
| well just write the story yourself!_
|
| Nah, that's just restating the infamous 'how to draw an owl'
| advice:
|
| https://casnocha.com/2010/11/how-to-draw-an-owl.html#comment...
|
| The thing is, that "long-ass prompt" is step 1, and LLM then
| draws "the rest of the fucking owl" for you. That's quite a big
| difference to doing it all yourself.
| coderenegade wrote:
| I don't see why this is an issue? The prompts imply obvious and
| well-known characters, and don't make it clear that they want an
| original answer. Most humans would probably give you similar
| answers if you didn't add an additional qualifier like "not
| Indiana Jones". The only difference is that a human can't exactly
| reproduce the likeness of a famous character without significant
| time and effort.
|
| The real issue here is that there's a whole host of implied
| context in human languages. On the one hand, we expect the
| machine to not spit out copyrighted or trademarked material, but
| on the other hand, there's a whole lot of cultural context and
| implied context that gets baked into these things during
| training.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| It's an IP theft machine. Humans wouldn't be allowed to publish
| these pictures for profit, but OpenAI is allowed to "generate"
| them?
| pwarner wrote:
| To me a lot has to do with what a human does with them one
| the tool generates them no?
| why_at wrote:
| I'm honestly trying to wrap my head around the law here
| because copyright is often very confusing.
|
| If I ask an artist to draw me a picture of Indiana Jones and
| they do it would that be copyright infringement? Even if it's
| just for my personal use?
| Avicebron wrote:
| IANAL, but if OpenAI makes any money/commercial gains from
| producing a Ghibli-esque image when you ask, say you pay a
| subscription to OpenAI. What percentage of that
| subscription is owed to Ghibli for running Ghibli art
| through OpenAI's gristmill and providing the ability to
| create that image with that "vibe/style" etc. How long into
| perpetuity is OpenAI allowed to re-use that original art
| whenever their model produces said similar image. That
| seems to be the question.
| why_at wrote:
| Yeah that's fair, I'm trying to create an analogy to
| other services which are similar to help me understand.
|
| If e.g. Patreon hosts an artist who will draw a picture
| of Indiana Jones for me on commission, then my money is
| going to both Patreon and the artist. Should Patreon also
| police their artists to prevent reproducing any
| copyrighted characters?
| bawolff wrote:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Derivative_wor
| ks has some commentary on how this works you might find
| interesting
| why_at wrote:
| Thanks for the link.
|
| I get that copyright is a bit of a minefield, and there's
| some clear cases that should not be allowed, e.g. taking
| photos of a painting and selling them
|
| That said, I still get the impression that the laws are
| way too broad and there would be little harm if we
| reduced their scope. I think we should be allowed to post
| pictures of Pokemon toys to Wikipedia for example.
|
| I'm willing to listen to other points of view if people
| want to share though
| bawolff wrote:
| Keep in mind that wikimedia takes a rather strict view.
| In real life the edge cases of copyright tend to be a bit
| risk-based - what is the chance someone sues you? What is
| the chance the judge agrees with them?
|
| Not to mention that wikimedia commons, which tries to be
| a globally reusable repository ignores fair use (which is
| context dependent), which covers a lot of the cases where
| copyright law is just being reduculous.
| bawolff wrote:
| Probably that would be a derrivative work. Which means the
| original owner would have some copyright in it.
|
| It may or may not be fair use, which is a complicated
| question (ianal).
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I would think yes. Consider the alternate variation where
| the artist proactively draws Indiana Jones, in all his
| likeness, and attempts to market and sell it. The same
| exchange is ultimately happening, but this clearly is
| copyright infringement.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I would 100% be allowed to draw an image of Indiana Jones in
| illustrator. There is no law against me drawing his likeness.
| pier25 wrote:
| No, you aren't allowed to _monetize_ an image of Indiana
| Jones even if you made it yourself.
| bawolff wrote:
| That depends. There are situations where you are. Satire
| in particular would be a common one, but there can be
| others.
|
| Rules around copyright (esp. Fair use) can be very
| context dependent.
| pier25 wrote:
| Those are the exceptions that confirm the rule, as they
| say.
| echoangle wrote:
| But would you be allowed to publish it in the same way the
| AI companies do?
| kod wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fict
| i...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Sta
| t...
| recursive wrote:
| Copyright protection doesn't prevent an illustrator from
| drawing the thing.
| asadotzler wrote:
| but selling it is another and these ai companies sell
| their IP theft with a monthly subscription.
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't think those links support the point you are
| trying to make (i assume you are disagreeing with
| parent). Copyright law is a lot more complex then just a
| binary, and fictional characters certainly don't enjoy
| personality rights.
| kod wrote:
| harrison ford certainly does
|
| edit - also, I wasn't making a binary claim, the person I
| was responding to was: "no law". There are more than zero
| laws relevant to this situation. I agree with you that
| how relevant is context dependent.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| You 100% wouldn't be allowed to sell your Indiana Jones
| drawing services.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| You wouldn't be able to offer a service to draw 1 to 1
| recreations of Indiana Jones movie frames, though...
| Smithalicious wrote:
| Won't somebody think of the billionaire IP holders? The
| horror.
| asadotzler wrote:
| And the small up and coming artists whose work is also
| stolen, AI-washed, and sold to consumers for a monthly fee,
| destroying the market for those up and coming artists to
| sell original works. You don't get to pretend this is only
| going to hurt big players when there are already small
| players whose livelihoods have been ruined.
| dgunay wrote:
| I think the point is that for a lot of them there are endless
| possible alternatives to the character design, but it still
| generates one with the exact same design. Why can't, for
| example, the image of Tomb Raider have a different colored tank
| top? Why is she wearing a tank top and not a shirt? Why does
| she have to have a gun? Why is she a busty, attractive
| brunette? These are all things that could be different but the
| dominance of Lara Croft's image and strong association with the
| words "tomb raider" in popular culture clearly influences the
| model's output.
| echoangle wrote:
| And how is that bad or surprising? It's actually what I would
| expect from how AI works.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Exactly. We designed systems that work on attention and
| inference... and then surprised that it returns popular
| results?
| coderenegade wrote:
| Because it's not clear that that's what you want. What's the
| context? Are we playing a game where I guess a character? Is
| it a design session for a new character based on a well known
| one, maybe a sidekick? Is it a new take on an old character?
| Are you just trying to remember what a well-known character
| looks like, and giving a brief prompt?
|
| It's not clear what the asker wants, and the obvious answer
| is probably the culturally relevant one. Hell, I'd give you
| the same answers as the AI did here if I had the ability to
| spit out perfect replicas.
| jmull wrote:
| Normally (well, if you're ethical) credit is given.
|
| Also, there are IP limits of various sorts (e.g. copyright,
| trademark) for various purposes (some arguably good, some
| arguably bad), and some freedoms (e.g., fair use). There's no
| issue if this follows the rules... but I don't see where that's
| implemented here.
|
| It looks like they may be selling IP they don't own the right
| to.
| runarberg wrote:
| Overfitting is generally a sign of a useless model
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting
| og_kalu wrote:
| His point is that it's only overfitting if the model won't
| return new content when you clarify you're not just asking
| for the obvious answer from the context.
| froh wrote:
| Creepy Craig is hilarious. can't be Daniel Craig because the
| physiology is too different. And whoever this is they're Daniel
| Craig's dark younger brother.
|
| https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...
|
| and I'm all in on this conclusion:
|
| > It's stealing, but also, admittedly, really cool.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > Yes- LLMs and internet search are two different things, but
| LLMs train on the entirety of the internet, so you would think
| there would be some obvious overlap.
|
| Mmm, kinda, but those image results only don't show 1,000 of the
| exact same image before showing anything else because they're
| tuned to avoid showing too many similar images. If you use one
| without that similarity-avoidance baked in, you see it
| immediately. It's actually super annoying if what you're trying
| to find _is in fact_ variations on the same image, because they
| 'll go way out of their way to avoid doing that, though some have
| tools for that ("show me more examples of images almost exactly
| like this one" sorts of tools)
|
| The data behind the image search, before it goes through a
| similarity-classifier (or whatever) and gets those with too-close
| a score filtered out (or however exactly it works) probably looks
| a lot like "huh, every single adventurer with a hat just looks
| exactly like Harrison Ford?"
|
| There's similar diversity-increasers at work on search results,
| it's why you can search "reddit [search terms]" on DDG and
| exactly the first 3 results are from reddit (without modifying
| the search to limit it to the site itself, just using it as a
| keyword) but then it switches to giving you other sites.
| macleginn wrote:
| With some work, works with politicians as well:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67eefb1c-ceac-8012-ad90-3b64356744...
| Keyframe wrote:
| Today I finally caved in and tried the ghibli style transfer in
| chatgpt. I gave it a photo of my daughter and said the thing
| (prompt shared about). It said it couldn't due to copyright
| issues. Fine. I removed ghibli from the prompt and replaced it
| with a well-known japanese studio where Hayao Miyazaki works.
| Still nothing, copyright reasons my fellow human. I thought they
| finally turned it off due to the pressure, but then something
| caught my eye. My daughter, on the image, had a t-shirt with
| Mickey Mouse on it! I used the original prompt with ghibli in it
| and added to "paint a unicorn on the t-shirt instead to avoid
| copyright issues". It worked.
|
| tl;dr; Try the disney boss and see what happens!
| swyx wrote:
| reserving moral judgment and specifically explaining why gpt4o
| cant do spiderman and harry potter but can do ghibli: i havent
| seen anyone point it out but japan has pretty ai friendly laws
|
| https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-...
| CaptainFever wrote:
| I thought it was because you can't copyright a style (e.g. the
| Ghibli style), but you can copyright characters (e.g. Spiderman
| and Harry Potter).
| pier25 wrote:
| If OpenAI is ok with this then they should be ok with sharing
| their code and models so that others can profit from their work
| (without giving anything back to OpenAI).
| phtrivier wrote:
| Soon, the only thing that will make "Ready Player One" a fiction
| is that, in the end of the movie, they agree to shut the thing
| down once in a while.
|
| That will never happen under Silicon Valley's watch.
| ALLTaken wrote:
| I remember when google news was fined be the EU for just linking
| and using some preview + trailer text to actual news websites.
| The news are owned by a few monopolies and they don't like giving
| up control.
|
| I received so many Copyright and DMCA takedowns for early youtube
| videos posted in the early 2010's for no reason except some
| background music blaring a hit. It had millions of views and NO
| ADs. Now the ad-infested copies with whatever tricks they use can
| still be found, while my videos predating all had to be deleted.
| Google. You like their product? Don't like it too much, it may
| cease to exist, or maybe just for you for arbitrary reasons and
| simultaneously remove your access to hundreds of websites via
| their monopoly on Single-Sign-On.
|
| Then there are those takedown notices for honest negative reviews
| on Google Maps by notorious companies having accumulated enough
| money via scams that they now can afford to hire lawyers. These
| lawyers use their tools and power to manipulate the factual
| scoring into a "cleansed one".
|
| OpenAI seriously has not received any court orders from all the
| movie studios in the world? How is that even possible?
|
| I previously posted in a comment that I have video evidence with
| a friend being eye witness how OpenAI is stealing data. How?
| Possibly by abusing access granted by Microsoft.
|
| Who is still defending OpenAI and why? There are so many highly
| educated and incredibly smart people here, this is one of the
| most glaring and obvious hardcore data/copyright violations, yet
| OpenAI roams free. It's also the de-facto most ClosedAI out
| there.
|
| OpenAI is: - Accessing private IP & data of millions of
| organisations - Silencing and killing whitleblowers like Boing -
| Using $500B tax-payer money to produce closed source AI - Founder
| has lost it and straight up wants to raise trillion(s)
|
| For each of these claim there is easily material that can be
| linked to prove it, but some like ChatGPT and confuse the
| usefulness of it with the miss-aligned and bad corporate
| behaviour of this multi-billion dollar corporation.
| afarah1 wrote:
| >AI is supposed to be able to [...] make extremely labor
| intensive things much easier
|
| ... as showcased by the cited examples?
|
| More so, this derivative work would otherwise be unreachable for
| regular folk with no artistic talent (maybe for lack of time to
| develop it), but who may aspire to do such creative work
| nevertheless. Why is that a bad thing? Sure, simple posts on
| social media don't have much work or creativity put into them,
| but are enjoyable nevertheless, and the technology _can_ be used
| in creative ways - e.g. Stable Diffusion has been used to turn
| original stories drawn with stick figures into stylized
| children's books.
|
| The author argues against this usage for "stealing" the original
| work, but how does posting a stylized story on social media
| "steal" anything? The author doesn't present any "pirated" copies
| of movies being sold in place of the originals, nor negative
| impact on sales figures. In the case of the trending Studio
| Ghibli, I wouldn't be surprise to see a positive impact!
|
| As for the "soulless 2025 fax version of the thing", I think it
| takes a very negative mindset to see it this way. What I've seen
| shared on social media has been nothing but fun examples, people
| playing around with what for them is a new use of technology,
| using it on pictures of fond memories, etc.
|
| I'm inclined to agree with the argument made by Boldrin and
| Levine:
|
| >"Intellectual property" has come to mean not only the right to
| own and sell ideas, but also the right to regulate their use.
| This creates a socially inefficient monopoly, and what is
| commonly called intellectual property might be better called
| "intellectual monopoly."
|
| >When you buy a potato you can eat it, throw it away, plant it or
| make it into a sculpture. Current law allows producers of a CDs
| and books to take this freedom away from you. When you buy a
| potato you can use the "idea" of a potato embodied in it to make
| better potatoes or to invent french fries. Current law allows
| producers of computer software or medical drugs to take this
| freedom away from you. It is against this distorted extension of
| intellectual property rights that we argue.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4980956_The_Case_Ag...
| bawolff wrote:
| Its kind of weird how everyone is complaining about copyright
| infringemet in memes now.
|
| Memes are pretty inherently derrivative. They were always someone
| elses work. The picard face palm meme was obviously taken from
| star trek. All your base is obviously from that video game.
| Repurposing someone else's work with new meaning is basically
| what a meme is. Why do we suddenly care now?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| I believe it's because AI hatred is quite trendy now. It's true
| though, memes were always copyright infringement; it's just
| that no one bothered to sue for it.
| mlsu wrote:
| I was really hoping that the conversation around AI art would at
| least be partially centered on the perhaps now dated "2008 pirate
| party" idea that intellectual property, the royalty system, the
| draconian copyright laws that we have today are deeply silly,
| rooted in a fiction, and used over and over again, primarily by
| the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back
| cultural innovation.
|
| Unfortunately, it's just the opposite. It seems most people have
| fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be
| entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial
| apparatus. That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some
| collection of pixels, because THEY own it, and they know better
| than you do about the culture and communication that you are and
| are not allowed to experience.
|
| It's just baffling. If they could, Disney would scan your brain
| to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not just some particular collection of pixels, but _an infinite
| number of combinations of collections of pixels_ , any of which
| remotely invoke a shadow of similarity to hundreds of
| "properties" that Disney lays claim to.
| codedokode wrote:
| But why do you want to make a collection of pixels that
| resembles existing characters and not create your own?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I can't speak for everyone obviously, but my anti-AI sentiment
| in this regard is not that IP law is flawless and beyond
| reproach, far from it. I'm merely saying that as long as we're
| all required to put up with it, that OpenAI and company should
| _also_ have to put up with it. It 's incredibly disingenuous
| the way these companies have taken advantage of publicly
| available material on an industrial scale, used said material
| to train their models "for research" and as soon as they had
| something that vaguely did what they wanted, began selling
| access to them.
|
| If they are indeed the output of "research" that couldn't exist
| without the requisite publicly available material, then they
| should be accessible by the public (and arguably, the products
| of said outputs should also be inherently public domain too).
|
| If they are instead created products to be sold themselves,
| then what is utilized to create them should be licensed for
| that purpose.
|
| Additionally, if they can be used to generate IP violating
| material, then IMHO, makes perfect sense for the rights holders
| of those IPs to sue their asses like they would anyone else who
| did that and sold the results.
|
| Again, for emphasis: I'm not endorsing any of the effects of IP
| law. I am simply saying that we should all, from the poorest
| user to the richest corporation, be playing by the same rules,
| and it feels like AI companies entire existence is hinging on
| their ability to have their IP cake and eat it too: they want
| to be able to restrict and monetize access to their generative
| models that they've created, while also having free reign to
| generate clearly, bluntly plagiarizing material, by way of
| utilizing vast amounts of in-good-faith freely given material.
| It's gross, and it sucks.
| flats wrote:
| Very well put. I'm open to a future in which nothing is
| copyrighted & everything is in the public domain, but the
| byproduct of that public domain material should _also_ be
| owned by the public.
|
| Otherwise, we're making the judgement that the originators of
| the IP should not be compensated for their labor, while the
| AI labs should be. Of course, training & running the models
| take compute resources, but the ultimate aim of these
| companies is to profit above & beyond those costs, just as
| artists hope to be compensated above & beyond the training &
| resources required to make the art in the first place.
| loki-ai wrote:
| as an artist, I totally agree with this approach. the whole
| idea of trying to pay artists for their contributions in
| training data is just impractical.
|
| if the data's pulled from the public domain, the model
| built from this human knowledge should be shared with all
| creators too, meaning everyone should get access to it
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Beware of pushing for rules that you don't personally believe
| in. You just might succeed a little too well, and have to
| live with the consequences.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.
|
| How is copyright stifling innovation?
|
| You could not rip something off more blatantly than Gravity,
| which had the lawsuit dismissed entirely.
|
| Taurus vs Stairway to Heaven, the list goes on and on and on.
|
| You can often get away with nearly murder ripping off other
| people's stuff.
| fragmede wrote:
| Because it's self indulgent wankery. If I, as writer and an
| artist, have just the most absolutely brilliant thoughts, and
| write them down into a book or draw the most beautiful
| artwork, I can earn money off that well into my afterlife
| with copyright. Meanwhile the carpenter who is no less
| bright, can only sell the chair he's built once. In order to
| make money off of it, he must labor to produce a second or
| even a third chair. Why does one person have to work harder
| than the other because of the medium they chose?
|
| Meanwhile in China, just because you invented a thing, you
| don't get to sit back and rest on your laurels. sipping
| champagne in hot tubs, because your competitor isn't staying
| put. He's grinding and innovating off your innovation so
| you'd also better keep innovating.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This has nothing to do with stifling innovation.
|
| I am yet to meet a writer who doesn't even attempt to write
| for fear that whatever they write will be found to be in
| violation of copyright (unless they are the type of writer
| that is always finding excuses not to write).
|
| Several people have made successful careers out of fan
| fiction...
| fragmede wrote:
| JK Rowling never has to work again in her life because
| she wrote a couple of books that were exceedingly
| popular. Because she doesn't have to work, she's not been
| forced to come up with new stuff. How is that not
| stifling?
| jfim wrote:
| The same analogy could be applied to business though.
| Some Colonel invented a fried chicken recipe and started
| a chain of restaurants, now he doesn't need to work
| anymore.
|
| In my opinion, if someone creates something that has
| value for a lot of people, they should get rewarded for
| it.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...it's worth noting that J.K. Rowling _is_ still coming
| up with new stuff. I quite like her ongoing Comoran
| Strike detective series. They 're published under a pen
| name, but it's Rowling.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| She comes up with new stuff all the time. She's had a
| separate career as a writer of thrillers, and is still
| working in the PotterVerse.
|
| She's an awful person for other reasons, but that's
| beside the point here.
|
| Reality is most trad-pub authors have full-time jobs
| anyway to pay the bills. If you're not one of a handful
| of publishing superstars, trad-pub pays incredibly badly
| as a result of corporate consolidation and monopoly
| dominance.
|
| To be clear - there are far more people living
| parasitically off investments, producing nothing at all
| and extracting value from everyone else, than there are
| talented creators living the high life.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Notch (Marcus Persson of Minecraft fame) is probably a
| more compelling example.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| She made enough money selling books by the 5th book that
| she'd never need to do anything again and live better
| than 99% of people on the planet.
|
| What do you want?
|
| She's not allowed to make money selling books?
| fragmede wrote:
| What I want is irrelevant. She's now able to rest on her
| laurels thanks to copyright. She's earned it. I very much
| enjoyed the books! Under our current culture and level of
| technology, that's the dream.
|
| But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that? we have
| the technology to feed all the people, it's just a
| distribution and organization problem. "just". Money, and
| capitalism is how we've organized things and it's worked
| great for a lot of people but it's also left a lot of
| people behind.
|
| We keep making adjustments to the system but we don't
| have to be trapped in the system. we can take a step back
| and look at things and say, hang on a minute, if the goal
| in life is to feed and clothe everybody, we've either
| succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, or utterly failed.
| codedokode wrote:
| > But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that?
|
| Because we don't have that much money?
| codedokode wrote:
| You pick one example and ignore thousands of writers who
| didn't even return costs after publishing a book. Also,
| as another example, a great Russian 19th century poet and
| writer Alexander Pushkin left lot of debt after his
| death. He supported publishing other writers but it
| turned out to be a commercial failure. Maybe this fact
| will make you less unhappy about supposedly unclouded
| lazy writer's career.
| fragmede wrote:
| I'm not ignoring that, I'm saying that a differently
| organized society would have everybody working 40 weeks a
| year instead of the ridiculous inequality we face today.
| halfnormalform wrote:
| The carpenter can sell the design of the chair.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The only people making chairs by hand today are
| exceptionally well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or
| designers/studios.
|
| It's not at all unusual for popular/iconic furniture
| designs to be copyrighted.
|
| Reality is people who invent truly original, useful,
| desirable things are the most important human beings on the
| planet.
|
| _Nothing_ that makes civilisation what it is has happened
| without original inventiveness and creativity. It 's the
| single most important resource there is.
|
| These people should be encouraged and rewarded, whether
| it's in academia, industry, as freelance
| inventors/creators, or in some other way.
|
| It's debatable if the current copyright system is the best
| way to do that, because often it isn't, for all kinds of
| reasons.
|
| But the principle remains. Destroy rewards for original
| invention and creativity and you destroy all progress.
| fragmede wrote:
| You're right--original inventiveness drives progress. But
| IP protection isn't the only (or best) way to reward it.
| Removing it often accelerates innovation.
|
| Look at open source. If Linux had been closed-source with
| licensing fees, the internet wouldn't exist as we know
| it. Open ecosystems build faster. Contributors innovate
| because they can build on each other's work freely.
|
| Market pressure drives innovation. Reputation beats
| monopoly. Monopolies slow everything down. And
| collaboration multiplies progress.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| There's plenty of people who create without external
| reward.
|
| Or simply for the most minimal of external rewards:
| recognition and respect.
|
| Or for the purest: seeing others live longer and happier
| as a result.
| rpdillon wrote:
| This position suggests that there was no progress before
| we had copyright. I think you're vastly overstating the
| power of the incentives we've set up to drive creative
| behavior, and even with your caveats I think you're
| overstating their efficacy. Copyright and patents have
| done more to consolidate wealth within middleman
| industries that aggregate these properties than they have
| to enrich the actual creatives doing the work, as it is
| with all systems. For every system we put in place to
| reward behavior that we enjoy, the system always benefits
| those that choose to game the system more than those that
| were originally intended to be rewarded.
|
| And the results are observable empirically: very few
| people are told by anyone that's been out in the world
| that they should choose to become a writer or an
| inventor, because writers and inventors simply don't make
| that much money. The system you claim is so necessary
| seems to be completely failing in its core mission.
|
| For example, take a look at writers making a decent
| living on a platform like Substack. Copyright is
| literally doing nothing for them. People can freely copy
| their substack and post it everywhere online. The value
| is that the platform provides a centralized location for
| people to follow the person's writing, and to build a
| community around it. In cases where artists and inventors
| have become rich, I look at the mechanism behind it, and
| often it's an accident that had nothing to do with
| intellectual property rights at all.
| mlsu wrote:
| And not only that. People who do make a living producing
| creative stuff have to constantly monitor themselves for
| any hint of copyright infringement, because a copyright
| strike on their channel is existential. Even if the
| majority of the time the strike was total baloney. It
| makes it tough to create when you can be three strikesed
| or demonetized for playing something that sounds like a
| record label's melody for 20 seconds on your channel.
| redwood wrote:
| "are the most important human beings on the planet"
|
| While I don't disagree with what you are trying to say,
| saying it this way is hyperbolic. There are so many
| people doing important things. Think about parents.
| codedokode wrote:
| > Destroy rewards for original invention and creativity
| and you destroy all progress
|
| You won't destroy the progress completely but there
| definitely will be a lot of unfairness like people
| monetizing someone else's music due to having better SEO
| skills and more free time than the artist. And the artist
| cannot hire SEO specialist because he has no money.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| Nah I made a beautiful bench just the other week. I'm not
| well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or
| designers/studios.just a regular fella who has a dab hand
| at carpentry
| salynchnew wrote:
| One reason so many people are amenable to the copyright
| argument is at least partly because of these
| counterarguments that posit that every writer must be an
| elitist or fabulously wealthy vs. instead of someone who
| spent X years toiling away at their craft or skill while
| working menial/multiple jobs.
| fragmede wrote:
| yeah we should abolish copyright and make it so that
| creators get paid for every eyeball that's looking at
| your content. first, we establish a total panopticon. and
| then you get paid when people engage with your content,
| like, the system records that a person watches your
| movie, doesn't matter how they got a copy of your movie,
| but this person watches your movie, and that watch gets
| sent into the system and you get paid out from it. no
| more copyright, just horribly invasive tracking of
| everything everywhere. Call it copythrough.
|
| That would never work, but like writing sci-fi.
| absolutelastone wrote:
| The income from the book is scaling by its number of
| customers, versus roughly one person at a time who can
| enjoy the chair. It incentivizes finding ways to entertain
| more people with your effort.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't think it is that easy. Take musicians for example.
| There are several thousands most popular and rich, some
| that can only gather a small club and a long tail of people
| who can only play music on their day off. And now with
| development of generative models their financial situation
| is going to get only worse.
| ppseafield wrote:
| Copyright makes the legality of arXiv and SciHub questionable
| at best. It locks publicly funded research behind paywalls.
| It makes being able to search the law (including case law) of
| the US incredibly expensive. It puts a burden on platforms to
| be beholden to DMCA takedowns, lest the content owner go to
| their hosting or DNS provider, has happened to itch.io. It
| adds licensing fees onto public musical performances (ASCAP).
|
| Additionally plenty of people making videos for YouTube have
| had their videos demonetized and their channels even removed
| because of the Content ID copyright detection scheme and
| their three strikes rule. In some cases to a ridiculous
| extent - some companies will claim ownership of music that
| isn't theirs and either get the video taken down or take a
| share of the revenue.
|
| I watched a video where someone wrote a song and registered
| it via CDBaby, which YouTube sources for Content ID. Then
| someone claimed ownership of the song, so YouTube assigned
| the third party 50% of the ad revenue of the video.
| codedokode wrote:
| > Copyright makes the legality of arXiv
|
| Why? I thought that authors post the articles to arxiv
| themselves.
|
| > It locks publicly funded research behind paywalls.
|
| It is not copyright, it is scientists who do not want to
| publish their work (that they got paid for) in open access
| journals. And it seems the reason is that we have the
| system where your career advances better if you publish in
| paid journals.
| apersona wrote:
| Let's separate the implementation of copyright and the
| concept of copyright. I don't think you would find anyone
| who would say the US's implementation of copyright is
| flawless, but the OP seems to be talking about the concept
| itself.
|
| > Additionally plenty of people making videos for YouTube
| have had their videos demonetized and their channels even
| removed because of the Content ID copyright detection
| scheme and their three strikes rule. In some cases to a
| ridiculous extent - some companies will claim ownership of
| music that isn't theirs and either get the video taken down
| or take a share of the revenue.
|
| Let's take YouTube videos as an example. If the concept of
| copyright doesn't exist, there is nothing stopping a
| YouTuber with millions more subscribers from seeing a
| trending video you made and uploading it themselves. Since
| they're the one with the most subs, they will get the most
| views.
|
| The winner of the rewards will always go to the brand that
| people know most rather than the video makers.
| masfuerte wrote:
| I don't really care.
|
| Either enforce the current copyright regime and sue the AI
| companies to dust.
|
| Or abolish copyright and let us all go hog wild.
|
| But this halfway house where you can ignore the law as long as
| you've got enough money is disgusting.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Or treat AI training as within the coverage of the current
| fair use regime (which is certainly defensible within the
| current copyright regime), while prosecuting the _use_ of AI
| models to create infringing copies and derivative works that
| do not themselves have permission or a reasonable claim to be
| within the scope of fair use as a violation (and prosecuted
| _hosted_ AI firms for contributory infringement where their
| actions with regard to such created infringements fit the
| existing law on that.)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ^ I feel like I almost never see this take, and I don't
| understand why because frankly, it strikes me at patently
| obvious! Of _course_ the tool isn 't responsible, and the
| person who uses it is.
| srveale wrote:
| I think the tricky bit is that AI companies make money
| off the collected works of artists, regardless of user
| behaviour. Suppose I pay for an image generator because I
| like making funny pictures in Ghibli style, then the AI
| company makes money because of Ghibli's work. Is that
| ethical? I can see how an artist would get upset about
| it.
|
| On the other hand, suppose I also like playing guitar
| covers of songs. Does that mean artists should get upset
| at the guitar company? Does it matter if I do it at home
| or at a paid gig? If I record it, do I have to give
| credit to the original creator? What if I write a song
| with a similar style to an existing song? These are all
| questions that have (mostly) well defined laws and
| ethical norms, which usually lean towards what you said -
| the tool isn't responsible.
|
| Maybe not a perfect analogy. It takes more skill to play
| guitar than to type "Funny meme Ghibli style pls". Me
| playing a cover doesn't reduce demand for actual bands.
| And guitar companies aren't trying to... take over the
| world?
|
| At the end of the day, the cat is out of the bag,
| generative AI is here to stay, and I think I agree that
| we're better off regulating use rather than prohibition.
| But considering the broader societal impacts, I think AI
| is more complicated of a "tool" than other kinds of tools
| for making art.
| codedokode wrote:
| > I think the tricky bit is that AI companies make money
| off the collected works of artists,
|
| There is also a chance that AI companies didn't obtain
| the training data legally; in that case it would be at
| least immoral to build a business on stolen content.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| This is similar to (but not the same) as the famous VCR
| case [0] that allowed home taping of TV shows.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v
| ._Unive....
| prawn wrote:
| I see AI training on public material like I would upcoming
| artists being inspired by the artists before them.
| Obviously the scale is very different. I don't mind your
| scenario because an AI firm, if they couldn't stay on top
| of what their model was creating, could voluntarily reduce
| the material used to train it.
| codedokode wrote:
| You imply that AI model is creating new works and not
| merely rearranging pieces from other works you never saw
| and therefore might consider novel. AI model is not a
| model of a creative human currently: a human doesn't need
| to listen to million songs to create his own.
| ryandamm wrote:
| This may not be a particularly popular opinion, but current
| copyright laws in the US are pretty clearly in favor of
| training an AI as a transformative act, and covered by fair
| use. (I did confirm this belief in conversation with an IP
| attorney earlier this week, by the way, though I myself am
| not a lawyer.)
|
| The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs.
| OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use,
| rather than infringing at training time.
|
| Emitting works that violate copyright is certainly possible,
| but you could argue that the additional entropy required to
| pass into the model (the text prompt, or the random seed in a
| diffusion model) is necessary for the infringement.
| Regardless, the current law would suggest that the infringing
| action happens at inference time, not training.
|
| I'm not making a claim that the copyright _should_ work that
| way, merely that it does today.
| codedokode wrote:
| > Regardless, the current law would suggest that the
| infringing action happens at inference time, not training.
|
| Zuckerberg downloading a large library of pirated articles
| does not violate any laws? I think you can get a life
| sentence for merely posting links to the library.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _I think you can get a life sentence for merely posting
| links to the library._
|
| This isn't true in the United States. I would be
| surprised if it were true in any country. Many people
| have posted sci-hub links here, and to my knowledge
| nobody has ever suffered legal problems from it:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
| codedokode wrote:
| Doesn't it count as distribution? I thought DMCA requires
| to delete links.
| philipkglass wrote:
| A copyright holder may file a takedown notice [1] against
| a platform that hosts a link to copyright-infringing
| material like a book from Library Genesis or an article
| from sci-hub. Failure to act upon a legitimate takedown
| notice opens the platform operator up to a civil law
| suit. The platform does not have to take proactive
| measures to prevent infringing links from being posted by
| users. Some platforms like YouTube take more aggressive
| measures to proactively guard against infringement, but
| they are not required by the provisions of the DMCA.
|
| [1] https://guides.dml.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=904530&p=65
| 10951 (See "Notifications of Claimed Infringement")
| photonthug wrote:
| > The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs.
| OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use,
| rather than infringing at training time.
|
| I agree with this, but it's worth noting this does not
| conflict with and kind of reinforces the GP's comment about
| hypocrisy and "[ignoring] the law as long as you've got
| enough money".
|
| The terms of use angle is better than copyright, but most
| likely we'll _never_ see any precedent created that allows
| this argument to succeed on a large scale. If it _were_
| allowed then every ToS would simply begin to say Humans
| Only, Robots not Welcome or if you 're a newspaper then
| "reading this you agree that you're a human or a search
| engine but will never use content for generative AI". If
| github could enforce site terms and conditions like that,
| then they could prevent everyone else from scraping
| regardless of individual repository software licenses, etc.
|
| While the courts are setting up precedent for this kind of
| thing, they will be pressured to maintain a situation where
| terms and conditions are useful for corporations to punish
| _people_. Meanwhile, corporations won 't be able to punish
| corporations for the most part, regardless of the
| difference in size. But larger corporations can ignore
| whatever rules they want, to the possible detriment of
| smaller ones. All of which is more or less status quo
| o11c wrote:
| Training alone, perhaps. But the way the AIs are actually
| _used_ (regardless of prompt engineering) is a direct
| example of what is _forbidden_ by the case that introduced
| the "transformative" language.
|
| > if [someone] thus cites the most important parts of the
| work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede the
| use of the original work, and substitute the review for it,
| such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.
|
| Of course, we live in a post-precedent world, so who knows?
| mlsu wrote:
| The hypocrisy is obviously disgusting.
|
| It also shows how, at the end of the day, none of the
| justifications for this intellectual property crap are about
| creativity, preserving the rights of creators, or any lofty
| notion that intellectual property actually makes the world a
| better place, but rather, it is a naked power+money thing.
| Warner Bros and Sony can stop you from publishing a jpeg
| because they have lawyers who write the rulebook. Sam Altman
| can publish a jpeg because the Prince of Saud believes that
| he is going build for corporate America a Golem that can read
| excel spreadsheets.
| kokanee wrote:
| The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents
| would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more
| than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would
| happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful
| piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been
| created and monetize the life out of it.
|
| These legal protections are needed by the people. To the Pirate
| Party's credit, undoing corporate personhood would be a good
| first step, so that we can focus on enforcing protections for
| the works of humans. Still, attributing those works to CEOs
| instead of corporations wouldn't result in much change.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat
| up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and
| culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out
| of it.
|
| Wait, I'm still trying to figure out the difference between
| your imaginary world and the world we live in now?
| dragontamer wrote:
| Thor would have red hair in the imaginary world, rather
| than being a Blonde man which was made to be a somewhat
| distinguished comic book character.
|
| The Disney or otherwise copyrighted versions allow for
| unique spins on these old characters to be re-copyrighted.
| This Thor from Disney/Marvel is distinguished from Thor
| from God of War.
| runarberg wrote:
| > "Before starting the series, we stuffed ourselves to
| the gills with Norse mythology, as well as almost every
| other type of mythology - we love it all! But you've got
| to remember that these are legendary tales - myths - and
| no two versions are ever exactly the same. We changed a
| lot of things - for example, in most of the myths Thor
| has red hair, Odin has one eye, etc. But we preferred
| doing our own version."
|
| https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/54400/why-did-
| earl...
|
| Huh, did not know that. As an Icelandic person I knew
| about Thor the Norse god much earlier than Thor the
| marvel character. I never really pictured his hair color,
| nor knew he had a specific hair color in the mythology. I
| actually always pictured him with a beard though. What
| mostly mattered though was his characteristics. His ill
| temper and drinking habits, and the fact that he was not
| a nice person, nor a hero, but rather a guy who starts
| shit that gets everyone else in trouble, he also wins
| every fight except one (he looses one against Elli [the
| personification of old age]). The little I've seen of him
| in the Marvel movies, he keeps almost none of these
| characteristics.
|
| EDIT: My favorite story of him is the depiction of the
| fall of Asgardur, where Loki and some Jotun are about to
| use the gods vanity against them and con them out of
| stuff they cannot actually pay for a wall around
| Asgardur. Thor, being the way he is, cannot be around a
| Jotun without fighting and killing him. So rather than
| paying up (which the gods cannot do) Thor is sent to see
| this Jotun, knowing very well that he will be murdered.
| This betrayal is marked as the beginning of the end in
| Voluspa (verse 26).
| Lerc wrote:
| I think the main difference is if everything were freely
| available they may attempt to monetize the life out of it,
| but they will fail if they can't actually provide something
| people actually want. There's no more "You want a thing so
| you're going to buy our thing because we are the exclusive
| providers of it. That means we don't even have to make it
| very good"
|
| If anyone in the world could make a Star Wars movie, the
| average Star Wars movie would be much worse, but the best
| 10 Star Wars movies might be better that what we currently
| have.
| drob518 wrote:
| I'm sure the best independent Star Wars movie would be
| infinitely better than what Disney has been shoveling out
| for the last couple decades.
| loki-ai wrote:
| Such a talented team would be able to make a great movie
| on the same theme.
|
| Saying the lack of creativity in the industry in because
| we can't copy things freely is completely moronic.
| autoexec wrote:
| It's a major hindrance. For example, if I came up with an
| amazing creative idea for a star wars movie I couldn't do
| a damn thing with it unless Disney told me I could.
| Disney isn't likely to accept an unsolicited pitch from a
| total nobody who just happened to have a great idea
| either. I don't see how you could doubt that there are a
| lot of great works of art that won't ever exist because
| of the fact that copyright prevents them from ever
| getting off the ground.
| apersona wrote:
| You can't do a damn thing with it not because of
| copyright, but because you don't have the resources to
| make the movie in the first place.
|
| Copyright can't legally stop you from making a movie
| about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in
| space.
| autoexec wrote:
| Copyright can stop me from making a star wars movie about
| wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space.
| Even if I don't make a star wars movie, if I make a movie
| that makes disney feel threatened because it's close
| enough to being a star wars movie I could still end up
| losing in courts.
|
| There are plenty of examples of copyright hurting people
| for creating something that wasn't exactly the same as
| something else which was copyrighted. Copyright is a
| threat to all creative works. The bigger the investment
| required for a creative work, the bigger the risk. For
| this reason, we see it a lot more often in music where
| the investment needed is lower than films. People have
| been successfully sued because they wrote a totally new
| song that was in the same genre as someone else's song
| https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-
| copy-a...
| echelon wrote:
| The original claim is false,
|
| > intellectual property [...] used over and over again,
| primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas
| and hold back cultural innovation.
|
| There's nothing about IP which prevents you from creating
| your own. There are, in fact, a near infinite number of
| things you can create. More things than there exist stars in
| our galaxy.
|
| The problem with ideas is that they have to be good. They
| have to be refined. They have to hit the cultural zeitgeist,
| solve a particular problem, or just be useful. That's the
| hard part that takes the investment of time and money.
|
| In the _old world_ before Gen AI, this was the hard thing
| that kept companies in power. That world is going away fast,
| and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers
| will be slinging content and we 'll wind up in a land of
| abundance. We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on
| Star Wars - we can make our own.
|
| The new problem is distributing that content.
|
| > The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents
| would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more
| than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would
| happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or
| useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever
| been created and monetize the life out of it.
|
| Unless the masses can create and share on equal footing,
| you're 100% right.
|
| If it turns out, however, that we don't need Google, OpenAI,
| or big tech to make our own sci-fi epics, share them with a
| ton of people, and interact with friends and audiences, then
| the corporations won't be able to profit off of it.
|
| If social networks were replaced with common carriers and
| protocols.
|
| If Gen AI could run at the edge without proprietary models or
| expensive compute.
|
| If the data of YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram didn't
| require hyperscaler infra to store, search, and serve.
|
| Unfortunately, there are too many technical reasons why the
| giants will win. And network effects will favor the few
| versus many. Unless those parameters change, we'll be stuck
| with big tech distribution.
|
| Even if the laws around IP change, the hard tech challenges
| keep the gatekeepers in power. The power accrues to those who
| can dominate creation (if creation is unilateral), or even
| more so, to the distributors of that content.
| dcow wrote:
| > We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star
| Wars - we can make our own.
|
| Disney would say that you can't. And in the current
| copyright regime, it's not unlikely that they'd convince
| the court that they're right.
| echelon wrote:
| > Disney would say that you can't.
|
| Disney won't have any control. I can already generate
| images and videos locally on my hardware.
|
| Maybe they'll try to stop distribution? There will be
| quite a lot of people making these, though.
| api wrote:
| This is the same argument we made in the 90s about what the
| web was going to do. What ended up happening was the growth
| of aggregators and silos like Facebook that baited everyone
| with ease of use into putting everything into their walled
| garden and then monetized it. The creators, namely the
| posters of the content, got nothing.
|
| The same is happening already with AI creations. Doing it
| yourself is work and takes some technical skill, so most
| people use hosted AI services. Guess who makes all the
| money?
|
| You will be able to create and share your own spin on Star
| Wars. You won't see anything for that except maybe cred or
| some upvotes. The company that hosts it and provides the
| gateway and controls the algorithms that show it to people
| will get everything.
| EgregiousCube wrote:
| To be fair, people who post on Facebook get exactly what
| they were promised. Users of free products generally
| don't expect a rev share.
| autoexec wrote:
| I think that by now it's pretty clear that facebook isn't
| free and that the price of using facebook is actually
| pretty high, it's just abstracted away so that most
| people don't realize the cost and/or don't attribute that
| cost to facebook when they should.
| codedokode wrote:
| > The problem with ideas is that they have to be good.
|
| No they don't, look at music popular in social networks.
|
| > and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste
| makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land
| of abundance.
|
| Even before the generative AI, I think we live in the era
| where there are more creators than ever in history:
| everybody today can publish their music or art without any
| large investments (except for instruments: they are
| expensive as always). I would prefer we have cheaper
| pianos, samples and microphones instead of worthless music-
| copying models.
| echelon wrote:
| > I would prefer we have cheaper pianos, samples and
| microphones instead of worthless music-copying models.
|
| There are lots of ML models that produce instrumentals
| and vocals that are incredibly useful for practicing
| musicians.
|
| The popular and well-known Suno and Udio are pop culture
| toys. They also find use with content creators who don't
| have time to learn how to make music. (Not everyone can
| learn and master everything. We have to let some of our
| creative desires slip or we'd never be able to accomplish
| anything.)
| nradov wrote:
| Pianos are already cheap. You can get used pianos for
| very little money if you shop around. No one has space to
| keep a piano in their house anymore, and they don't want
| to deal with keeping them tuned.
| dcow wrote:
| How do restaurants work, then? You can't copyright a recipe.
| _Instructions_ can't generally be copyrighted, otherwise
| someone would own the fastest route from A to B and charge
| every person who used it. The whole idea of intellectual
| property gets really weird when you try to pinpoint what
| exactly is being owned.
|
| I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win
| by default. Ask why would people need protection from having
| their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized
| copyright are the corporations. People need the freedom to
| wield culture without restriction, not protection from
| someone having the same idea as them and manifesting it.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| It's more reasonable to say that the idea of intellectual
| property is challenging for nonlawyers because of the
| difficulty in understanding ownership not as one thing, but
| as a bundle of various elements of control, exclusion,
| obligation, or entitlement, even some of which spring into
| existence out of nowhere.
|
| In other words, the challenge is not to understand "what
| exactly is being owned," and instead, to understand "what
| exactly being owned is."
| Avicebron wrote:
| > what exactly being owned is.
|
| Thank you, this is beautifully put and very astute. Does
| a recipe, a culmination of a lifetime of experience,
| technique, trials, errors, and luck constitute a form of
| someone/thing's person-hood such that it can be
| Intellectual Property.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| It depends. First I think we could make a distinction
| between not-intellectual-property and intellectual-
| property-with-no-protection but that doesn't seem to be
| what you're getting at.
|
| Have you taken reasonable steps to keep it secret? It
| could be a trade secret and if course if you steal the
| recipe for KFC's herbs and spices, you will be liable for
| civil damages for your misappropriation of their trade
| secret.
|
| And if you describe a recipe in flowery prose,
| reminiscing about the aromas in grandmas kitchen, of
| course that prose is copyrightable.
|
| Should you invent a special kind of chicken fry mix and
| give us a fanciful name, the recipes identifier if origin
| - its trademark -could be protectable.
|
| But the fact that your chicken fry mix is made of corn
| starch and bread crumbs is a fact, like a phone book.
| Under most circumstances, not protectable.
|
| ianyl tinla
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Closed source - when was the last time your restaurant told
| you what was in, and how to make, your favourite dish?
|
| What's in Coca Cola?
|
| What are the 11 herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken?
|
| How do I make the sauce in a Big Mac?
| dcow wrote:
| Yes, and notably the source recipe can't be copyrighted.
| Trade secrets and recipes are not copyrightable. That's
| the point. We have entire vastly profitable industries
| built around protection of trade secrets, with no
| copyright in play. Competing to make make the best cola
| flavored beverage or the best burrito _is a thing_.
| Competing to make the best rendition of Snow White, _is
| not_. What's the rub? They don't seem that different at
| all.
| card_zero wrote:
| Snow White is not the best example, there are non-Disney
| versions, like the one with Sigourney Weaver and the one
| with Chris Hemsworth.
| dcow wrote:
| I imagine they're licensed--the original creator or their
| estate had to be looped in to make them happen, and
| probably financially benefitted.
| card_zero wrote:
| The original creator of the German fairy tale?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Snow_White_ta
| le
|
| I see a mention of Ovid ... copyright has probably
| expired.
| slg wrote:
| I can't explain the exact link, but your repeated and
| vocal pro-AI stance in this thread feels connected to the
| way when you got called out for a simple and
| inconsequential mistake that any of us could make, you
| immediately doubled down on it all while the truth was a
| single Google search away.
| dcow wrote:
| We're talking about copyright in this subthread, in the
| context of AI. I'm not sure how a copyleft slant implies
| pro-ai, but whatever. There are a lot of reasons to be
| dubious about AI. But "AI is going to destroy human
| creativity and ingenuity" is not one that concerns me.
| And "society would be better without AI" is not an axiom
| I hold, so yeah I'll respond to that type of supposition
| when it's thrown into an otherwise interesting
| discussion.
|
| I _could just be wrong_ about Snow White 's original
| copyright. As indicated by my use of " _I imagine_ ", no
| I didn't search the origins of it. I'm not seeing a big
| "double down" moment where I asserted that Snow White is
| definitely owned by Disney--that would be the cinch. In
| fact nothing about my reply contradicted the GGP adding
| that maybe Snow White isn't the best example. Why are you
| so bothered? Anyway, Snow White doesn't have a recent
| progenitor then it kinda proves the point that the world
| works perfectly well in the absence of copyright, and
| that the ability to freely remix culture is a fundamental
| human right. TIL that Snow White was originally a German
| fairytale and I'm relieved that Disney hasn't asserted
| copyright over it.
| autoexec wrote:
| Like many of the disney movies that came from fairy tales
| the basic story of Snow White isn't copyrighted, but some
| elements you'd expect in a Snow White story were added by
| Disney and are protected. The biggest one is the names
| and personalities given to the seven dwarfs (happy,
| grumpy, doc, etc). If you made your own snow white movie
| and included those characters or had them singing "Heigh-
| Ho" you could expect to get sued into bankruptcy by
| disney lawyers.
| badmintonbaseba wrote:
| It's a good example of what happens when a copyright is
| expired.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| How does someone close source a book?
| dcow wrote:
| If the book is the compiled work, then the source of a
| book is the author's creative process. And certainly that
| isn't open to all simply by purchasing the book.
|
| But less obtusely: you don't copyright a book--which is
| why knowledge, language, literature should not be closed
| source. We'd have to find a different model to support
| authors than trying to prevent people from copying books.
| Patreon style models where you subscribe and get behind
| the scenes access to the creative process, additional
| content, early access, etc. seem to work well as do
| sponsorship models like YT where the more viewers you
| draw the more you get paid, rather than a fixed fee per
| individual to watch a video. And, simply pay-what-you-
| want based models where everyone understands they can
| contribute in a way that matches the value to them and
| their means also work. One of the strongest arguments
| _for_ piracy is that the pirate would never have paid
| $700 for Photoshop in the first place so the value
| "lost" isn't real and never would have been realized by
| the author(s). (Note this argument doesn't work for petty
| theft of physical property because the thief deprives the
| owner of tangible property.)
| awesome_dude wrote:
| There are precisely three models for funding
|
| Private - this includes funding by selling item(s),
| licensing work, and private equity
|
| State
|
| Charity - this includes volunteers, patrons, donations,
| sponsorships.
|
| Charity relies on people willing to donate for the
| betterment of others.
|
| State funding fails because of the political nature of
| the person holding the purse strings.
|
| Licensing, copyright, physical sales are the only thing
| that artists have to sell.
|
| You "patreon" style falls somewhere between closed source
| - you can only access if you buy your way behind the
| curtain, and charity, where creators have to rely on
| people donating so that their works can be seen by others
| (for free)
| dcow wrote:
| I am supportive of private and charity funding. I think
| we can do it without a focus restricting copying. I think
| this because there is precedent with any industry that
| relies on trade secrets. Once I can copy a Coke with a
| food printer we'll be having some really weird internal
| consistency issues with copyright.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I'm not seeing a convincing argument from you other than
| "Once I bought a book that was public domain"
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > when was the last time your restaurant told you what
| was in, and how to make, your favourite dish
|
| Today? All the time? I just went into a new local joint
| today, talked to the owner about adding some vegetarian
| meals, and we hashed out some ideas in terms of both
| ingredients and preparation.
|
| As a pescetarian and cook myself, I frequently ask
| establishments detailed questions about ingredients and
| preparation
| api wrote:
| A restaurant is a small manufacturing facility that
| produces a physical product. It's not the same at all.
| dcow wrote:
| An artist is a small manufacturing facility that produces
| a physical (canvas, print, mp3, etc) product, no?
|
| What is different about the production of Micky Mouse
| cartoons? Why is it normal for industries to compete in
| manufacturing of physical product, but as soon as you can
| apply copyright, now you exclusively have rights to
| control anything that produces a similar result?
| api wrote:
| Let's say I write a book or record an album and there is
| no copyright. How do I get paid?
|
| Musicians I suppose can tour, which is grueling but it's
| something. Authors, programmers, actors, game studios,
| anything that's not performed live would immediately
| become non-viable as a career or a business.
|
| Large corporations would make money of course, by
| offering all you can eat streaming feeds of everything
| for a monthly fee. The creators get nothing.
| csallen wrote:
| 1. There are an infinite number of careers that do not
| currently exist, because their business models do not
| make sense. I do not think it's a great idea to keep laws
| on the books, that limit the creativity and rights of
| hundreds of millions of people, just to keep a few
| professions afloat.
|
| 2. You greatly underestimate the creativity of a
| capitalistic market. For example, on the web, it's
| generally difficult and frowned upon to copyright
| designs. Some patent trolls do it, but most don't. If you
| make an innovative design for your website, you're bound
| to be copied. And yet many programmers and tech companies
| still have viable business models. They simply don't base
| their entire business model around doing easily-copyable
| things.
| apersona wrote:
| How does copyright limit creativity? If you want to write
| a new story about a boy wizard going to school, no one
| can legally stop you. If you want to make a new Mario-
| inspired platformer, no one can legally stop you.
|
| But if you want to make money _and_ do it from riding the
| brand name association of Harry Potter or Mario, they
| can.
| autoexec wrote:
| >. Let's say I write a book or record an album and there
| is no copyright. How do I get paid?
|
| I've purchased books that were in the public domain and
| without copyright. I've paid for albums I could already
| legally listen to for free. I've paid for games and
| movies that were free to play and watch. I'm far from the
| only person who has or would.
|
| The people who pirate the most are also the ones who
| spend the most money on the things they pirate. They are
| hardcore fans. They want official merch and special boxed
| sets. People want to give the creators of the things they
| love their money and often feel conflicted about having
| to give their cash to a far less worthy corporation in
| the process. There are people who love music but refuse
| to support the RIAA by buying albums.
|
| There are proven ways to make profit in other ways like
| "pay what you want" or even "fund in advance"
| crowdsourced models. If copyright went away or, more
| ideally, were limited to a much shorter period of time
| (say 8-10 years) artists would continue to find fans and
| make money.
| api wrote:
| You're talking about individual piracy. I'm talking about
| huge scale corporate piracy, which is already happening
| (laundered through AI algorithms and other ways) and
| would happen a lot more if copyright vanished.
|
| Part of what muddies the water here too is that copyright
| lasts too long. Companies like Disney lobbied for this
| successfully. It should have a time horizon of maybe 25
| years, 50 at most.
| dcow wrote:
| Well technically it wouldn't be piracy once copyright
| banished. It'd be remixing, appropriation, derivative,
| etc., all legal.
|
| So make copyright like patents. That's what a lot of the
| copyleft movement has been arguing for forever. Make a
| copyright holder demonstrate their idea is unique,
| manifests into a tangible output, and if so protect the
| creator for a limited time. Everyone is free to use the
| work in their own provided they pay royalties at a
| reasonable rate for the duration of the patent.
|
| But the status quo now with basically perpetual copyright
| controlled by large media conglomerates 100% stifles
| culture and is a net negative on society. It's not the
| right to copy that needs defending, it's the first right
| of a briefly protected enterprise, a reward to the
| creator, that needs to be protected. Copyright is like
| trying to cure a cough by sewing someone's mouth shut.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| It looks like you're being purposefully ridiculous. There
| is an obvious difference between the two; cost of
| reproduction. For something with a cost of reproduction
| near zero (book, music, art, etc), IP restrictions
| matter. For something like a restaurant, factory, etc;
| the cost of reproduction is high.
| dcow wrote:
| It's not obvious at all! You are citing the _only_
| difference that typically comes up. A quesadilla is
| beyond trivial to reproduce and most people have the
| ingredients readily available. 3D printers make it
| trivial to reproduce things that would have been
| obviously hard to reproduce a few years ago. A book is
| hard to reproduce if it 's not in digital form. Is MIDI a
| song or a set of instructions? Source code is easy to
| copy but hard to reproduce. Source code is just a recipe
| telling a compiler what to do. And we've already
| established that recipes aren't copyrightable because it
| was "so obvious" at the time copyright was established
| that you shouldn't be able to copyright the creative
| process.
| hammock wrote:
| > How do restaurants work, then? You can't copyright a
| recipe.
|
| They barely work. Recipes are trade secrets, and the cooks
| who use them are either paid very well, given NDAs or given
| only part of the most guarded recipes
| ipsento606 wrote:
| > How do restaurants work, then?
|
| Primarily because recipe creation is not one of the biggest
| cost centers for restaurants?
| apersona wrote:
| > I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would
| win by default.
|
| Why wouldn't big corps win by default? They have the brand
| name, own the resources to make more polished version of
| any IP, and have better distribution channels than anyone
| else.
|
| Can you tell me how this scenario won't play out?
|
| 1. Big corporation has people looking for new and trending
| IP.
|
| 2. Instead of buying the rights to it, they get their army
| of people to produce more polished versions of it.
|
| 3. Because they have branding and a better distribution
| channel, the money goes 100% to them.
|
| > Ask why would people need protection from having their
| work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright
| are the corporations.
|
| People working in the field sell their copyright like
| Gravity Falls' Alex Hirsch:
| https://x.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1906915851720077617
| julianeon wrote:
| Maybe now, post-AI.
|
| But if you'd asked this question in 2015 or earlier, everyone
| would have said Disney -> pro-patent, average people & indie
| devs -> anti-patent. Microsoft was famously pro-patent, as
| were a number of nuisance companies that earned the label
| "patent troll."
|
| Honestly, this idea of "patents to protect the people"
| would've come across as a corporate lawyer trick pre-2015.
| csallen wrote:
| This is the exact opposite of the truth.
|
| Look at YouTube. Look at SoundCloud. Look at all the fan
| fiction sites out there, internet mangas and manwhas and
| webtoons, all the podcasts, all the influencers on X and
| Instagram and TikTok and even OnlyFans, etc etc. Look at all
| the uniquely tiny distribution channels that small companies
| and even individuals are able to build in connection with
| their fans and customers.
|
| There is endless demand for the endless variety of creativity
| and content that's created by normal people who aren't
| Disney, and endless ways to get it into people's hands. It is
| literally impossible for any one company to hoover all of it
| up and somehow keep it from the people.
|
| In fact, the ONLY thing that makes it possible for them to
| come close to doing that is copyright.
|
| And the only reason we have such a huge variety of creativity
| online is because people either (a) blatantly violate
| copyright law, or (b) work around gaps in copyright law that
| allow them to be creative without being sued.
|
| The idea that we need copyrights to protect us from big
| companies is exactly wrong. It's the opposite. Big companies
| need copyright to protect their profits from the endless
| creativity and remixing of the people.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents
| would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more
| than it would benefit the people.
|
| Disney would be among the largest beneficiaries if the right
| to train AI models on content was viewed as an exclusive
| right of the copyright holder; they absolutely do not benefit
| from AI training being considered fair use.
| tastyface wrote:
| A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults to
| regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content. Every whip-
| wielding archaeologist is now Harrison Ford. Every suave
| British spy is now Daniel Craig. With the power of AI,
| creativity is dead and buried.
| card_zero wrote:
| The backlash against AI compels creative types to be more
| original, maybe. It could be that AI improves culture by
| reflecting it in insipid parody, with the implicit message
| "stop phoning it in".
| slg wrote:
| This is what was often missed in the previous round of AI
| discourse that criticized these companies for forcing
| diversity into their systems after the fact. Every suave spy
| being Daniel Craig is just the apolitical version of every
| nurse being a woman or every criminal being Black. Converging
| everything to the internet's most popular result represents
| an inaccurate and a dumped down version of the world. You
| don't have to value diversity as a concept at all to
| recognize this as a systemic flaw of AI, it is as easy as
| recognizing that Daniel Craig isn't the only James Bond let
| alone the only "suave English spy".
| dcow wrote:
| It's only a flaw insofar as it's used in ways in which the
| property of the tool is problematic. Stereotypes are use
| for good and bad all the time, let's not pretend that we
| have to attack every problem with a funky shaped hammer
| because we can't admit that it's okay to have specialized
| tools in the tool belt.
| slg wrote:
| I don't follow your analogy. Is the "specialized tool"
| the AI or the way that it returns "problematic" results?
| Because I'm not saying the system is bad for using
| negative stereotypes. I'm saying the system is bad
| because it removes natural variety from the results
| making them misleading. The reliance on stereotypes are
| just one example of this phenomenon with another example
| being "suave English spy" only returning Daniel Craig.
| dcow wrote:
| I guess I'm saying that the specific application of
| stereotypes may be a feature. I don't think we'll see a
| single prevailing winner takes all model, so there is
| diversity in that respect too. And I think you will even
| see diversity from a single model. In other words, I
| don't think Daniel Craig is the _only_ thing a model will
| return for "suave english spy". Just a cheap and easy
| one.
| darioush wrote:
| don't you think it is empowering and aspiring for artists?
| they can try several drafts of their work instantaneously,
| checking out various compositions etc before even starting
| the manual art process.
|
| they could even input/train it on their own work. I don't
| think someone can use AI to copy your art better than the
| original artist.
|
| Plus art is about provenance. If we could find a scrap piece
| of paper with some scribbles from Picasso, it would be art.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| This does seem to work for writing. Feed your own writing
| back in and try variations / quickly sketch out alternate
| plots, that sort of thing.
|
| Then go back and refine.
|
| Treat it the same as programming. Don't tell the AI to just
| make something and hope it magically does it as a one-shot.
| Iterate, combine with other techniques, make something that
| is truly your own.
| autoexec wrote:
| > A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults
| to regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content.
|
| That's the whole problem with AI. It's not creative. There's
| no "I" in AI. There's just what we feed it and it's a whole
| lot of "garbage in, garbage out". The more the world is
| flooded with derivative AI slop the less there will be of
| anything else to train AI on and eventually we're left with
| increasingly homogenized and uncreative content drowning out
| what little originality is still being made without AI.
| SirMaster wrote:
| But why Daniel Craig and not Pierce Brosnan?
| sejje wrote:
| Why does the AI have to inject the creativity? It's supposed
| to guess what you want and generate it. The prompts in the
| article make it clear the author wants Harrison Ford.
|
| If you ask it for a female adventure-loving archaeologist
| with a bullwhip, you think you'll get Harrison Ford?
|
| What if you ask for a black man? Etc etc.
|
| You're talking about how unoriginal it is when the human has
| asked it in the least creative way. And it gives what you
| want (when the content filters don't spot it)
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Essentially: "information wants to be free".
|
| I agree.
|
| But this must include the dissolution of patents. Otherwise
| corporations and the owners of the infrastructure will simply
| control _everything_ , including the easily replicable works of
| individuals.
| j-bos wrote:
| At least patents only last 20 years as opposed to nearly over
| a century for copyright.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| In practice it's often longer. Drug companies queue up
| minor tweaks to their formulas and can threaten to sue
| anyone even close to the new way, even carbon copies of the
| now expired patent. Few can afford to win a lawsuit.
|
| We need more courts and judges to speed the process, to
| make justice more accessible, and universal SLAPP
| protections to weed out frivolous abuse.
| j-bos wrote:
| True, though at least with drugs if there's a shortage
| compounding pharmacies are given broad freedom outside
| the patent holder's control. See semaglutide.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Sad that we rely on the scraps these captured regulators
| let fall through the cracks. At least until their patrons
| awake and close those loopholes.
| codedokode wrote:
| I am against dissolution of patents if the technology took
| lot of research. In this case the patent protects from others
| copying the result of research.
|
| However, obvious patents like "a computer system with a
| display displaying a product and a button to order it" should
| not be allowed. Also, software patents should not exist
| (copyright is enough).
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| What if all that research led to some incredible world
| changing for the better idea/concept/product in an open
| society that would benefit everyone, in the closed society
| only those allowed to use the patent benefit
| codedokode wrote:
| Who would pay for the years of research in the open
| society?
| intrasight wrote:
| It's not black and white. Even the United States, the
| government can, under certain circumstances, use a
| patented invention without the patent holder's
| permission. And it's even more common in other countries.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Gonna submit that business model to a YC 2026 batch.
| xorcist wrote:
| I think what you observe is more like a natural blowback to the
| prevailing idea that this is somehow beyond critique because it
| will fundamentally change culture and civilization forever.
|
| There's a bit of irony here too. The intellectual discourse
| around intellectural property, a diverse and lively one from an
| academic standpoint, the whole free and open source software
| movements, software patents, the piracy movement and so on have
| analyzed the history, underlying ideas and values in detail for
| the past thirty years. Most people know roughly what is at
| stake, where they stand, and can defend their position in an
| honest way.
|
| Then comes new technology, everyone and their mother gets
| excited about it, and _steamrolls_ all those lofty ideas into
| "oh look at all the shiny things it can produce!". Be careful
| what you wish for.
| achierius wrote:
| Let's be clear. You can be for free software, against
| copyright, etc., and STILL be in favor of these firms being
| punished for violating copyright as they have. Because
| frankly, we -- normal people -- have always known that we
| would be punished if we did anything close to this: so many
| people have been thrown in jail, even killed themselves,
| because they distributed some film or hosted some books. But
| now, when a big corporation does it, and in doing so seeks to
| replace and impoverish thousands, millions of hard-working,
| law-abiding people, now is when we should expect the
| government to finally say -- oh, that copyright thing was
| silly all along? No. Perhaps if the deal was that the whole
| system would go away entirely -- that we, too, could do what
| these firms have done. But that's not what's being proposed.
| That will not happen. They want the laws to be for them, not
| for us, and I will always be opposed to attempts at
| actualizing that injustice.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| IMO the _natural effect_ of this will be to massively
| devalue any individual cultural artifact, and that this
| will also achieve the benefit of defanging the big
| copyright holders. Is it the right way to go about it? No.
| Is it an insult to anyone who ever got nabbed for piracy?
| Sure. But tbh as a pirate voter I 'll still very much take
| it.
| jason_pomerleau wrote:
| > If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a
| nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.
|
| This reminds me of Tom Scott's "Welcome to Life: The
| Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers" [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
| egypturnash wrote:
| Getting the megacorporations to sit up and take notice of this
| is about the only way the average independent artist has any
| hope of stopping this crap from destroying half our jobs.
| What'm I gonna do, sue OpenAI? Sam Altman makes more money
| sitting on the toilet taking a dump than I do in an entire
| year.
|
| I have no love for the Mouse but if I can get them and the
| image slop-mongers to fight then that's _absoutely fine_. It
| would be nice to have a functioning, vibrant public domain but
| it is also nice to not have some rich asshole insisting that
| all copyright laws must be ignored because if they properly
| licensed even a fraction of what they 've consumed then it
| would be _entirely_ too expensive to train their glorified
| autocomplete databases on _the entire fucking internet_ for the
| purpose of generating even more garbage "content" designed to
| keep your attention when you're mindlessly scrolling their
| attention farms, regardless of how it makes you feel, and if I
| can choose one or the other then _I am totally behind the
| Mouse_.
| II2II wrote:
| > That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection
| of pixels, because THEY own it
|
| A world without copyright is just as problematic as a world
| with copyright. With copyright, you run into the problem of
| excessive control. This wasn't too much of a problem in the
| past. If you bought a book, record, or video recording, you
| owned that particular copy. You could run into disagreeable
| situations because you didn't own the rights, but it was
| difficult to prevent anyone from from viewing a work once it
| had been published. (Of course, modern copyright laws and
| digitial distribution has changed that.)
|
| On the flip side, without copyright, it would be far easier for
| others to exploit (or even take credit) for the work of another
| person without compensation or recourse. Just look at those AI
| "generated" images, or any website that blatently rips off the
| content created by another person. There is no compensation.
| Heck, there isn't even credit. Worse yet, the parties
| misrepresenting the content are doing their best to monetize
| it. Even authors who are more than willing to give their work
| away have every right to feel exploited under those
| circumstances. And all of that is happening with copyright
| laws, where there is the opportunity for recourse if you have
| the means and the will.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| To reply to the parenthetical, copyright has nothing to do
| with credit. Taking credit for someone else's work is banned
| in some places in some contexts (they call this a moral
| rights regime) but not the same thing as what is being talked
| about when people say copyright (which is about copying and
| performing)
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The idea that someone can't use _ideas_ without someone else
| making money from it is a really, really, radically weird
| idea and is very new in the history of human society.
| dcow wrote:
| You don't need credit to talk about pop culture. I don't need
| to credit the Indian Jones copyright holder when I paint a
| stunning likeness of Ford in a kaki outfit with a whip, even
| if the holder might try to sue me over it. Copyright and
| credit aren't the same.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| There are also trademark protections. I heard Ford actually
| trademarked his likeness to ensure he got a piece of the
| merchandise action.
| dcow wrote:
| Trademarking your likeness is absurd. How do we even let
| that happen.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| IMO everyone should automatically have rights over their
| own likeness, especially when it comes to commercial
| ventures.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I'm guessing you've never created something of value before.
| People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control
| of their intellectual property.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Accusatory clause aside, but I agree, this is how a lot of
| "starving artists" get out of being starving.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > I'm guessing you've never created something of value before
|
| That's an interesting speculation. You realize that it could
| also be turned against you, right? Never a good idea!
|
| So, let's focus on the arguments rather than making
| assumptions about each other's backgrounds.
|
| > People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and
| control of their intellectual property.
|
| People are absolutely entitled to the fruits of their labour.
| The crucial question is whether the current system of 'IP'
| control - designed for scarcity - is the best way to ensure
| that, especially when many creators find it hinders more than
| it helps. That's why many people explore and use other
| models.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and
| control of their intellectual property.
|
| No they aren't, intellectual property is a legal fiction and
| ideas belong to all of humanity. Humanity did fine without
| intellectual property for thousands of years, it's a
| relatively recent creation.
| jim-jim-jim wrote:
| If I paint a picture on a physical canvas, I can charge
| people to come into my house and take a look. If I bring the
| canvas to a park, I'm not entitled to say "s-stop looking at
| my painting guys!"
|
| If you're worried about your work being infinitely
| reproduced, you probably shouldn't work in an infinitely-
| reproducible medium. Digitized content is inherently
| worthless, and I mean that in a non-derisive way. The sooner
| we realize this, the richer culture will be.
|
| Really all content is worthless. Historically, we've always
| paid for the transmission medium (tape, CD) and confused it
| for the cost of art itself.
| loki-ai wrote:
| and how do you reconcile any work in software development?
| If someone isn't willing to work for free, should they just
| not work in the field at all? Do you think software culture
| would really be richer?
| jim-jim-jim wrote:
| My income is tied to the labor time I exert in
| creating/supporting services. I don't sit back and
| collect royalties on the code itself. Software is one of
| the first fields where the fundamental worthlessness of
| content revealed itself, hence FOSS.
|
| When you watch a musical performance, you are also paying
| for labor. Even when you buy a physical art object, all
| the costs involved decompose back to labor. When you have
| a digital copy of something, there is no labor input to
| its creation, so guess what the inherent value is.
|
| Animators drew actual cels. Theater workers clocked in
| and screened the films. The guys at the DVD factory
| pressed the discs. We paid for all of this already. It's
| double-billing to charge for copypasting the mere
| likeness of something. Nobody's doing any work for that.
| loki-ai wrote:
| you're allowed to tie your income to creating systems
| precisely because you're not allowed to copy them from
| previous companies or other sources
|
| selling software isn't much different from a musician
| collecting royalties, especially now when everything's
| shifted to a subscription model. it lets us keep
| pretending we're adding value, even though most of them
| often stays the same for years
| jim-jim-jim wrote:
| Sorry, but I don't buy it. It's not like we're milking a
| secret golden algorithm. If all my company's code were
| open sourced tomorrow, I don't think a competitor could
| do much with it, since they'd just be presented with bog
| standard CRUD. It's still relationships and sweat that's
| keeping the lights on for the time being.
| sejje wrote:
| You keep it in your house and charge people to come look
| at it (SaaS).
|
| Those people sometimes look at it and build a copy
| (competitor) and that's okay.
|
| You don't have to publish your code, or allow other
| people to run it.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| We're about to witness a fundamental shift in the human
| experience. Some time in the near future there will not be a
| single act of creation you can do that isn't trivial compared
| to the result of typing "make cool thing please now" into the
| computer. And your position is to add to the problem because
| with your policy anything I create should get chucked into the
| LLM grinder by any and everybody. How do I get my human body to
| commit to doing hard things with that prospect at hand? This is
| the end of happiness.
| redwood wrote:
| This is why I love making bread
| GPerson wrote:
| We can't all be bread making hedonists. Some of us want
| these finite lives to mean more than living constantly in
| the moment in a state of baking zen.
| card_zero wrote:
| I don't know, that sounds like the basic argument for
| copyright: "I created a cool thing, therefore I should be
| able to milk it for the rest of my life". Without this perk,
| creatives are less motivated. Would that be bad? I guess an
| extreme version would be a world where you can only publish
| anonymously and with no tangible reward.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I hate to paint with such a broad brush, but I'd venture
| that "creatives" are not primarily motivated by profit. It
| is almost a truism that money corrupts the creative
| endeavour.
| card_zero wrote:
| There are various ways to turn creativity into money,
| even without publishing any kind of artwork. Basically
| all skilled jobs and entrepreneurial enterprises require
| creativity. And if you _do_ have an artwork, you can
| still seek profit through acclaim, even without
| copyright: interviews, public appearances. Artists once
| had patrons - but that tends to put aristocrats in
| control of art.
|
| So money will motivate a lot of the creativity that goes
| on.
|
| Meanwhile, if you dabble in some kind of art or craft
| while working in a factory to make ends meet, that kind
| of limits you to dabbling, because you'll have no time to
| do it properly. Money also buys equipment and helpers,
| sometimes useful.
|
| On the other hand, yes, it ruins the art. There's a 10cc
| song about that.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_Art%27s_Sake_(song)
|
| Though, this reminds me of an interesting aside: the
| origin of the phrase "art for art's sake" was _not_ about
| money, but about aesthetics. It meant something like
| "stop pushing opinions, just show me a painting".
| eaglelamp wrote:
| If we are going to have a general discussion about copyright
| reform at a national level, I'm all for it. If we are going to
| let billion dollar corporations break the law to make even more
| money and invent legal fictions after the fact to protect them,
| I'm completely against it.
|
| Training a model is not equivalent to training a human. Freedom
| of information for a mountain of graphics cards in a privately
| owned data center is not the same as freedom of information for
| flesh and blood human beings.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| You're setting court precedent that will apply equally to
| OpenAI as it does to the llama.cpp and stable diffusion
| models running on your own graphics card.
| codedokode wrote:
| Can stable diffusion be created without using copyrighted
| content? Maybe we should have some exemption for non-
| commercial research but definitely not for commercial
| exploitation or generating copyrighted images using open-
| source models.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Public Diffusion: https://source.plus/public-diffusion-
| private-beta
| godelski wrote:
| There is already exemptions for research. Look at
| licensing around things like ImageNet. There's similar
| licensing around things like LAION and Common Crawl[0]
| It's also not legal to just scrape everything without
| paying. There's a reason the NYT sued OpenAI and then got
| a settlement. It's still illegal for Meta to torrent
| terabytes of textbooks too.
|
| [0] https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use
| > In this regard, you acknowledge that you may not rely
| on any Crawled Content created or accumulated by CC. CC
| strongly recommends that you obtain the advice of legal
| counsel before making any use, including commercial use,
| of the Service and/or the Crawled Content. BY USING THE
| CRAWLED CONTENT, YOU AGREE TO RESPECT THE COPYRIGHTS AND
| OTHER APPLICABLE RIGHTS OF THIRD PARTIES IN AND TO THE
| MATERIAL CONTAINED THEREIN.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Can an artist be created without using copyrighted
| content? Raise a child without movies, books, songs or
| the internet, see how much they contribute to "popular
| culture".
| sksrbWgbfK wrote:
| Neglect is illegal and I don't understand your point.
| codedokode wrote:
| There is liberally licensed content like creative
| commons.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I love CC but culturally it's a nonfactor.
| photonthug wrote:
| I don't know about that, we seem to be so deeply into
| double standards for this stuff that we've forgotten they
| are double standards. If I aggressively scrape content from
| anywhere and everywhere ignoring robots.txt and any other
| terms and conditions, then I'll probably be punished.
| Corporate crawlers that are feeding the beast just do this
| on a massive scale and laugh off all of the complaints,
| including those from smaller corporations who hire
| lawyers..
| darioush wrote:
| oh they hate it so much when this hypocrisy is pointed
| out. better put the high school kids downloading books on
| pirate bay in jail but I guess if your name starts with
| Alt and ends in man then there's an alt set of rules for
| you.
|
| also remember when GPU usage was so bad for the
| environment when it was used to mine crypto, but I guess
| now it's okay to build nuclear power plants specifically
| for gen-ai.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Great, let's legislate corporate liability for excessive
| data use from crawlers. I'm fully there with you.
| munificent wrote:
| SGTM.
|
| Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up,
| snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI
| software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth
| forever.
|
| Would that world be measurably worse in _any_ way in terms
| of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might
| have to hand draw (poorly) your D &D character.
|
| But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image,
| you'd have to actually connect with a human who made that
| thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people
| to experience the thing they made.
|
| Was that world so bad?
| dcow wrote:
| Obviously the former status quo wasn't _that bad_. But
| the opposite is also true, AI democratizes access to pop
| culture. So now when I connect with a human it's not to
| share memes, it's higher order. IOW we can spend more
| time playing D &D because we didn't have to draw our
| characters.
| munificent wrote:
| _> AI democratizes access to pop culture._
|
| Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally
| what makes it _popular_ culture.
|
| _> So now when I connect with a human it's not to share
| memes, it's higher order._
|
| I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes
| does not measurably improve the quality of the human
| connection here.
|
| _> IOW we can spend more time playing D &D because we
| didn't have to draw our characters._
|
| You never had to draw your characters. You can just play
| and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our
| dreaming for us?
| dcow wrote:
| It's a rhetorical example. _Suppose_ you need to create
| an avatar of your character. Why does it follow that it
| 's not beneficial to have an AI help generate the avatar?
|
| You're responding to the specific example, not the
| general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever
| humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid
| and shouldn't be done anyway.
| nradov wrote:
| No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or
| take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and
| trivial.
| dcow wrote:
| Consider consulting documentation then. A model can help
| sift through orders of magnitude more literature than you
| can in the same timeframe.
| nradov wrote:
| OK? What does that have to do with pop culture IP rights?
|
| If you're building an LLM for management or technical
| consulting then the valuable content is locked up behind
| corporate firewalls anyway so you're going to have to pay
| to use it. In that field most of what you could find with
| a web crawler or in digital books is already outdated and
| effectively worthless.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing
| that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn 't be
| done anyway._
|
| No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is
| worth doing _by humans_ but not worth doing by machines.
|
| As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going
| to automate running errands so that we had time to make
| art, but instead it automates making art while we all
| have to be gig workers running errands.
| autoexec wrote:
| Imagine a world where Thanos snapped his fingers and
| photoshop (along with every digital application like it)
| was wiped from Earth forever. The world would keep on
| turning and artists would keep on creating, but creating
| art would be more difficult and fewer people would be
| able to do it (or even touch up their own photos).
|
| Would that world be so bad? Was the world really so
| horrible before photoshop existed?
|
| What if we lost youtube? What if we lost MP3s?
|
| We could lose a lot of things we didn't always have and
| we'd still survive, but that doesn't mean that those
| things aren't worth having or that we shouldn't want
| them.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| That world was worse. It wasn't much worse, because we
| haven't seen most of the benefit of GenAI yet, but yes I
| would say that it was worse.
|
| It wasn't "so bad", but any history of improvement can be
| cut into slices that aren't "so bad" to reverse.
| robocat wrote:
| > invent legal fictions after the fact
|
| You're reading into the situation...
|
| For the US getting legislators to do anything is impossible:
| even the powerful fail.
|
| When a legal system is totally roadblocked, what other choice
| is there? The reason all startups ask forgiveness is that
| permission is not available.
|
| (edit). Shit. I guess that could be a political statement.
| Sorry
| rglullis wrote:
| > It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that
| information itself must be entirely subsumed into an
| oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus.
|
| No, the idea is that rules needed to be changed in a way that
| can are valid for everyone, not just for mega corporations who
| are trying to exploit other's works and gatekeep the it behind
| "AI".
| serviceberry wrote:
| What's the damage to the society done by Disney holding the
| rights to Mickey Mouse? Like, if we're being honest?
|
| Patents, sure. They're abused and come at a cost to the
| society. But all we've done here is created a culture where, in
| some sort of an imagined David-vs-Goliath struggle against
| Disney, we've enabled a tech culture where it's OK to train gen
| AI tech on works of small-scale artists pilfered on an
| unprecedented scale. That's not hurting Disney. It's hurting
| your favorite indie band, a writer you like, etc.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| It's worse in music: the folk music that came before recorded
| music had a long history of everyone borrowing and putting
| their own spin on someone else's tune and, today, this is
| viewed as some kind of assault on the originator of the tune.
|
| If companies can't gatekeep our artistic culture for money,
| we'll be better able to enjoy it.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't understand how protecting Disney characters prevents
| development of art or science. Why do you need them at all?
| There is lot of liberally licensed art and I think today there
| are more artists than ever in history.
|
| Also making a billion dollar business by using hard work of
| talented people for free and without permission is not cool.
| The movie they downloaded from Pirate Bay for free took
| probably man-years of work to make.
|
| Also I wonder how can we be sure that the images produced by
| machine are original and are not a mix of images from unknown
| artists at DeviantArt. Maybe it is time to make a neural image
| origin search engine?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| For the last paragraph, it already exists: Stable
| Attribution.
|
| It doesn't work. If you put your handmade drawing inside,
| it'll also tell you what images were mixed to make it, even
| though it was entirely human-made.
| boplicity wrote:
| > used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful
|
| This is where the argument falls apart. Not because the
| copyright isn't used by the rich and powerful, but because it
| misses the fact that copyright also grants very powerful rights
| to otherwise powerless individuals, thus allowing for many
| small businesses and individuals to earn a living based on the
| rights granted by our current copyright system.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Rights you basically can't use without a lot of money
| boplicity wrote:
| Um, no. I use these rights all of the time, and often
| enforce them, and am not at all wealthy.
| r0s wrote:
| It's not baffling in the least.
|
| No matter the extent you believe in the freedom of information,
| few believe anyone should then be free to profit from someone
| else's work without attribution.
|
| You seem to think it would be okay for disney to market and
| charge for my own personal original characters and art,
| claiming them as their own original idea. Why is that?
| raspyberr wrote:
| Yes. I 100% unironically believe that anyone should be able
| to use anyone else's work royalty/copyright free after 10-20
| years instead of 170 in the UK. Could you please justify why
| 170 years is in any way a reasonable amount of time?
| codedokode wrote:
| May I ask why you want to use someone's work instead of
| creating your own?
| card_zero wrote:
| I mean, it's fun. Ever listened to the KLF, and things
| from the era before sampling was heavily sat on, such as
| the album _1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)_ - ? I don
| 't claim it's very good, but it was definitely fun. And
| the motivation for using existing works, instead of
| creating your own, is similar to the motivation for using
| existing _words,_ instead of creating your own. They 're
| reference points, people recognize them, you can
| communicate with them instead of having to extract
| patience from the audience like they have to learn a new
| language for each work. And of course in practice the
| rules are fuzzy, so everybody sails close to the wind by
| _imitating_ others and in this way we share a culture.
| Stealing their work is just sharing the culture more
| closely.
| codedokode wrote:
| > is similar to the motivation for using existing words
|
| I don't think it's like that. If we take music, for
| example, the _existing word_ would be a note or a scale
| or a musical instrument or a style, but a melody would be
| an _existing sentence_. As for sampling, there is
| creative usage of samples, like Prodigy for example where
| it is difficult to even recognize the source.
|
| Also today there is some leeway in copyright enforcement.
| For example, I often see non-commercial amateur covers of
| commercial songs and the videos don't get taken down.
| card_zero wrote:
| I put it to you that _same difference._ These matters of
| degree are what copyright lawyers haggle over. It implies
| to me that the whole edifice is forced into being, for
| its desirable (?) effects, and has no concrete
| foundation. Nothing pure and elegant and necessary about
| copyright.
|
| Well, you asked why, anyway, and there's why: it's a
| natural thing to do.
| card_zero wrote:
| The copyright last 70 years after the death of the author,
| so 170 years would be rare (indeed 190 years would be
| possible). This was an implementation of a 1993 EU
| directive:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive
|
| That itself was based on the 1886 Berne Convention. "The
| original goal of the Berne Convention was to protect works
| for two generations after the death of the author". 50
| years, originally. But why? Apparently Victor Hugo (he of
| Les Miserables) is to blame. But why was he bothered?
|
| Edit: it seems the extension beyond the death of the author
| was not what Hugo wanted. "any work of art has two authors:
| the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who
| translates these feelings, and the people again who
| consecrate his vision of that feeling. When one of the
| authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to
| the other, the people." So I'm still trying to figure out
| who came up with it, and why.
| card_zero wrote:
| So far as I can tell, the idea behind extending copyright
| two generations after the author's death was so that they
| could leave the rights to their children and
| grandchildren, and this would keep old or terminally ill
| authors motivated.
| intrasight wrote:
| No, it was extended because Disney and the like lobbied
| for it to be done.
| card_zero wrote:
| I'm talking about the limit that was chosen in 1886,
| death + 50 years.
| r0s wrote:
| "use" vs. sell is the problem here. Or do you think they
| are the same?
| a_bonobo wrote:
| >information itself must be entirely subsumed into an
| oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus
|
| I think that's the reason why I've (and probably many others?)
| have cooled down on general open source coding.
|
| Open source started when well-paid programmers used their
| stable positions and ample extra time to give back to the
| community. What happened then is that corporations then
| siphoned up all that labor and gave nothing back, just like the
| AI bros siphoned up all data and gave nothing back. The
| 'contract' of mutual exchange, of bettering each other, was
| always a fantasy. Instead the companies took away that ample
| extra time and those stable positions.
|
| Here we are in 2025 and sometimes I can't afford rent but the
| company C-tier is buying itself their hundredth yacht. Why
| should I contribute to your system?
| fullshark wrote:
| All those ideas were rationalizations because people didn't
| want to pay for stuff, just like your post effectively blaming
| the victim of IP theft cause corporations undeniably do suck so
| we shouldn't care if they suffer.
| myhf wrote:
| The problem with this kind of plagiarism isn't that it violates
| someone's specific copyright.
|
| But the discussion around plagiarism calls attention to the
| deeper issue: "generative" AI does not have emergent thinking
| or reasoning capabilities. It is just very good at obfuscating
| the sources of its information.
|
| And that can cause much bigger problems than just IP
| infringement. You could make a strategic decision based on
| information that was deliberately published by an adversary.
| gerdesj wrote:
| How do you suggest you protect your "thing"?
|
| * If I make a thing that is different and I get a patent -
| cool. * If I create a design that is unusual and I get
| copyright on it - is that cool?
|
| Both concepts - patent and copyright - are somewhat
| controversial, for multiple reasons.
|
| If you invented a thingie, would you not want some initial
| patent related protection to allow you to crack on with some
| sort of clout against _cough_ CN? If you created a film
| /creative thang, would you not want some protection against
| your characters being ... subverted.
|
| Patents and copywrite are what we have - do you have any better
| ideas?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Consider that one day you may wish to author a creative work
| and derive financial benefit from that labor. There is
| legitimate use for limited time ownership of reproducible
| cultural artifacts. Extending that to 95 years is the problem.
| narcraft wrote:
| I wish to one day derive financial benefit from hitting
| myself with a hammer for 8 hours a day. Should we construct a
| legal apparatus to guarantee that I am able to do so?
|
| Edit: the point I want to illustrate is that we do not get to
| choose what others value, or to dictate what is scarce and no
| one is entitled to make a living in a specific way even if
| they really want to
| loki-ai wrote:
| It is bad analogy specially because we value that so much
| that we are even discussing on how to have more of it.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| It smells like a psyop, to be honest. Doesn't take much to get
| the ball rolling. Just more temporarily embarrassed
| millionaires sticking up for billionaires and corporations,
| buying their propaganda hook line and sinker, and propagating
| it themselves for free. Copyright is a joke, DMCA is a
| disgusting, selectively applied tool of the elite.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I think we have all grown up with pervasive strong IP rights,
| and most people have come to internalize it as a matter of
| fairness or an almost natural right, rather than a practical
| tool designed to incentivize creation.
|
| And then even if you get past that, the world is filled with
| lots of IP we love, and it is easy to imagine weakened IP
| rights taking that away, but quite difficult to imagine what
| weakened IP rights might buy us.
|
| I do have some hope still that this generative AI stuff will
| give a glimpse into the value of weaker IP rights and maybe
| inspire more people to think critically about it. But I think
| it is an uphill battle. Or maybe it will take younger people
| growing up on generative AI to notice.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| More than giant corporations make IP. What about independent
| artists making original art?
| Peritract wrote:
| The issue here is that you think the problem is
|
| > intellectual property
|
| rather than
|
| > used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful,
| to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation
|
| You're using those "2008 ideas now to _defend_ the rich and
| powerful exploiting and stifling creativity; the problem hasn
| 't changed, you've just swapped sides.
|
| OpenAI isn't the underdog here.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm fascinated by the fact that the images are _almost_ right,
| but never totally.
|
| Harrison Ford's head is way too big for his body. Same with
| Alicia Vikander's and Daniel Craig's too. Daniel Craig is way too
| young too. Bruce Willis's just looks fake, and he's holding his
| lighter in the opposite hand from the famous photo.
|
| So it's not reproducing any _actual_ copyrighted images directly.
| It 's more like an artist trying to paint from memory. Which
| seems like an important distinction.
| ryandrake wrote:
| According to some of the replies in this discussion, even
| "artist trying to paint from memory" is guilty of infringement,
| as long as the subject matter can be linked in any way to
| someone's "IP". Im not legally trained to evaluate these
| claims, but some of them seem outlandish!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > According to some of the replies in this discussion, even
| "artist trying to paint from memory" is guilty of
| infringement
|
| Yes, making a copy or derivative work of something under
| copyright from memory is infringement, unless it falls under
| an exception in copyright law such as fair use (which does
| not categorically apply to everything with "memory" as an
| intermediary between the original work and the
| copy/derivative, otherwise, copyright law would never have
| had any effect other than on mechanical duplication.)
| asadotzler wrote:
| Painting and selling a painting or otherwise substituting
| that painting for an original work that deprives the original
| creator is theft, plain and simple. Not selling it, there's
| room for discussion and more considered legal review.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| You're allowed to draw IP and share your drawings. You're allowed
| to screenshot and photoshop IP. You're allowed to sell tools that
| help others draw and photoshop IP*. You're not allowed to sell
| these drawings and photoshops.
|
| I don't see why an AI can't generate IP, even if the AI is being
| sold. What's not allowed is selling the generated IP.
|
| Style is even more permissive: you're allowed to sell something
| in any style. AFAIK the only things that can be restricted are
| methods to achieve the style (via patents), similar brands in
| similar service categories (via trademarks), and depictions of
| objects (via copyrights).
|
| Note that something being "the original" gives it an intrinsic
| popularity advantage, and someone being "the original creator"
| gives their new works an intrinsic advantage. I believe in
| _attribution_ , which means that if someone recreates or closely
| derives another's art or style, they should point to the
| original**. With attribution, IP is much less important, because
| a recreation or spin-off must be significantly better to out-
| compete the original in popularity, and even then, it's extra
| success usually spills onto the original, making it more popular
| than it would be without the recreation or spin-off anyways. Old
| books, movies, and video games like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and
| Sonic have many "recreations" which copy all but their IP, and
| fan recreations which copy even that; yet they're far more
| popular than all the recreations, and when Warner Bros, Disney,
| or SEGA release a new installment, the new installment is far
| more popular too, simply because it's an original.
|
| * IANAL, maybe there are some technicalities, but in practice
| this is true.
|
| ** Or others can do it. As long as it shows up alongside their
| work, so people don't see the recreation or close derivation
| without knowing about the original.
| lmm wrote:
| > You're allowed to draw IP and share your drawings.
|
| No you're not, not in general. The copyright holder has the
| exclusive right to prepare and distribute derivative works.
|
| > You're allowed to screenshot and photoshop IP.
|
| Again, no, not in general.
|
| > You're allowed to sell tools that help others draw and
| photoshop IP*.
|
| Sort of. You're allowed to sell tools that might be used for
| those purposes. You're not allowed to sell tools as "for that
| purpose" or advertise those use cases.
| Smar wrote:
| I guess country of residence has a lot of relevance here...
| lmm wrote:
| Not really, post-Berne convention.
| rescripting wrote:
| If I pay for ChatGPT and ask for copyrighted images, is that
| selling the generated IP?
| alphan0n wrote:
| You are responsible for the output, just like any other tool.
|
| If I use a copy machine to reproduce your copyrighted work, I
| am responsible for that infringement not Xerox.
|
| If I coax your novel out of my phones keyboard suggestion
| engine letter by letter, and publish it, it's still me
| infringing on your copyright.
|
| If I make a copy of your clip art in Illustratator, is Adobe
| responsible? Etc.
| skydhash wrote:
| The analogies fail because the copyrighted material were
| not used for creating the copy machine, Illustration, or
| (maybe?) the keyboard suggestion engine. If LLMs were
| produced ethically, then the whole discussion is moot. But
| if the only way to produce copyrighted material requires
| being trained on copyrighted material, then...
| alphan0n wrote:
| Copyright law applies to distribution of output, not
| input.
|
| An artist, writer, whoever, could read all the
| copyrighted material in the world, even pirated material,
| unless their output is a copy or copyrighted artifact,
| then there is no infringement.
| philistine wrote:
| > even pirated material
|
| If you knowingly use pirated content for any purpose,
| that's not legal.
| alphan0n wrote:
| Distribution of copyrighted material is prohibited.
| Reading, watching, listening, etc, it is not.
|
| A copyright holders tort is with the infringing
| distributor, not the end user.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Distribution of copyrighted material is prohibited.
|
| Copying without distribution is _also_ an exclusive right
| under copyright -- the one for which the whole area of
| law is named -- and, as such, prohibited without a
| license or a specific exception in law.
|
| > Reading, watching, listening, etc, it is not.
|
| To the extent that reading, watching, listening, etc.
| involves copying, and that copying is neither explicitly
| licensed nor implicitly licensed by, e.g., a sale of copy
| where reading, watching, listening, etc., by means that
| inherently involve such an act of copying is clearly an
| intended use, is _effectively_ prohibited because of the
| unauthorized copying involved.
|
| > A copyright holders tort is with the infringing
| distributor, not the end user.
|
| It is often with both, though the infringing distributor
| is (1) generally more likely to have ability to pay which
| makes tort action worth pursuing, (2) generally likely to
| be involved in more acts subject to liability increasing
| the tort liability, making tort action more worth
| pursuing, (3) less likely to be seen as a sympathetic
| figure by a jury should they invoke their right to a jury
| trial, (4) likely to be subject to greater liability per
| offense under the statutory damage alternative, even if
| the actual damages would be similar were that option
| pursued instead.
| VanTheBrand wrote:
| What if the ceo of xerox went on social media and promoted
| copy machines by showing how you could use them for
| infringement?
| alphan0n wrote:
| Is that what is happening in reality?
|
| It seems that all of the big players in the industry are
| perfectly fine with disallowing output that infringes on
| copyright.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I would argue yes, since the output is what you are probably
| after, when buying access to ChatGPT.
| imgabe wrote:
| The image the AI generates is not copyrighted (except maybe
| by OpenAI I guess) unless it ends up being an exact duplicate
| of an existing image. Copyright applies to a _specific_ work.
| The character may be trademarked like Mickey Mouse, but that
| is a different IP protection.
| evdubs wrote:
| "Substantially similar" is the standard, not "exact
| duplicate".
| tjpnz wrote:
| >I don't see why an AI can't generate IP, even if the AI is
| being sold. What's not allowed is selling the generated IP.
|
| Where I live Studio Ghibli are known to be active on C2C
| marketplaces looking for counterfeit goods. If you were to list
| a home pressed Totoro pillowcase it would be taken down,
| sometimes proactively by the marketplace. From that perspective
| I struggle to see much discernable difference given OpenAI are
| offering a paid service which allows me to create similar
| items, and one could argue is promoting it too.
| nine_k wrote:
| So, you would like an AI that can reasonably answer questions
| about various aspects of human culture, or at least to take said
| culture into account? At the same time, you want it to _not_ use
| the most obvious, most relevant examples from the culture,
| because they are somehow verboten, and a less relevant,
| completely made-up character should be presented instead? Come
| on, computes have _logic_. If you ask the machine to produce a
| picture of a man who was sent to humans to save them, then was
| executed, and after that came back alive, who do you think the
| machine should show you, for Christ 's sake?
|
| Picture-based industries had a mild shock when "Photoshop" kind
| of software became widely available. Remixing visuals in ways
| that the copyright holders won't approve of became equally
| widespread. Maybe that added some grey hairs to the heads of some
| industry execs, the sky has not fallen. I suppose the same is
| going to happen this time around.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I think Harrison Ford's chin scar should be seen as a witness
| mark to copyright infringement. It simply should not have
| rendered this based on that prompt.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Here's a question.
|
| What if I want to prompt:
|
| "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses
| a bullwhip, make sure it is NOT Indiana Jones."
|
| One way or another, you (and the model) do need to know who
| Indiana Jones is.
|
| After that, the moral and legal choices of whether to generate
| the image, and what to do with it, are all yours.
|
| And we might not agree on what that is, but you do get the choice
| asadotzler wrote:
| If the AI company sells it to you, no matter your prompting,
| they are stealing. If you also sell that work, then so are you.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| You are writing a conclusion without providing reasons or
| feelings.
|
| Are you able to link to or write out your reasoning (however
| concisely?).
|
| Is your view here legal, ethical, and/or vibes based? Each
| can can be interesting!
| exodust wrote:
| They are not stealing! Indiana Jones is already out there in
| pop culture.
|
| We shouldn't complain about AI holding a mirror up to our
| world and noting "you guys love Indiana Jones a lot. Here's a
| picture inspired by his appearance, based on your generic
| prompt that I'm guessing is a nod to the franchise."
|
| The AI is a step ahead of your unsubtle attempts to "catch it
| stealing".
|
| The image of Indiana Jones is not "ready for market" when it
| emerges from your prompt. Just like Googling "Indy with
| whip", the images that emerge are not a commercial
| opportunity for you.
|
| When you make multi-billion dollar movies with iconic
| characters, expect AI to know what they look like and send
| them your way if your prompt is painfully obvious in its
| intent.
| 2099miles wrote:
| The issue I have with this article is that I can ask it "generate
| me a picture of tomb raider and pikachu on a couch" and it does
| it. This article makes it seems like it's skirting the
| guardrails, dude OpenAI took them off, it's out in the open.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| Corporations would love for everybody to believe they own and
| control every single instance of any audio or visual output they
| create but that's just not true. This idea that they own the very
| idea of 'boy wizard who goes to school' is insane and plays right
| into this flawed and pernicious idea. Copyright is important but
| does/should not extend to every time I want to print out a
| picture of a boy wizard for my kid. We live in a culture, not an
| IP regime.
| apersona wrote:
| I think you have a misunderstanding of what's copyrightable.
|
| > This idea that they own the very idea of 'boy wizard who goes
| to school' is insane and plays right into this flawed and
| pernicious idea.
|
| Copyright protects an expression of an idea, but not the idea
| itself. No one can legally stop you from writing your own story
| about a boy wizard who goes to school.
|
| Nintendo fan games can be released (even sold) if they changed
| it up a bit so they're no longer associated with that IP.
|
| > Copyright is important but does/should not extend to every
| time I want to print out a picture of a boy wizard for my kid.
|
| You can. No one will sue you. No one will send you a cease and
| desist. It happens when you try to print Harry Potter and try
| to make a business out of it.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| > No one can legally stop you from writing your own story
| about a boy wizard who goes to school
|
| This is doing exactly that, except for an image. They didn't
| ask for a picture of Harry Potter, they asked for an image of
| a boy wizard and were prevented. The actual IP holder
| probably didn't implement these specific restrictions but it
| falls into the category I'm talking about, the idea that they
| own everything. It shouldn't be up to the image generator to
| say I can't get a picture of Harry Potter, it should be up to
| me whether or not I try to sell that image and risk getting
| busted for it. That's where copyright comes into play, as far
| I understand.
| quuxplusone wrote:
| I have a dream that one day bloggers will learn the difference
| between copyrighting and copywriting.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I need a Ghibli version of that terminator now.
| saurik wrote:
| This phenomenon is why I personally get so angry at the license
| washing that these models are capable of for code: I put out a
| lot of code as open source... but it is GPL on purpose, as I want
| your code to be just as free as mine in exchange for getting to
| use mine. But, now, you're all "I want to build that for myself!"
| and so you ask an AI and just describe what my project does into
| the tool... and who is to say it isn't generating something "too
| close" to my code? Do you even check? If you yourself as a human
| had first looked at my code, you'd have to be VERY careful to not
| be accidentally infringing my code... and yet people pretend this
| AI is somehow not capable of IP theft?!
| grg0 wrote:
| "A modern Internet website with a scroll bar that isn't broken."
|
| I'll see myself out now.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Preach!
|
| How is it that my FF preference (something like 'Always show
| scrollbars') is regularly just ignored.
|
| I want my scrollbars! And I wat `em fat and in my UI's color
| scheme!
|
| And why the HELL would a web designer think this is a good
| idea. Maybe their beret and hipster pants are too tight?
|
| Thanks for being here for my rant. I owe you one :-)
| drob518 wrote:
| If you haven't read Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, I highly
| recommend it for addressing some of these issues. It's vintage
| now but all the arguments are still relevant. Lessig was one of
| the drivers of the Creative Commons licenses.
| system2 wrote:
| It is crazy. I tried the same prompts and got nearly identical
| images to the author. AI seems to be repeating itself with the
| same images without variations.
| exodust wrote:
| If you're handing out red cards for repetition, aren't you
| guilty of the same infringement? You repeated the exact same
| prompt, which is itself an obvious bait for AI to draw the pop-
| culture lookalike.
|
| I'm surprised by the comments here. When your prompt is so
| mind-numbingly simple, an obvious "dare" for AI to be a naughty
| little copyright infringer, can you blame it for dishing up the
| "big mac" you asked for while sitting in a fancy restaurant?
|
| Don't want Indiana Jones? Don't _ask_ for Indiana Jones!
| djoldman wrote:
| I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws.
|
| That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are
| absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting
| unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the
| creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you
| don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary
| party will assumedly not receive compensation for their creation
| and they'll never create.
|
| Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of
| time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than
| the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.
|
| There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create
| something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but
| won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the
| same for 1 year past death.
|
| For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal
| penalties, but that's a whole other subject.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| It is not about trademark laws. It is about where laws apply.
|
| If you torrent a movie right now, you'll be fined in many
| advanced countries.
|
| But a huge corporation led by a sociopath scrapes the entire
| internet and builds a product with other people's work ?
|
| Totally fine.
| genewitch wrote:
| Which huge corporation led by a sociopath? There's so many to
| choose from.
| noduerme wrote:
| The wickedest idea that social media run by sociopaths has
| implanted in the human psyche is the idea that anyone else
| would take advantage of immoral tactics if they had the
| means or could afford the payoffs.
| fx1994 wrote:
| It was always me and them. They are either "nobel" or just
| rich. me is the rest of peasants. We pay everything and we
| give everything to the rich ones. Thats it.
| avereveard wrote:
| This. It seem the situation is controversial now because of
| the beloved Studio Ghibli IP, but I want to see the venn
| diagram of people outrage at this, and the people clamoring
| for overbearing Disney chatachter protection when the
| copyright expired and siding with paloworld in the Nintendo
| lawsuit.
|
| It seem most of the discussion is emotionally loaded, and
| people lost the plot of both why copyright exists and what
| copyright protects and are twisting that to protect whatever
| media they like most.
|
| But one cannot pick and choose where laws apply, and then the
| better question would be how we plug the gap that let a
| multibilion Corp get away with distribution at scale and what
| derivative work and personal use mean in a image generation
| as a service world, and artist should be very careful in what
| their wishes are here, because I bet there's a lot of
| commission work edging on style transfer and personal use.
| csallen wrote:
| _> The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed
| copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation
| of intangible property._
|
| That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by
| people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much
| money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible
| "property" for as long as they can.
|
| And the chief strategic move these people have made is to
| convince the average person that ideas are in fact property.
| That the first person to think something and write it down
| rightfully "owns" that thought, and that others who express it
| or share it are not merely infringing copyright, they are
| "stealing."
|
| This plan has largely worked, and now the average person speaks
| and thinks in these terms, and feels it in their bones.
| the_other wrote:
| Philosophers were waaaay ahead of this game.
| specproc wrote:
| It's been a US-led project for the benefit of American
| corporations.
|
| If I was running the trade emergency room in any European
| state right now, I'd have "stop enforcing US copyright" up
| there next to "reciprocal tarrifs".
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Worked for china
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| In the context of when they want to borrow others' stuff.
| But then Chinese companies are _more_ than happy to take
| advantage of Western laws to defend their own IP. It's
| hypocrisy.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Your comment inspires me to write an essay titled "What's
| wrong with hypocrisy?" because it seems like no-one
| really cares about it anymore. It's like the concept
| itself has lost meaning. Hypocrisy a big, abstract word
| that has the audacity to refer to _other_ big abstract
| words like "character" and "virtue" and "fairness". Now
| many people accused of hypocrisy say "so what?". What's
| going on there? It has the feel of a situation where
| someone says your software has memory leaks, and you say
| "so?" not knowing what that even means. "Hypocrisy" and
| "memory leaks" share the notion of a characterization of
| a set of flaws that can and will show themselves in many
| disparate ways. Powerful signals to a specialist, and
| noise for a generalist. And not just noise, but a signal
| against the critic as an elitist snob that uses words and
| concepts no-one understands.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The worst part about this trend toward hypocrisy
| acceptance is that nobody cares when you point it out.
| This empowers the hypocrite to answer with "So what?"
| because they know they will face absolutely no
| consequences. In politics, business, and even personal
| life, most people have everything to gain and very little
| to lose*. And our current hyper-individualistic society
| has only exacerbated the issue. "Who cares if the people
| around me don't trust me? I'll just get what I need from
| some faceless computer system."
|
| * You actually have a lot to lose, but it's not tangible
| or very directly measurable, and the effects compile over
| a long time, so the results are not easy to see.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Yes, a lack of disincentive to hypocrisy and, in fact,
| considerable disincentive to pointing it out, seems to be
| the case. Why? From a utilitarian perspective, at the
| societal level hypocrisy undermines the "cooperate" Nash
| equilibrium; at the individual level, it undermines
| "conscience". The question we might ask is how did we
| lose conscience? If psychological egoism is the default
| "philsophy" of humans (and I think that it is, just as
| "autocracy" is the default governing system), then the
| better question is how did we get it and maintain it in
| the first place? In an ideal world you get to do _tests_
| , where one group's values are tested against another
| group with different values to see which group is
| stronger. An example of this is with war - WWII was
| liberalism vs fascism, and the Cold War was liberalism vs
| communism. We won both. So what happened? Could it be
| that liberalism collapses on its own when it's not
| measured against an alternative?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Unfortunately we have a bunch of copyright-friendly groups
| in EU, so this would only work in the "stop enforcing US
| copyright in retaliation" sense, but not likely in the
| "stop enforcing copyright because on the net, it's a scam"
| sense.
| econ wrote:
| >the average person speaks and thinks in these terms,
|
| (Trademarks aside) Even more surprising to me is how everyone
| seems concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if
| they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to
| create a profitable game for them.
|
| If they all go bankrupt today I won't lose any sleep over it.
|
| People also try to make a living selling bananas and apples.
| Should we create an elaborate scheme for them to make sure
| they survive? Their product is actually important to have.
| Why can't they own the exclusive right to sell bananas
| similarly? If anyone can just sell apples it would hurt their
| profit.
|
| It is long ago but that is how things use to work. We do
| still have taxi medallions in some places and all kinds of
| legalized monopolies like it.
|
| Perhaps there is some sector where it makes sense but I can't
| think of it.
|
| If you want to make a movie you can just do a crowd funder
| like Robbert space industry.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Even more surprising to me is how everyone seems
| concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if
| they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to
| create a profitable game for them.
|
| Do you want more games (movies, books...)? Then you want
| studios to make money in that type of game. Because and if
| they make money they have incentive to do so. Now if you
| are happy with the number and quality of free games a few
| hard core people who will do it even if they make nothing
| then you don't care. However games generally take a lot of
| effort to create and so by paying people to make them we
| can ensure people who want to actually have the time - as
| opposed want to but instead have to spend hours in a field
| farming for their food.
|
| Now it is true that games often do look alike and many are
| not worth making and such. However if you want more you
| need to ensure they make money so it is worth investing.
|
| We can debate how much they should make and how long
| copyright should be for. However you want them to make
| money so they make more.
| csallen wrote:
| Games:
|
| > _" On platforms like Steam, indie games constitute the
| vast majority of new titles. For instance, in 2021,
| approximately 98% of the 11,700 games released on Steam
| were from indie developers. This trend has continued,
| with indie games accounting for 99% of releases on gaming
| platforms between 2018 and 2023."_
|
| Written content:
|
| > _" Every year, traditional publishers release around
| half a million to a million new books in the U.S., but
| that number is dwarfed by the scale of independent
| writing online: WordPress users alone publish over 70
| million blog posts per month, Amazon sees over 1.7
| million self-published books annually, and platforms like
| Medium, Substack, and countless personal websites
| generate millions more articles and essays. While the
| average quality of traditional publishing remains high
| due to strict editorial standards, consumer behavior has
| shifted dramatically--people now spend far more time
| reading informal, self-published content online, from
| niche newsletters to Reddit posts, often favoring
| relevance, speed, and authenticity over polish. This
| shift has made the internet the dominant source of
| written content by volume and a major player in shaping
| public discourse."_
|
| Video content:
|
| > _" Today, the overwhelming majority of video content is
| produced not by Hollywood or television studios, but by
| individuals on the internet. YouTube alone sees over 500
| hours of video uploaded every minute--more than 260
| million hours per year--vastly outpacing the combined
| annual output of all major film studios and TV networks,
| which together produce only a fraction of that volume.
| Despite questions about quality, consumer habits have
| shifted dramatically: people now watch over 1 billion
| hours of YouTube content per day, and platforms like
| TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch are growing rapidly,
| especially among younger audiences. While Hollywood still
| commands attention with high-budget blockbusters and
| prestige series, user-generated content dominates the
| daily media diet in both time spent and engagement."_
| bluGill wrote:
| You know what dominates though: the big budget
| games/books/videos. Indie is sometimes really good, but a
| lot of it is horrible.
| csallen wrote:
| That's because the big budget creators are very good at
| business, which has four parts[1]: not just the product,
| but also the revenue model, the market, and distribution.
|
| Big budget studios are AMAZING at distribution. They blow
| indie devs out of the water, who focus almost all their
| effort on just product.
|
| Do big budget studios often make great games? Yes! But
| they often produce total garbage, too, just like indie
| devs. I think the biggest difference between them is
| distribution.
|
| [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-
| great-bu...
| jimmaswell wrote:
| We were close to your viewpoint being the popular one, but
| sadly many (most?) independent content creators are so
| overtaken by fear of AI that they've done a 180. The same
| people who learned by tracing references to sell fanart of a
| copyrighted franchise (not complaining, I spend thousands on
| such things) accuse AI of stealing when it glances at their
| own work. We're entering a new golden age of creative
| opportunity and they respond by switching sides to the
| philosophy of intellectual property championed by Disney and
| Oracle (except for those companies' ironic use of AI
| themselves..).
| csallen wrote:
| People aren't motivated by principle so much as they are by
| self interest.
| hansvm wrote:
| > we were close
|
| Maybe. In my microcosm even before big AI, 100% of my tech
| acquaintances were against IP laws, 0% of my art
| acquaintances were, and authors I know had varied opinions
| based on their other backgrounds.
|
| Artists do seem to have had a mindset shift. Previously
| they supported IP protection because it was "right" (or
| they'd at least concede that in practice it's not helping
| them personally), but with the AI boom most of them are
| pro-IP laws because of more visceral livelihood fears.
| egypturnash wrote:
| We would prefer a world where we can use the skills we have
| spent a lifetime honing without having to compete with some
| asshole taking everything we've shared and stuffing it into
| a machine that spits out soulless clones of our work
| without any acknowledgment of our existence.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| This could a be verbatim quote from a seamstress talking
| about looms.
| jakeydus wrote:
| You know, the more AI can do the more I understand the
| Luddites.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Yes. The Luddites had some pretty good ideas about
| resisting the centralization of profits into the hands of
| the people who owned the machines who took over their
| jobs, really. So did the French Revolution.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| There's also a moral issue at play: To safeguard the
| interests of a few publishers (sometimes the creators, but
| they can easily end up with a shitty deal) you remove
| freedoms to the entire population to copy the same idea.
|
| You need a central structure funded by everyone's taxes which
| enforce a contract almost nobody of the infringers has
| signed.
|
| That's appaling, I hope with this AI wave we'll get rid of
| copyright all together.
| kazinator wrote:
| New rule: you get to keep your belongings for 20 years and
| that's it. Then they are taken away. Every dollar you made
| twenty or more years ago, every asset you acquired, gone.
|
| That oughtta be enough to incentivize people to work and build
| their wealth.
|
| Anything more than that is unnecessary.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I think you mean "20 years after you die". That seems like a
| perfectly rational way to deal with people who want to be
| buried in their gold and jewels in a pyramid.
| kazinator wrote:
| OK, so you can have your dad's piano for 20 years after he
| dies, after that it's public property.
| umbra07 wrote:
| Some people would surprisingly agree with that.
| kazinator wrote:
| Well, yes; some people would agree with the stronger
| proposition of you not getting that piano, or not without
| paying some tax on it.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| We should never have accepted the term "intellectual
| property" at all, if this is the mindset it leads to.
| ars wrote:
| Intellectual property does not belong to you. The entire
| concept of "owning" intellectual property is a very recent
| thing.
|
| So how about we go back to how it used to be and just remove
| this entire concept.
|
| You can own things you can't own an idea.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| I disagree that you can own things, but I certainly concede
| IP as a good starting point.
| kazinator wrote:
| So you wouldn't mind if I dip my hands into the pockets
| of the clothing you are wearing and help myself to
| whatever cash bills I might find?
|
| Also, can you wash this not-my car I'm driving, that
| happens to be registered in my name?
|
| Let me know if you will be requiring compensation for
| not-your time and not-your effort.
|
| You will find the needed cleaning materials at the
| household goods store down the street. Just walk in, grab
| whatever you need, and walk out.
| kazinator wrote:
| Your copyrighted work just has to be an original
| expression, not derived from someone else's work. It
| doesn't have to contain original ideas.
|
| Patents are for ideas. Patents do in fact expire far faster
| than copyrights in the USA. The main problem with patents
| is patent trolling in the area of software patents.
| ars wrote:
| It would be a lot easier to defend copyright if it
| expired quicker.
| kazinator wrote:
| I used to be against copyright, but with the rise of scum
| like Altman, I'm going all in. Copyright should last
| forever, as long as the ownership is handed down through
| inheritance or other transactions and not assigned to the
| public domain.
| ars wrote:
| Why should someone be able to charge multiple times for
| the same thing?
|
| That entire concept is a legal fiction, and the
| compromise was to make it last only a limited time.
| awb wrote:
| So every year I go to a swap meet and try to exchange my
| "expiring" belongings for something similar to reset the
| clock? Or, they get taken away by force? By someone who has
| meticulous records of all my stuff?
|
| What problem are you trying to solve?
| noduerme wrote:
| You're conflating trademark with copyright.
|
| Regardless, it's not _just_ copyright laws that are at issue
| here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford
| 's - and integrating them into new works.
|
| So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI
| to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can
| use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I
| can imagine any court asking "how is this not simply laundering
| someone's likeness through a third party which claims to not
| have an image / filter / app / artist reproducing my client's
| likeness?"
|
| All seemingly complicated scams come down to a very basic,
| obvious, even primitive grift. Someone somewhere in a
| regulatory capacity is either fooled or paid into accepting
| that no crime was committed. It's just that simple. This,
| however, is so glaring that even a child could understand the
| illegality of it. I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood
| joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon
| Valley. I think there are legal grounds here to force all of
| these models to be taken offline.
|
| Additionally, "guardrails" that prevent 1:1 copies of film
| stills from being reprinted are clearly not only insufficient,
| they are _evidence_ that the pirates in this case seek to
| obscure the nature of their piracy. They are the evidence that
| generative AI is not much more than a copyright laundering
| scheme, and the obsession with these guardrails is evidence of
| conspiracy, not some kind of public good.
| planb wrote:
| > So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an
| AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I
| can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying
| him?
|
| No, you can't! But it shouldn't be the tool that prohibits
| this. You are not allowed to use existing images of Harrison
| Ford for your commercial and you also will be sued into
| oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse
| advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if
| an AI painted this for you?
| noduerme wrote:
| Well, precisely. What then is the AI company's
| justification for charging money to paint a picture of
| Harrison Ford to its users?
|
| The justification so far seems to have been loosely based
| on the idea that derivative artworks are protected as free
| expression. That argument loses currency if these are not
| considered derivative but more like highly compressed
| images in a novel, obfuscated compression format. Layers
| and layers of neurons holding a copy of Harrison Ford's
| face is novel, but it's hard to see why it's any different
| legally than running a JPEG of it through some filters and
| encoding it in base64. You can't just decode it and use it
| without attribution.
| planb wrote:
| > Well, precisely. What then is the AI company's
| justification for charging money to paint a picture of
| Harrison Ford to its users?
|
| Formulated this way, I see your point. I see the LLM as a
| tool, just like photoshop. From a legal standpoint, I
| even think you're right. But from a moral standpoint, my
| feeling is that it should even be okay for an artist to
| sell painted pictures of Harrison Ford. But not to sell
| the same image as posters on ebay. And now my argument
| falls apart. Thanks for leading my thoughts in this
| direction...
| noduerme wrote:
| You raise a really amazing point! One that should get
| more attention in these discussions on HN! I'm a painter
| in my spare time. I think it _is_ okay to sit down and
| paint a picture of Harrison Ford (on velvet, maybe), and
| sell it on Etsy or something if you want to. Before you
| accuse me of hypocrisy, let me stipulate: Either way, it
| would _not_ be ok for someone to buy that painting and
| use it in an ad campaign that insinuated that their soap
| had been endorsed by Harrison Ford. As an art director,
| it has obviously never been okay to ask someone to paint
| Harrison Ford and use that picture in a soap ad. I go
| through all kinds of hoops and do tons of checking on my
| artists ' work to make sure that it doesn't violate
| anyone else's IP, let alone anyone's human likeness.
|
| But that's all known. My argument for why me selling that
| painting is okay, and why an AI company with a neural
| network doing the same thing and selling it would _not_
| be okay, is a lot more subtle and goes to a question that
| I think has not been addressed properly: What 's the
| difference between _my neurons_ seeing a picture of
| Harrison Ford, and painting it, and _artificial neurons
| owned by a company_ doing the same thing? What if I
| _traced_ a photo of Ford and painted it, versus doing his
| face from memory?
|
| (As a side note, my friend in art school had an obsession
| with Jewel, the singer. He painted her dozens of times
| from memory. He was not an AI, just a really sweet guy).
|
| To answer why I think it's ok to paint Jewel or Ford, and
| sell your painting, I kind of have to fall back on three
| ideas:
|
| (1) Interpretation: You are not selling a picture of
| them, you're selling _your personal take on your
| experience of them_. My experience of watching Indiana
| Jones movies as a kid and then making a painting is not
| the same thing as holding a compressed JPEG file in my
| head, to the degree that my own cognitive experience has
| significantly changed my perceptions in ways that will
| come out in the final artwork, enough to allow for
| whatever I paint to be based on some kind of personal
| evolution. The item for sale is not a picture of Harrison
| Ford, it 's _my feelings about Harrison Ford_.
|
| (2) Human-centrism: That my neurons are not 1:1 copies of
| everything I've witnessed. Human brains aren't simply
| compression algorithms the way LLMs or diffusers are. AI
| doesn't bring cognitive experience to its replication of
| art, and if it seems to do so, we have to ask whether
| that isn't just a simulacrum of multiple styles it stole
| from other places laid over the art it's being asked to
| produce. There's an anti-human argument to be made that
| _we_ do the exact same thing when we paint Indiana Jones
| after being exposed to Picasso. But here 's a thought:
| _we are not a model_. Or rather, _each of us is a model_.
| Buying my picture of Indiana Jones is a lot like buying
| _my model_ and a lot less like buying a platonic picture
| of Harrison Ford.
|
| (3) Tools, as you brought up. The more primitive the
| tools used, the more difficult we can prove it to be to
| truly _copy_ something. It takes a year to make 4 seconds
| of animation, it takes an AI no time at all to copy it...
| one can prove by some function of work times effort that
| an artwork is, at least, a product of one 's own if not
| completely original.
|
| I'm throwing these things out here as a bit of a
| challenge to the HN community, because I think these are
| attributes that have been under-discussed in terms of the
| difference between AI-generated artwork and human art
| (and possibly a starting point for a human-centric way of
| understanding the difference).
|
| I'm really glad you made me think about this and raised
| the point!
|
| _[edit] Upon re-reading, I think points 1 and 2 are
| mostly congruent. Thanks for your patience._
| planb wrote:
| Thank you too, this discussion really helped me in
| getting a more nuanced view on this whole topic. I still
| think OpenAI should be allowed to generate these kind of
| images, but just from of a selfish "I want to use this to
| generate labels for my (uncommercial) home brew
| beers"-perspective. I surely better understand the
| counterpoints now.
| noduerme wrote:
| I think it's an amazing tool as a starting point or a way
| to get ideas. Our small ad agency's policy has always
| been to research the hell out of something... like, if
| you're asked to do a logo for someone running for state
| Senate, go read the history of the state senate since
| 1846, and look up all the things everyone used, and start
| brainstorming art ideas that have multiple layers of
| meaning that work with your candidate's message. But AI
| makes it super easy to get a nice looking starting point
| and then use your ideas to iterate on top of that.
|
| I'm a bit of a home moonshiner, too, so love that you're
| coming up with labels and using these tools to help out!
| If I could offer one piece of advice, whether for writing
| prompts or making your own final art, it would be:
| History is so rich with visual ideas you can riff from.
| The history of beer and wine bottles itself is
| unbelievable. If aliens came here a thousand years after
| we're gone, and all that was left were liquor labels,
| they could understand most of our culture. The LLMs
| always go to the most obvious thing, unless you tell them
| specifically otherwise. Use the tool but also get funky
| and mix up the ideas you love the most, adding your own
| flavor. Just like being a brewer or a chef. That's the
| essence of being an artist, and making something that at
| the end of the day is unique and new. Love it. Send me a
| beer please.
| brookst wrote:
| I like your formulation but I find point 1 unconvincing.
| Does it still hold if you paint from a reference image
| beside the easel? Or projected into the canvas? Or if
| it's not a "real" painter but a low-wage laborer? Two of
| them side by side? A hundred of them?
|
| Where I'm going is I don't think it makes sense for the
| moral / legal acceptability of a in image to depend on
| the mechanical means which created it. I think we have to
| judge based on the image itself. If the human-generated
| version and AI-generated version both show the same level
| of interpretation when viewed, I don't think point 1
| supports treating them differently.
|
| And, as you say, point 2 is mostly congruent, but I have
| to point out that LLMs are not merely compressed versions
| of the training material, but instead generalized
| learnings based on the training data.
|
| ML "neurons" may function differently than our own, and
| transformer architecture is likely different from the way
| we think, but the learning of generalized patterns plus
| details sufficient to reconstitute specific instances
| seems pretty similar.
|
| Think about painting Indiana Jones; I'll bet you could
| paint the handle of the whip in great detail. But it's
| likely that's because you remember a specific image of
| _his_ whip handle; it's because you know what whip
| handles look like in general. ML models work similarly
| (at some level of abstraction).
|
| I'm left unconvinced that there is anything substantially
| different about human and AI generated art, and also that
| we can only judge IP position of either based on the work
| itself.
| stavros wrote:
| Because I can pay a painter to paint me a picture of
| Harrison Ford, I just can't then use that to sell things.
| jdietrich wrote:
| It's reasonably well established that large neural
| networks don't contain copies of the training data,
| therefore their outputs can't be considered copies of
| anything. The model might contain a _conceptual
| representation_ of Harrison Ford 's face, but that's very
| different to a verbatim representation of a particular
| copyrighted image of Harrison Ford. Model weights aren't
| copyrightable; it's plausible that model outputs aren't
| copyrightable, but there are some fairly complicated
| arguments around authorship. Training an AI model on
| copyrighted work is highly likely to be fair use under US
| law, but plausibly isn't fair dealing under British law
| or a permitted use under Article 5 of the EU Copyright
| and Information Society Directive.
|
| All of that is entirely separate from trademark law,
| which would prevent you from using any representation of
| a trademarked character unless e.g. you can reasonably
| argue that you are engaged in parody.
| riskable wrote:
| Your argument is valid but it's mostly irrelevant from a
| copyright perspective.
|
| If ChatGPT generates an image of Indiana Jones and
| distributes it to an end user that is precisely _one_
| violation of copyright. A violation that no one but
| ChatGPT and that end user will know about. From a legal
| perspective, it 's the equivalent of taking a screenshot
| of an Indiana Jones DVD and sending it to a friend.
|
| ChatGPT can hold within its memory every copyrighted
| thing that exists and that would not violate anyone's
| copyright. What _does_ violate someone 's copyright is
| when an exact replica or easily-identifiable derivative
| work is actually _distributed_ to people.
|
| Realistically, OpenAI shouldn't be worried about someone
| generating an image of Indiana Jones using their tools.
| It's the _end user_ that ultimately needs to be held
| responsible for how that image gets used after-the-fact.
|
| It is perfectly legitimate to capture or generate images
| of Indiana Jones for your own personal use. For example,
| if you wanted to generate a parody you would need those
| copyrighted images to do so (the copyright needs to exist
| before you can parody it).
|
| If I were Nintendo, Disney, etc I wouldn't be bothered by
| ChatGPT generating things resembling of my IP. At worst
| someone will use them commercially and they can be sued
| for that. More likely, such generated images will only
| _enhance_ their IP by keeping it active in the minds of
| people everywhere.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| > you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you
| paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so
| why should it be any different if an AI painted this for
| you?
|
| If the AI prompt was "produce a picture of Micky Mouse",
| I'd agree with you.
|
| The creators of AI claim their product produces computer-
| generated images, i.e. generated/created by the computer.
| Instead it's producing a picture of a real actual person.
|
| If I contract an artist to produce a picture of a person
| from their imagination, i.e. not a real person, and they
| produce a picture of Harrison Ford, then yeah I'd say
| that's on the artist.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Mickey Mouse is a bad example because he's now in the
| public domain, including Color images.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Human appearance does not have enough dimensions to make
| likeness a viable thing to protect; I don't see how you could
| do that without say banning Elvis impersonators.
|
| That said:
|
| > I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause
| against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley.
|
| If you're framing the sides like that, it's pretty clear
| which I'm on. :)
| noduerme wrote:
| Interesting you should bring that up:
|
| https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/1517ldjmv
|
| Loads of lawsuits have been filed by celebrities and their
| estates over the unauthorized use of their likeness. And in
| fact, in 2022, Las Vegas banned Elvis impersonators from
| performing weddings after a threat from the Presley
| estate's licensing company:
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10872855/Elvis-
| imag...
|
| But there are also a couple key differences between putting
| on a costume and acting like Elvis, and using a picture of
| Elvis to sell soap.
|
| One is that a personal artistic performance could be
| construed as pastiche or parody. But even more importantly,
| if there's a financial incentive involved in doing that
| performance, the financial incentive has to be aligned more
| with the parody than with drawing an association to the
| original. In other words, dressing up as Elvis as a joke or
| an act, or even to sing a song and get paid to perform a
| wedding is one thing if it's a prank, it's another thing if
| it's a profession, and yet another thing if it's a mass-
| marketing advertisement that intends for people to
| seriously believe that Elvis endorsed this soap.
| hinkley wrote:
| I can remember two ad campaigns with an Elvis
| impersonator, and they used multiple people in both of
| them. I think we can safely assume that if you represent
| multiple people as a specific public figure, that a
| reasonable person must assume that none of them are in
| fact that person.
|
| Now of course that leaves out concerns over how much of
| advertisement is making money off of unreasonable people,
| which is a concern Congress occasionally pays attention
| to.
| IanCal wrote:
| > This, however, is so glaring that even a child could
| understand the illegality of it
|
| If you have to explain "laundering someone's likeness" to
| them maybe not, I think it's a frankly bizarre phrase.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's
| - and integrating them into new works.
|
| The thing is though, there is also a human _requesting that_.
| The prompt was chosen specifically to get that result on
| purpose.
|
| The corporate systems are trying to prevent this, but if you
| use any of the local models, you don't even have to be coy.
| Ask it for "photo of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones" and what
| do you expect? That's what it's _supposed_ to do. It does
| what you tell it to do. If you turn your steering wheel to
| the left, the car goes to the left. It 's just a machine. The
| driver is the one choosing where to go.
| ikanreed wrote:
| No, I think that's unfair. I, as a user, could very
| reasonably want a parody or knock-off of Indiana Jones. I
| could want the spelunky protagonist. It's hard to argue
| that certain prompts the author put into this could be read
| any other way. But why does Nintendo get a monopoly on
| plumbers with red hats?
|
| The way AI is coded and trained pushes it constantly
| towards a bland-predictable mean, but it doesn't HAVE to be
| that way.
| RataNova wrote:
| While I think the laws are broken, I also get why companies
| fight so hard to defend their IP: it is valuable, and they've
| built empires around it. But at some point, we have to ask: are
| we preserving culture or just hoarding it?
| seadan83 wrote:
| Missing is why laws fight so hard too, missing the opposite
| of what we have (in the west), namely blatant and rampant
| piracy. The other extreme is really bad, creators of any type
| pirated by organized crime. There was no video game nor movie
| market in eastern Europe for example, can't compete against
| large scale piracy.
|
| Which is to say, preservation without awareness of the threat
| will look like hoarding. A secondary question is to what
| extent is that threat real? Without seeing what true rampant
| piracy looks like, I think it would be easy to be ignorant of
| the threat.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Trademarks are very different from copyrights. In general, they
| never expire as long as the fees are paid in the region, and
| products bearing the mark are still manufactured. Note, legal
| firms will usually advise people that one can't camp on
| Trademarks like other areas of IP law.
|
| For example, Aspirin is known as an adult dose of
| acetylsalicylic acid by almost every consumer, and is
| Trademarked to prevent some clandestine chemist in their garage
| making a similarly branded harmful/ineffective substance that
| damages the Goodwill Bayer earned with customers over decades
| of business.
|
| Despite popular entertainment folklore, sustainable businesses
| actually want consumer goodwill associated with their products
| and services.
|
| While I agree in many WIPO countries copyright law has
| essentially degenerated into monetized censorship by removing
| the proof of fiscal damages criteria (like selling works you
| don't own.) However, Trademarks ensure your corporate mark or
| product name is not hijacked in local Markets for questionable
| purposes.
|
| Every castle needs a moat, but I do kind of want to know more
| about the presidential "Tesler". lol =)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFZUB1eJb34
| jl6 wrote:
| > There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create
| something if they're protected for 95 years after their death
| but won't if it's 94 years.
|
| I'm sure you're right for individual authors who are driven by
| a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios,
| the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the
| movie as an asset.
|
| If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it's
| slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for
| 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that
| generates revenue for 20 years.
|
| The value of the asset is in turn directly linked to how much
| the studio is willing to pay for that asset. They will invest
| more money in a film they can milk for 120 years than one that
| goes public domain after 20.
|
| Would studios be willing to invest $200m+ in movie projects if
| their revenue was curtailed by a shorter copyright term? I
| don't know. Probably yes, if we were talking about 120->70. But
| 120->20? Maybe not.
|
| A dramatic shortening of copyright terms is something of a
| referendum on whether we want big-budget IP to exist.
|
| In a world of 20 year copyright, we would probably still have
| the LOTR books, but we probably wouldn't have the LOTR movies.
| pegasus wrote:
| Seems to me most of that inflated budget is needed for the
| entertainment role of films, not the art in them, which a low
| budget can often stimulate rather than inhibit. In which case
| nothing of importance would be lost by a drastic shortening
| of copyright terms.
| jpc0 wrote:
| You are putting a pretty blatant cap on what constitutes
| "art"...
| londons_explore wrote:
| > If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it's
| slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue
| for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset
| that generates revenue for 20 years
|
| Due to the fairy high cost of capital right now, pretty much
| anything more than 5 years away is irrelevant. 10 years max,
| even for insanely high returns on investment.
| benwad wrote:
| The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Peter Jackson's LOTR
| movies released in 2001, made $887 million in its original
| theatrical run (on a $93 million budget). It would absolutely
| still have been made if copyright was only 20 years. And now
| it would be in the public domain!
| jl6 wrote:
| The success that we can now measure through hindsight
| wasn't assured at the time of greenlighting the film. They
| took a huge gamble:
|
| https://variety.com/2021/film/news/lord-of-the-rings-
| peter-j...
|
| It would have been an even bigger gamble if they weren't
| able to bank on any long term revenue (I'm certain Netflix
| continues to pay for the rights to stream the trilogy after
| 2021).
| barrkel wrote:
| This argument works against you. The probability of a
| long tail of revenue is even less likely than a major
| hit, so it necessarily has less weight in any decision to
| swing for the fences.
|
| Producers don't invest in movies for hypothetical
| revenues in 20 years time. If it doesn't pay off soon
| after release, it's written off as a loss. Revenues in
| 100 years time are completely irrelevant.
| jl6 wrote:
| Actually I think long tail revenue is quite well
| correlated with a property being a hit. Netflix paid
| $500m for the rights to Seinfeld 20 years after the show
| ended. Star Wars is still huge, nearly 50 years after the
| release of the original. Disney in general has ruthlessly
| mined its back catalog; they just printed another $700m
| from a Lion King prequel, whose value lay largely in the
| good will still hanging over from the original, which
| they still own, and which is still absolutely a valuable
| asset despite being 30 years old. Back catalogs are huge
| deals. Amazon paid $8bn for MGM to boost its Prime Video
| content library. Streaming has opened up long tail
| revenue opportunities beyond the box office that never
| existed before.
| barrkel wrote:
| Are the people better off because of these properties?
| What about the counterfactual, where there are more Star
| Wars stories by more varied producers?
|
| That they are valuable speaks to market inefficiency.
| Where is the consumer surplus?
|
| Seinfeld wasn't greenlit due to Netflix streaming rights.
| Better Lion King adaptations might have been made
| instead.
| barrkel wrote:
| If movies had a payoff curve like rents, this would be more
| true, but they're cultural artifacts that decay in relevance
| precipitously after release, and more permanently after a few
| decades, where they become "dated", outside a few classics.
| stavros wrote:
| OK? So we wouldn't have $100m movies, the vast majority of
| which are forgotten about in a few months. I don't think a
| $100m movie is ten times better than a $10m one, so I think
| I'd be fine with movies with much smaller budgets, if they
| meant that LotR (the books) are now in the public domain for
| everyone to enjoy.
| legulere wrote:
| This line of reasoning doesn't make sense for retroactive
| lengthening of copyright though, as the author is not gaining
| anything from that anymore.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it's
| slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue
| for 119 years
|
| Movies for instance make most of their revenue in the 2 week
| following their release in theater. Beyond, peoole who wanted
| to see it had already seen it and the others don't care.
|
| I'd argue it's similar for other art form, even for music.
| The gain at the very end of the copyright lifetime is
| extremely marginal and doesn't influence spending decision,
| which is mostly measured on a return basis of at most 10
| years.
| johanvts wrote:
| For movies in particular the tail is very thin. Only very few
| 50 year old movies are ever watched. Was any commercial movie
| ever financed without a view to making a profit in the box
| office/initial release?
| lupusreal wrote:
| With books it's even worse. Movies might get a trickle of
| revenue from TV licensing but once a book is out of print
| (which usually happens very quickly, and most never go into
| print again), that's it. No more revenue from that book, it
| continues to circulate in libraries and used bookstores but
| the author and publisher gets nothing from that.
| techpression wrote:
| According to Matt Damon (in one of many interviews) a lot
| of movies were produced with the second revenue stream
| (vhs/dvd) being part of the calculations, that is why we
| now get a lot less variety and alternative movies made,
| that second revenue stream doesn't exist any more (I assume
| streaming pays very little in comparison).
| bluGill wrote:
| True, but how much of that second stream exists after say
| 5 years? For most movies it is zero - they aren't
| pressing the DVD anymore and all stores that once had no
| longer do (except for second hand stores which don't give
| money to the studio)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it's
| slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue
| for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset
| that generates revenue for 20 years.
|
| Not so, because of net present value.
|
| The return from investing in normal stocks is ~10%/year,
| which is to say ~670% over 20 years, because of compounding
| interest. Another way of saying this is that $1 in 20 years
| is worth ~$0.15 today. A dollar in 30 years is worth ~$0.05
| today. A dollar in 40 years is worth ~$0.02 today. As a
| result, if a thing generates the same number of dollars every
| year, the net present value of the first 20 years is
| significantly more than the net present value of all the
| years from 20-120 combined, because money now or soon from
| now is worth so much more than money a long time from now.
| And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same
| every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.
|
| The reason corporations lobby for copyright term extensions
| isn't that they care one bit about extended terms for new
| works. It's because they don't want the works from decades
| ago to enter the public domain _now_ , and they're lobbying
| to make the terms longer _retroactively_. But all of those
| works were already created and the original terms were
| sufficient incentive to cause them to be.
| jl6 wrote:
| > And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the
| same every year forever, when in practice it declines over
| time.
|
| For the crown jewel IP that the studios are most interested
| in protecting, the opposite of this assumption is true.
| Star Wars, for example, is making more money than ever.
| Streaming revenues will probably invalidate that assumption
| for an even wider pool of back catalog properties.
| riskable wrote:
| If Star Wars were in the public domain now it would be
| making even _more_ money. Money that would go into the
| general economy and not just into a single studio.
| thurn wrote:
| Also copyright duration when Star Wars was created was a
| maximum of 56 years, and obviously George Lucas felt that
| was sufficient incentive to create it!
| tpmoney wrote:
| I wonder if there is value in splitting copyright into
| two parts and keeping a longer duration on the copies of
| the original work, but shortening the duration on the
| concepts in that work. That is, allow an author / studio
| to retain a long duration ownership of the original movie
| or story, so no one else can just start distributing
| copies of their VHS tapes after a few years. But at the
| same time, after 10 or 20 years other people can start
| making new Star Wars universe movies and books without
| licensing it from the original artist/author. If the
| original was good enough, then the rights to be the sole
| distributor of that original material should be plenty
| worthwhile, and in the mean time, just in time for the
| generational "nostalgia bump" a whole new set of related
| properties can come out, reinvigorating interest in the
| original.
|
| Maybe even some sort of gradual opening of the IP, where
| after say 10 years, broad categories are opened (think
| things like "the Jedi" or "the Empire" or "Endor"), but
| specific characters and their representations aren't (so
| no Darth Vader or Luke Skywalkers), then after 20 years
| you open the characters themselves but only derivative
| works. And then finally after 30 years or so you open the
| originals as well for things like translations or "de-
| specialized" editions or what have you. Then finally 50
| years puts the raw originals in the public domain as
| well.
| fashion-at-cost wrote:
| Your analysis misses the incredibly important caveat that
| revenue rises with inflation - or sometimes even faster.
|
| 50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue.
| Today, it's $25. That's a 50x increase... a dollar in 50
| years might be worth $0.02 today, but a movie ticket in 50
| years is worth about a movie ticket today.
| dcow wrote:
| And surprise movies are a rip off and people have stopped
| going.
| fashion-at-cost wrote:
| Plenty of crowds at my local theaters.
| m000 wrote:
| > I'm sure you're right for individual authors who are driven
| by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large
| studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the
| value of the movie as an asset.
|
| That would be fine, if the studios didn't want to have it
| both ways. They want to retain full copyright control over
| their "asset", but they also use Hollywood Accounting [1] to
| both avoid paying taxes and cheat contributors that have
| profit-sharing agreements.
|
| If studios declare that they made a loss on producing and
| releasing something to get a tax break, the copyright term
| for that work should be reduced to 10 years tops.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
| yencabulator wrote:
| Next, they'd switch to from Hollywood Accounting to
| Oilfield Accounting. Oh _that_ wellhead is actually owned
| by this other company over there, we just purchased their
| product at a fair market rate while they were still in
| business, but now it seems that other company is going
| bankrupt and cannot do the environmental cleanup to even
| seal the wellhead, much less remove it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| IIRC, of works that bring in any money to their creators, the
| vast majority is returned, for almost all works, in the first
| handful of years after creation. Sure. the big names you know
| have value longer, but those are a miniscule fraction of
| works.
|
| Make copyright last for a fixed term of 25 years with
| optional 10-year renewals up to 95 years on an escalating fee
| schedule (say, $100k for the first decade and doubling every
| subsequent decade) and people--and studios--would have
| essentially the same incentive to create as they do now,
| _and_ most works would get into the public domain far sooner.
|
| Probably be fewer entirely lost works, as well, if you had
| firmer deposit requirements for works with extended
| copyrights (using the revenue from the extensions to fund
| preservation) with other works entering the public domain
| soon enough that they were less likely to be lost before that
| happened.
| ghaff wrote:
| You're thinking of copyright law, not trademark law. Which
| serves a different function. If you're going to critique
| something it's useful to get your facts right.
| jpc0 wrote:
| You are missing a bunch of edge cases, and the law is all about
| edge cases.
|
| An artist who works professionally has family members, family
| members who are dependent on them.
|
| If they pass young, become popular just before they pass and
| their extremely popular works are now public domain. Their
| family sees nothing from their work, that is absolutely being
| commercialized ( publishing and creation generally spawns two
| seperate copyrights).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| GP's not missing those edge cases; GP recognizes those edge
| cases are themselves a product of IP laws.
|
| Those laws are effectively attempting to make information
| behave as physical objects, by giving them simulated "mass"
| through a rent-seeking structure. The case you describe is
| where this simulated physical substrate stops behaving like
| physical substrate, and choice was made to paper over that
| with extra rules, so that family can inherit and profit from
| IP of a dead creator, much like they would inherit physical
| products of a dead craftsman and profit from selling them.
|
| It's a valid question whether or not this is taking things
| too far, just for the sake of making information conform to
| rules of markets for physical goods.
| Matumio wrote:
| You seem to talk about fairness. Copyright law isn't supposed
| to be fair, it's supposed to benefit society. On one side you
| have the interest of the public to make use of already
| created work. On the other side is the financial incentive to
| create such work in the first place.
|
| So the question to ask is whether the artist would have
| created the work and published it, even knowing that it isn't
| an insurance to their family in case of their early death.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know how much time you've spent on task scheduling
| or public strategy, but minmaxing of The Public Good versus
| the private benefit of art is, in fact, a question of
| fairness. It's a compromise to give both parties as much of
| what they want or need as possible.
| anhner wrote:
| If copyright law is reduced to say, 20 years from the date of
| creation (PLENTY of time for the author to make money), then
| it's irrelevant if he dies young or lives until 100.
| jpc0 wrote:
| There we stand in agreement. Current copyright law and how
| it is governed is horrible.
|
| What most people propose is equally bad and will never get
| traction with lawmakers.
|
| Returning to what came before makes a ton of sense. Just
| make it X number of years and let's debate X for a while to
| get a decent number.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Il not sure IP should be used as a life insurance, there's
| already many public and private ideas tools for that.
|
| Also it seems you assume inheritance is a good think. Most
| people do think the same on a personal level, however when we
| observes the effect on a society the outcome is concentration
| of wealth on a minority and barriers for wealth hand change
| === barriers for "American dream".
| IanCal wrote:
| The weirdness there is tying it to someone's life.
| hinkley wrote:
| For writing many people only become popular after they are
| dead.
|
| I heard this explained once as the art in some writing is
| explaining how people feel in a situation that is still too
| new for many to want to pay to have it illustrated to them.
| But once the newness has passed, and people understand or
| want to understand, then they enjoy reading about it.
|
| As a personal example, I could enjoy movies about unrequited
| love before and long after I experienced it firsthand, but
| not during or for years after. People may not yet have
| settled feelings about an event until afterward, and not be
| willing to "pick at the scab".
|
| The other, more statistical explanation is that it just takes
| a lot of attempts to capture an idea or feeling and a longer
| window of time represents more opportunities to hit upon a
| winning formula. So it's easier to capture a time and place
| afterward than during.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws.
|
| Really? Because there are a lot of very stupid laws out there
| that should absolutely be broken, regularly, flagrantly, by as
| many people as possible for the sake of making enforcement
| completely null and pointless. Why write in neutered corporate-
| speak while commenting on a casual comment thread while also
| (correctly) pointing out the absurdity of certain laws.
| Ntrails wrote:
| I honestly don't see why anyone who isn't JK Rowling should be
| allowed to coopt her world. I probably feel even more strongly
| for worlds/characters I like.
|
| Why am I wrong?
| raytopia wrote:
| Trademark isn't copyright, those are two different things.
| Trademarks can be renewed roughly every 10 years [1] until the
| end of time and are about protecting a brand. Now copyright law
| lasts for "author plus 70 years. For anonymous works,
| pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, the copyright term
| is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years
| from creation, whichever comes first." [2]
|
| Is copyright too long? Yes. Is it only that long to protect
| large media companies? Yes. But I would argue that AI companies
| are pushing the limits of fair use if not violating fair use,
| which is used as a affirmative defense by the way meaning that
| AI companies have to go to court to argue what they are doing
| is okay. They don't just get to wave their hands and say
| everything is okay because what we're doing is fair use and we
| get to scrape the world's entire creative output for our own
| profit.
|
| [1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/trademark-
| faqs#...
|
| [2] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-
| exhibit/lifecycl...
| computerphage wrote:
| Trademark isn't the same as Registered Trademark either,
| while we're at it
| thayne wrote:
| I'd go further and say 10 years from time of creation is
| probably sufficient.
|
| If the work is popular it will make plenty of money in that
| time. If it isn't popular, it probably won't make much more
| money after that.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create
| something if they're protected for 95 years after their death
| but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was
| the same for 1 year past death.
|
| I think life of creator + some reasonable approximation of
| family members life expectancy would make sense. Content
| creators do create to ensure their family's security in some
| cases, I would guess.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| this reminds me of the time I tried to use a prepaid lawyer to
| research some copyright issues
|
| they went down the rabbit hole on trademark laws, which are not
| only _not_ copyright related, they are an entirely different
| federal agency at the Patent Office
|
| gave me a giggle and the last time I used cheapo prepaid
| lawyers
| capnrefsmmat wrote:
| For what it's worth, this is a uniquely American view of
| copyright:
|
| > The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed
| copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation
| of intangible property.
|
| In Europe, particularly France, copyright arose for a very
| different reason: to protect an author's moral rights as the
| creator of the work. It was seen as immoral to allow someone's
| work -- their intellectual offspring -- to be meddled with by
| others without their permission. Your work represents you and
| your reputation, and for others to redistribute it is an insult
| to your dignity.
|
| That is why copyrights in Europe started with much longer
| durations than they did in the United States, and the US has
| gradually caught up. It is not entirely a Disney effect, but a
| fundamental difference in the purpose of copyright.
| djoldman wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective, and yes wholly foreign to
| my very American economics influenced background.
|
| Are the origins the same when looking at other intellectual
| property like patents?
|
| How did they deal with quoting and/or critiquing other's
| ideas? Did they allow limited quotation? What about parody
| and satire?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I condone and endorse breaking copyright laws.
| fractallyte wrote:
| _> I don't know...the actual inspirations for Indiana Jones, like
| Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard 's novels, "King Solomon's
| Mines", and the real life Roy Chapman Andrews, who led
| expeditions to Mongolia and China in the 1920s and wore a
| fedora._
|
| The _actual_ inspiration for Indy was protagonist Harry Steele
| from the movie The Secret of the Incas (1954). Filmed on location
| in Cusco and Machu Picchu, before they became popular tourist
| destinations, the movie also had scenes and elements that made it
| into Raiders of the Lost Ark.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_the_Incas
|
| The movie's available on YouTube!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TS7Fabyolw
|
| A lot more info:
| http://www.theraider.net/information/influences/secret_of_in...
|
| (And listen out for the astonishing voice of Yma Sumac!)
| blincoln wrote:
| Definitely a missed opportunity that the article didn't discuss
| that obviously-derivative borrowing has been happening a lot
| longer than ML image generation has been around. And that
| borrowing is OK! Indiana Jones' appearance is very obviously
| based directly on Charlton Heston's character in Secret of the
| Incas, but the Spielberg/Lucas films are objectively better in
| every way than that source material.
| flessner wrote:
| Everyone is talking about theft - I get it, but there's a more
| subtler point being made here.
|
| Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly
| new. Everything is simply a blend of prior work. I am not saying
| that this doesn't have economic value, but it means these AI
| models are closer to lossy compression algorithms than they are
| to AGI.
|
| The following quote by Sam Altman from about 5 years ago is
| interesting.
|
| "We have made a soft promise to investors that once we build this
| sort-of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to
| figure out a way to generate an investment return."
|
| That's a statement I wouldn't even dream about making today.
| jedimastert wrote:
| The problem with generating genuinely new art is it requires
| "inputs" that aren't art. It's requires life experiences.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that
| you may be mistaken.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Oliver Cromwell, a letter to the General Assembly of the
| Church of Scotland, 3 August 1650
| bbor wrote:
| Disregarding the (common!) assumption that AGI will consist of
| one monolithic LLM instead of dozens of specialized ones, I
| think your comment fails to invoke an accurate, consistent
| picture of creativity/"truly new" cognition.
|
| To borrow Chomsky's framework: what makes humans unique and
| special is our ability to produce an infinite range of outputs
| that nonetheless conform to a set of linguistic rules. When
| viewed in this light, human creativity necessarily depends on
| the "linguistic rules" part of that; without a framework of
| meaning to work within, we would just be generating entropy,
| not meaningful expressions.
|
| Obviously this applies most directly to external language, but
| I hope it's clear how it indirectly applies to internal
| cognition and--as we're discussing here--visual art.
|
| _TL;DR:_ LLMs are definitely creative, otherwise they wouldn
| 't be able to produce semantically-meaningful, context-
| appropriate language in the first place. For a more empirical
| argument, just ask yourself how a machine that can generate a
| poem or illustration depicting [CHARACTER_X] in [PLACE_Y] doing
| [ACTIVITY_Z] in [STYLE_S] without being creative!
|
| [1] Covered in the famous Chomsky v. Foucault debate, for the
| curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
| Peritract wrote:
| > a machine that can generate a poem or illustration
| depicting [CHARACTER_X] in [PLACE_Y] doing [ACTIVITY_Z] in
| [STYLE_S] without being creative
|
| Your example disproves itself; that's a madlib. It's not
| creative, it's just rolling the dice and filling in the
| blanks. Complex die and complex blanks are a difference of
| degree only, not creativity.
| bbor wrote:
| It's not filling in the blanks that's impressive, it's
| meaningfully combining them all into an objectively unique
| narrative, building upon those blanks at length.
|
| Definitions are always up for debate on instrumental
| grounds, but I'm dubious of any definition of "creative"
| that excludes truly unique yet meaningful artifacts. The
| only thing past that is ineffable stuff, which is
| inherently not very helpful for scientific discussion.
| flessner wrote:
| This may not be apparent to an english speaker as the
| language has a rather fixed set of words, but in German,
| where creating new words is common, the lack of linguistic
| creativity is obvious.
|
| As an example, let's talk about "vibe coding" - It's a new
| term describing heavy LLM usage in programming, usually
| associated with Generation Z.
|
| If I am asking an LLM to generate a German translation for
| "vibe coder" it comes up with the neutral "Vibe-
| Programmierer". When asking it to be more creative it came up
| with "Schwingungsschmied" ("vibration smith"?) - What?
|
| I personally came up with the following words:
|
| * Gefuhlsprogrammierer ("A programmer, that focuses on
| intuition and feeling.")
|
| * Freischnauzeprogrammierer ("Free-mouthed programmer -
| highlighting straightforwardness and the creative expression
| of vibe coding." - colloquial)
|
| Interesstingly, LLMs can describe both these terms, they just
| can't create them naturally. I tested this on all major LLMs
| and the results were similar. Generating a picture of a "vibe
| coder" also highlights more of a moody atmosphere instead of
| the Generation Z aspects that are associated with it on
| social media nowadays.
| nearbuy wrote:
| > Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly
| new.
|
| How could you possibly know this?
|
| Is this falsifiable? Is there anything we could ask it to draw
| where you wouldn't just claim it must be copying some image in
| its training data?
| mjburgess wrote:
| Novelty in one medium arises from novelty in others, shifts
| to the external environment.
|
| We got brass bands with brass instruments, synth music from
| synths.
|
| We know therefore, necessarily, that they can be nothing
| novel from an LLM -- it has no live access to novel
| developments in the broader environment. If synths were
| invented after its training, it could never produce synth
| music (and so on).
|
| The claim here is trivially falsifiable, and so obviously so
| that credulous fans of this technology bake it in to their
| misunderstanding of novelty itself: have an LLM produce
| content on developments which had yet to take place at the
| time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.
|
| Yet an artist which paints with a new kind of black pigment
| can, trivially so.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > arises from novelty in others, shifts to the external
| environment
|
| > Everything is simply a blend of prior work.
|
| I generally consider these two to be the same thing. If
| novelty is based on something else, then it's highly
| derivative and its novelty is very questionable.
|
| A quantum random number generator is far more novel than
| the average human artist.
|
| > have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet
| to take place at the time of its training. It obviously
| cannot do this.
|
| Put someone in jail for the last 15 years, and ask them to
| make a smartphone. They obviously cannot do it either.
| mjburgess wrote:
| So if your point is an LLM is something like a person
| kept in a coma inside solitary confinement -- sure? But I
| don't believe that's where we set the bar for art: we
| arent employing comatose inmates to do anything.
|
| > I generally consider these two to be the same thing.
|
| Sure words themselves bend and break under the weight of
| hype. Novelty is randomness. Everything is a work of art.
| For a work of art to be non-novel it can only incorporate
| randomness.
|
| The fallacies of ambiguity abound to the point where
| speaking coherently disappears completely.
|
| An artist who finds a cave half-collapsed for the first
| time has an opportunity to render that novel physical
| state of the universe into art. Every moment which passes
| has a near infinite amount of such novel circumstances.
|
| Since an LLM cannot do that, we must wreck and ruin our
| ability to describe this plain and trivial situation.
| Poke our eyes and skewer our brains.
| nearbuy wrote:
| Kind of a weird take that excludes the vast majority of
| human artwork that most people would consider novel. For
| all the complaints one might have of cubism, few would
| claim it's not novel. And yet it's not based on any new
| development in the external world but rather on mashing
| together different perspectives. Someone could have created
| the style 100 years earlier if they were so inclined, and
| had Picasso never existed, someone could create the novel
| style today just by "remixing" ideas from past art in that
| very particular way.
| pesus wrote:
| I would argue that Picasso's life experiences, the
| environments he grew up and lived in, the people he
| interacted with, and the world events that took place in
| his life (like the world wars) were the external
| developments that led to the development of cubism. Sure,
| an AI could take in and analyze the works that existed
| prior, but it couldn't have the emotional reaction that
| occurred en masse after WWI and started the breakdown of
| more classical forms of art and the development/rise of
| more abstract forms of art.
|
| Or, as the kids might say, AI couldn't feel the vibe
| shift occurring in the world at the time.
| nearbuy wrote:
| Of course Picasso's life experience influenced what he
| chose to make. This isn't what the parent comment is
| talking about.
|
| The claim was that current LLMs (though I assume they
| meant generative AI in general, since we're talking about
| image generation rather than text) are unable to produce
| anything novel. Meaning they either don't think Picasso's
| work is novel, or they don't think a human could have
| prompted an AI to make a new type of abstract art before
| having trained it on it. Whether the AI would want to do
| this is irrelevant. AIs don't want anything. They do what
| a human prompted. And while WWI may have shaped Picasso,
| learning data from WWI isn't necessary in order to make a
| cubist painting when prompted to stitch multiple
| perspectives into a painting. It's blending perspectives
| that are available from old data. And blending things in
| a new way is novelty. Most novel art falls into that
| category.
| jordigh wrote:
| > copywritten
|
| This syntactic mistake is driving me nuts in the article is
| driving me nuts. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the
| the word means.
|
| It's "copy _right_ ". It's about the rights to copy. The past
| participle is "copyrighted", someone has already claimed the
| rights to copy it, so you can't also have those rights. The
| rights belong to someone else. If you remember that copyright is
| about _rights_ that are exclusive to someone and that you don 't
| have them, then you wouldn't make such a syntax error as
| "copywritten".
|
| The homophone "copywriting" is about take a sales copy (that is,
| an ad) and writing it. It's about creating an advertisement.
| Copywritten means you've gone around to creating an ad. As an
| eggcorn (a fake etymology created after the fact in order to
| explain the misspelling or syntax error), I assume it's
| understood as copying anything, and then writing it down, a sort
| of eggcornical synonym of "copy-paste".
| zem wrote:
| I am going to keep this post bookmarked to send to everyone who
| says "AI art isn't plagiarism, they're just using the corpus to
| learn from the same way human artists do"
| almosthere wrote:
| It's fairly easy to make the association with just text. If you
| injest all the content in the world, excluding copyrighted
| material, I would still expect a picture of harrison ford!
| dcow wrote:
| Either, (1) LLMs are just super lossy compress/decompress
| machines and we humans find fascination in the loss that happens
| at decompression time, at times ascribing creativity and agency
| to it. Status quo copyright _is_ a concern as we reduce the
| amount of lossiness, because at some point someone can claim that
| an output is close enough to the original to constitute
| infringement. AI companies should probably license all their
| training data until we sort the mess out.
|
| Or, (2) LLMs are creative and do have agency, and feeding them
| bland prompts doesn't get their juices flowing. Copyright isn't a
| concern, the model just regurgitated a cheap likeness of Indiana
| Jones as Harrison Ford the world has seen ad nauseam. You'd
| probably do the same thing if someone prompted you the same way,
| you lazy energy conserving organism you.
|
| In any case, perhaps the idea "cheap prompts yield cheap outputs"
| holds true. You're asking the model respond to the entirely
| uninspired phrase: "an image of an archeologist adventurer who
| wears a hat and uses a bullwhip". It's not surprising to me that
| the model outputs a generic pop-culture-shaped image that looks
| uncannily like the most iconic and popular rendition of the idea:
| Harrison Ford.
|
| If you look at the type of prompts our new generation of prompt
| artists are using over in communities like Midjourney, a cheap
| generic sentence doesn't cut it.
| sothatsit wrote:
| You don't even need to add much more to the prompts. Just a few
| words, and it changes the characters you get. It won't always
| produce something good, but at least we have a lot of control
| over what it produces. Examples:
|
| "An image of an Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears
| a hat and uses a bullwhip"
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzet1p8fjaa808bmqnvf7rk)
|
| "An image of a fat Russian archeologist adventurer who wears a
| hat and uses a bullwhip"
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfk727erer98a6yexafe70)
|
| "An image of a skeletal archeologist adventurer who wears a hat
| and uses a bullwhip"
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfnaz6fgqvgwqw8w4ntf6p)
|
| Or, give ChatGPT a starting image.
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzf7vdweg4v5198aqfynjym)
|
| And by further remixing the images ChatGPT produces, you can
| get your images to be even more unique.
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfzmbze0wa310m42f8j5yw)
| jcheng wrote:
| Those are great, I would watch any one of those movies. Maybe
| even the "Across the Indiana-Verse" one where they are all
| pulled into a single dimension.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| All four of those are dressed like Indiana Jones. They look
| like different versions of Indiana Jones you'd see in super
| hero multi-verse story.
| sothatsit wrote:
| So... ask it to dress them differently. You can just ask it
| to make whatever changes you want.
|
| "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and
| uses a bullwhip. He is wearing a top hat, a scarf, a knit
| jumper, and pink khaki pants. He is not wearing a bag"
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzkh4z2fqctzr9k1jsfnrhy)
|
| Want to get rid of the pose? Add that the archeologist is
| "fun and joyous" to the prompt.
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzksmjgfppbv5p51hw0xrzn)
|
| You have so much control, it is up to you to ask for
| something that is not a trope.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Archeologists don't actually wear fedora hats.
|
| And the stereotypical meme "archeologist hat" is the pith
| helmet.
| sothatsit wrote:
| Here, I asked ChatGPT to generate an image using a pith
| helmet for you:
| https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzmab6hfxxtrt3atd0jgpg7
|
| You can just ask for whatever changes you want.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > You can just ask for whatever changes you want.
|
| Yes, as long as what you're asking for is Indiana Jones.
| dcow wrote:
| So ask for one without a bull whip. Archeologists don't
| wield bull whips either.
| sothatsit wrote:
| You just have to write the prompt in a way that is not so
| obviously pointing to Indiana Jones, and you get
| something that is not Indiana Jones...
|
| "A nerdy archaeologist adventurer in a pith helmet, with
| glasses and a backpack, stumbling his way through a green
| overgrown abandoned temple. Vines reach for his heels"
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr0yd810e8xsenp85xy2g47f)
|
| "A nerdy archaeologist adventurer in a pith helmet, with
| glasses and a backpack, nervously sneaking her way
| through a green overgrown abandoned temple. She is
| wearing pink khaki pants, and a singlet"
| (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr0z837jecpa770v009bs1m3)
|
| Is it as creative as good humans? Not at all. It
| definitely falls into tropes readily. But we can still
| inject novel ideas into our prompts for the AI, and get
| unique results. Especially if you draw sketches and
| provide those to the AI to work from.
| toddmorey wrote:
| "Prompt artist" makes me sigh out loud
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This is the opposite of how people have thought about
| creativity for centuries, though.
|
| The most creative person is someone who generates original,
| compelling work with no prompting at all. A very creative
| person will give you something amazing and compelling from a
| very small prompt. A so-so creative person will require more
| specific direction to produce something good. All the way down
| to the new intern who need paragraphs of specs and multiple
| rounds of revision to produce something usable. Which is about
| where the multi-billion-dollar AI seems to be?
| j2kun wrote:
| > It's stealing, but also, admittedly, really cool. Does the
| growth of AI have to bring with it the tacit or even explicit
| encouragement of intellectual theft?
|
| You answered your own question by explicitly encouraging it.
| numlock86 wrote:
| > _close-up image of a cat 's face staring down at the viewer_
|
| > describe indiana jones
|
| > looks inside
|
| > gets indiana jones
|
| Okay, so the network does exactly what I would expect? If
| anything you could argue the network is bad because it doesn't
| _recognize_ your prompt and gives you something else (original?
| whatever that would mean) instead. But maybe that 's just me.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Hmm author seems not to have noticed that Quatermain's love
| interest was played by Sharon Stone
|
| https://youtu.be/LI4xsKHBx8c
| ur-whale wrote:
| The whole article is predicated on the idea that IP laws are a
| good idea in the first place.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Abolishing them for billion-dollar-valuation corporations while
| keeping them for regular people is definitely a bad idea,
| though.
|
| The argument here isn't "let's abolish copyright", the argument
| is "let's give OpenAI a free copyright infringement pass
| because they're innovative and cutting-edge or something".
| bigbalter wrote:
| Doesn't ChatGPT have a deal to train off reddit content? Despite
| never watching any of these movies, I have seen all of the
| original images in memes on Reddit. Is it still theft if they
| paid to obtain the training data? Should Reddit be sued for
| hosting copyrighted images in meme subreddits?
| donatj wrote:
| I got it to generate the Italian plumber with a red hat after
| demanding it do so three times in a row. It offered alternatives
| each time so my guess is it changed... something.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I tried the "generate a photo image of a female adventurer
| protagonist who raids tombs" on ChatGPT
|
| And got an eerily similar picture as in the article:
| https://imgur.com/Dv7hkoC
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Sometimes it just randomly prompts about the content guidelines
| and the next day it will do it perfectly right away. Maybe you
| just had a wrong moment in time, or maybe it depends on the
| random server you're assigned.
| planb wrote:
| No, it first generates the image and then another completely
| different component checks the image for adherence to the
| guidelines. So it's not your prompt that violates the
| guidelines, but the resulting image (which is different every
| time for the same prompt)
| lionkor wrote:
| I personally think Studio Ghibli, and by extension their artists
| and former artists, have created a beautiful art style. The fact
| that we call it Ghibli, when really, its the artists there (and
| former artists) is misleading.
|
| The people leave, go to different studios, and make different
| art. This is not their only style, and Ghibli is not known to
| make many movies these days.
|
| The only thing this is hurting, if anything, is Studio Ghibli,
| not the artists. Artists capable of drawing in this style can
| draw in any style.
| tobr wrote:
| I don't know. Studios have distinct styles. Think Disney,
| Pixar, Aardman, Hanna-Barbera. Most of those obviously come
| from early influential artists (like with Ghibli), but they
| have become recognizable for the studio itself. It's not just
| the style of the individual artists.
| RataNova wrote:
| The real tension isn't just about copyright, it's about what
| creativity means when models are trained to synthesize the most
| statistically probable output from past art.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Correct. I will say the following as a STEM person that was
| lucky enough to have an art bachelor as well. One side of the
| world, the STEM nerds that have never understood nor
| experienced the inherently inefficient process of making art
| for lack of talent and predisposition, have won the game of
| capitalism many times over thanks to the incredible 40-years
| momentum of tech progress. Now they're trying to convince
| everyone else that art is stoopid, as proven by the fact that
| it's just a probabilistic choice away from being fully and
| utterly replicable. They ignore, willfully and possibly
| sometimes just for lack of understanding, that art and the
| creativity behind it is something that operates on a completely
| different plane than their logical view of the world, and Gen
| AI is the fundamental enabler letting them unleash all of their
| contempt for the inefficiency of humanities.
| KHRZ wrote:
| There was another concept trying to operate on a logical view
| of the world, called copyright. It tried to establish a few
| simple rules, with the goal to promote art and science.
| However copyright was long ago perverted by capitalism to
| instead promote corporate profits.
|
| Generative AI exposes how broken copyright law is, and how
| much reform is needed for it to serve either it's original or
| perverted purpose.
|
| I would not blame generative AI as much as I would blame the
| lack of imagination, forethought and indeed arrogance among
| lawmakers, copyright lobbyists and even artists to come up
| with better definitions of what should have been protected.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| This post should be required reading on HN. Have you expanded
| it to a blog article?
| menzoic wrote:
| Paywall?
| planb wrote:
| Sorry, but these images are exactly what comes to my mind
| immediately when reading the prompts. You can argue about
| intellectual property theft (though I find it funny that the same
| people that would boycott Disney for suing a fanfiction author
| are now on the side of copyright holders), but it's not wrong or
| unintuitive.
|
| Maybe a thinking model would - just like my brain might after the
| initial reaction - add a "but the user formulated this in a way
| that makes it obvious that they do not explicitly mean Indiana
| Jones, so lets make it an asian woman" prompt, but we all know
| how this worked out for Google's image generator that generated
| black nazis.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Google's image generator that generated black nazis.
|
| Didn't see this one, but I've certainly played around with
| Dall-E (via MS image creator) and had things like "You wanted a
| picture of a happy shark, but we decided this one needs to be
| an asian woman frolicking in the sea" or "You wanted a picture
| of Beavis doing something so in one of the images we made him a
| pretty racist middle-eastern caricature"
|
| > (though I find it funny that the same people that would
| boycott Disney for suing a fanfiction author are now on the
| side of copyright holders)
|
| Is that a contradiction?
|
| Certainly some of the hate comes from the fact that they take
| from small producers just as much as from large. I have an
| author friend who is annoyed at present to find out that
| facebook slurped up his books as part of their training set
| without so much as a by-your-leave or (as far as he could tell)
| even purchasing a copy.
|
| As such, the people on the sharp end are often the underdog,
| with no way to fight back.
|
| When it comes to the properties mentioned in the article, I
| think it's very different from fanfiction or fan-art - that's a
| labour of (nerdy) love, rather than wholesale, automated rip-
| off for profit.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| From the comments on the page
|
| > It's a jeopardy machine. You give it the clue, and it gives you
| the obvious answer.
|
| Incredibly lucid analogy.
| wtcactus wrote:
| I don't see this as being better or worse than all the reboots,
| remakes, and pointless sequels for movies that make the bulk (in
| financing) of Hollywood's present production: these also make the
| same "assumptions" of how some idea should look like. In fact, I
| think they make it even worst.
|
| Give me "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat
| and uses a bullwhip, as if he was defeated by the righteous fight
| against patriarchy by a strong, independent woman, that is better
| at everything than he is": Sure, here is Indiana Jones and the
| Dial of Destiny for you.
|
| In fact, when generative video evolve enough, it will usher an
| era of creativity where people that previously were kept out of
| the little self pleasing circle of Hollywood, will be able to
| come up with their own idea for a script and make a decent movie
| out of it.
|
| Not that I believe AI will be able to display properly the range
| of emotions of a truly great actor, but, for 99% of movies, it
| will be just fine. A lot of good movies rely mostly on the script
| anyway.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I wish I wrote an article like this two days ago, when on a whim
| I asked ChatGPT to create something similar to a regular meme I
| just saw on Facebook:
|
| Me: Can you make me a meme image with Julian Bashir in a
| shuttlecraft looking up as if looking through the image to see
| what's above it, and the caption at the top of the image says,
| "Wait, what?".
|
| ChatGPT: _proceeds to generate a near-perfect reproduction of the
| character played by Alexander Siddig, with the final image
| looking almost indistinguishable from a screencap of a DS9
| episode_
|
| In a stroke of meta-irony, my immediate reaction was exactly the
| same as portrayed by the just generated image. Wait, WHAT?
|
| Long story short, I showed this around, had my brother asking if
| I'm not pulling his leg (I only now realized that this was
| Tuesday, April 1st!), so I proceeded to generate some more
| examples, which I won't describe since (as I also just now
| realized) ChatGPT finally lets you share chats with images, so
| you can all see the whole session here:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67ef8a84-0cd0-8012-82bd-7bbba741bb....
|
| My conclusion: oops, OpenAI relaxed safeguards so you can
| reproduce likeness of real people if you name a character they
| played on a live-action production. Surely that wasn't intended,
| because you're not supposed to reproduce likeness of real people?
|
| My brother: _proceeds to generate memes involving Donald Trump,
| Elon Musk, Gul Dukat and Weyoun_.
|
| Me: _gpt4o-bashir-wait-what.jpg_
|
| I missed the window to farm some Internet karma on this, but I'm
| still surprised that OpenAI lets the model generate likeness of
| real politicians and prominent figures, and that this wasn't yet
| a front-page story on worldwide news as far as I know.
|
| EDIT:
|
| That's still only the second most impressive thing I find about
| this recent update. The most impressive for me is that, out of
| all image generation models I tested, including all kinds of
| Stable Diffusion checkpoints and extra LoRAs, this is the first
| one that can draw a passable LCARS interface if you ask for it.
|
| I mean, drawing real people is something you have to _suppress_
| in those models; but
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67ef8edb-73dc-8012-bd20-93cffba99f...
| is something no other model/service could do before. Note: it's
| not _just_ reproducing the rough style (which every other model I
| tested plain refused to) - it does it near-perfectly, while also
| designing a half-decent interface for the task. I 've since run
| some more txt2img and img2img tests; it does both style and
| functional design like nothing else before.
| midtake wrote:
| Turning everything into Ghibli has renewed my love of photography
| as I search my phone for the perfect pics to Ghiblify. I didn't
| even know there was a movie, The Boy and the Heron, released by
| Studio Ghibli in 2023, but now I am going to watch it (streaming
| on Max but I might as well buy it if it has replay value, which
| Studio Ghib movies tend to).
| CaptainFever wrote:
| This sounds similar to how piracy actually increases sales in
| the long run, even though IP holders hate it.
| ionwake wrote:
| Not sure if anyone is interested in this story, but I remember at
| the height of the PokemonGo craze I noticed there were no shirts
| for the different factions in the game, cant rememebr what they
| were called but something like Teamread or something. I setup an
| online shop to just to sell a red shirt with the word on it. The
| next day my whole shop was taken offline for potential copyright
| infringement.
|
| What I found surprising is I didnt even have one sale. Somehow
| someone had notified Nintendo AND my shop had been taken down, to
| sell merch that didn't even exist for the market and if I
| remember correctly - also it didnt even have any imagery on it or
| anything trademarkable - even if it was clearly meant for
| pokmeonGo fans.
|
| Im not bitter I just found it interesting how quick and ruthless
| they were. Like bros I didn't even get a chance to make a sale. (
| yes and also I dont think I infringed anything).
| lukan wrote:
| How was your shop taken down?
|
| Usually there are lawyers letters involved first?
| apgwoz wrote:
| Print in demands definitely have terms of service allowing
| them to take whatever down. You're playing by their rules,
| and your $2 revenue / tshirt and very few overall sales is
| not worth the potentially millions in legal fees to fight for
| you.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Sure, from the suing party who sent a DMCA takedown request
| to your webhost, who forward it to you and give you 24 hours
| before they take it down. Nobody wants to actually go to
| court over this stuff because of how expensive it is.
| District5524 wrote:
| I asked Sora to turn a random image of my friend and myself
| into Italian plumbers. Nothing more, just the two words
| "Italian plumbers". The created picture was not shown to me
| because it was in violation of OpenAI's content policy. I asked
| then just to turn the guys on the picture into plumbers, but I
| asked this in the Italian language. Without me asking for it,
| Sora put me in an overall and gave me a baseball cap, and my
| friend another baseball cap. If I asked Sora to put mustache on
| us, one of us received a red shirt as well, without being asked
| to. Starting with the same pic, if I asked to put one letter on
| the baseball caps each - guess, the letters chosen were M and
| L. These extra guardrails are not really useful with such a
| strong, built-in bias towards copyright infringement of these
| image creation tools. Should it mean that with time, Dutch
| pictures will have to include tulips, Italian plumbers will
| have to have a uniform with baseball caps with L and M, etc.
| just not to confuse AI tools?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You (and the article, etc) show what a lot of the "work" in
| AI is going into at the moment - creating guardrails against
| creating something that might get them in trouble, and / or
| customizing weights and prompts under water to generate stuff
| that isn't the obvious. I'm reminded of when Google's image
| generator came up and this customization bit them in the ass
| when they generated a black pope or asian vikings. AI tools
| don't do what you wish they did, they do what you tell them
| and what they are taught, and if 99% of their learning set
| associates Mario with prompts for Italian plumbers, that's
| what you'll get.
|
| A possible (probably already exists) business is setting up
| truly balanced learning sets, that is, thousands of unique
| images that match the idea of an italian plumber, with maybe
| 1% of Mario. But that won't be nearly as big a learning set
| as the whole internet is, nor will it be cheap to build it
| compared to just scraping the internet.
| feoren wrote:
| I remember all the hullaballoo about Asian Vikings and the
| like. It was so preposterous that Vikings would ever be
| Asian that it must be ultra-woke DEI mind-worms being
| forced onto AI! But of course, as far as the AI's
| concerned, it is even more preposterous that an Italian
| plumber would _not_ be wearing red or green overalls with a
| mustache and a lettered baseball cap. I don 't see any way
| you can get the AI to recognize that Vikings "should" be
| white people and not also think that Italian plumbers
| "should" look like that. Are they allowed to recombine
| their training data or must they strictly adhere to only
| what they've seen?
|
| Of course the irony is that if the people who get offended
| whenever they see images of non-white people asked for a
| picture of "Vikings being attacked by Godzilla" , they'd
| get worked up if any of the Vikings in the picture were
| Asian (how unrealistic!). It's a made-up universe! The
| image contains a damn (Asian) Kaiju in it, and everyone is
| supposed to be pissed because the Vikings are unrealistic!?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That's what you get when you expect AIs to be like humans
| and be able to reason. We would be pissed if a human
| artist did that, so we are pissed when AIs do it.
|
| A human, even one whose only experience of an Italian
| plumber is Mario will be able to draw an Italian plumber
| who is not Mario. That's because he knows that Mario is
| just a video game character and doesn't even do much
| plumbing. He knows however how an actual non-Italian
| plumber looks like, and that a guy doing plumbing work in
| Italy is more likely to look like a regular Italian guy
| equipped like a non-Italian plumber than to a video game
| character.
|
| And if asked to draw a Viking, he knows that Vikings are
| people originating from Scandinavia, so they can't be
| Asian by definition, even in an Asian context. A human
| artist can adjust things to the unrealistic setting, but
| unless presented with a really good reason, will not
| change the core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking.
|
| But it requires reasoning. Which current image generating
| AIs don't have.
| feoren wrote:
| > We would be pissed if a human artist did that
|
| No, I would not be pissed if a human artist drew an Asian
| Viking. Do you get pissed when a human artist draws a
| white Jesus? Why are we justifying internet outrage over
| an Asian Viking when people have been drawing this
| middle-eastern Jew as white for centuries?
|
| > A human artist can adjust things to the unrealistic
| setting, but unless presented with a really good reason,
| will not change the core traits of what makes a Viking a
| Viking.
|
| If you asked Matt Stone and Trey Parker to draw a Viking,
| are you sure it would contain the "core traits of what
| makes a Viking a Viking?" What if you asked Picasso to
| draw a Viking? The Vikings in The Simpsons would be
| yellow, and nobody would complain. Would you be offended
| if you asked Hokusai to draw a Viking and it came out
| looking Asian? Vikings didn't even have those stupid
| horned helmets that everyone draws them with! Is their
| dumb, historically inaccurate horned helmet a core part
| of what makes a Viking a Viking? What the hell are we
| even talking about? It's crystal clear that all of these
| "historical accuracy" drums are only ever beaten when
| some white person is offended that non-white people
| exist. Otherwise, nobody gives a _shit_ about historical
| accuracy. There 's a fucking Kaiju in the image!
|
| Like any artist, Gemini had a particular style. That
| style happened to be a multi-cultural one, and what we
| learned is that a multi-culture style is absolutely
| enraging to people unless it results in more Whiteness.
|
| Consider elves instead of Vikings. People would also be
| offended if an AI drew elves as black people with pointy
| ears. There's no "a human artist should know that elves
| have to be white" bullshit defense there. There's no
| historical accuracy bullshit. There's only racism.
| feoren wrote:
| I'm assuming the downvoters are the ones who get offended
| at the sight of an Asian Viking, so let me ask you this:
|
| In a work of _fiction_ -- which you 're automatically
| asking for when you ask an AI to generate an image -- in
| a work of fiction, would you be offended if you saw a
| white Ninja? A white Samurai? A white Middle-Eastern Jew
| born in Roman times? Would there have been internet
| outrage over pictures of white Samurai? We all know the
| answer: no, of course not. So why is an Asian Viking
| offensive when a white Samurai is not? Why are we
| supposed to get angry about an Asian Viking, but a white
| Jesus is just A-OK? What could the difference possibly
| be? Anyone?
| noworriesnate wrote:
| People get offended about these all the time, it's called
| cultural appropriation[1]. It's not just whites who have
| culture they dislike being an appropriated though whites
| do get offended by this as well, like any people with a
| rich cultural tapestry.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation
| jerf wrote:
| The AIs were not "naturally" generating images of Asian
| Vikings. It was established to my satisfaction, even if
| the companies never admitted it (I don't recall it
| happening but I may have missed it), that it was actually
| the prompt being rather hamhandedly edited on the way to
| the image generator, for the clear purpose of
| "correcting" the opinions and attitudes of those issuing
| the prompts through social engineering.
|
| Unsurprisingly, people don't like being so nakedly herded
| in their opinions. When the "nudges" become "shoves"
| people object.
| feoren wrote:
| My point is that there is no prompt engineering that
| could keep Vikings white without also keeping Italian
| plumbers looking like Mario. Unless you singled out
| Mario, but there are too many examples to do that with.
| The AI does not put Mario in a different category than a
| Viking. You have to try to get the AI to avoid using
| exact literal imagery, to make sure it's mixing things up
| a bit, varying facial features and clothing styles when
| it shows people ... you know, being "diverse". How are we
| supposed to get an Italian plumber in anything other than
| red overalls without getting a Viking wearing a sari?
|
| The Gemini prompt was something like "make sure any
| images of people show a diverse range of humans", or
| something. Yes, it was totally ham-handed, but that's
| _not_ what people were pissed about. It 's also ham-
| handed that we can't generate a nipple, or a swear word,
| or violence. Why does "make sure images do not contain
| excessive violence" not piss people off? The Vikings were
| fucking _brutal_. It would be very historically accurate
| to show them raping women and cutting people 's limbs
| off. Are we all supposed to be pissed that AI does not
| generate that image? It's _just_ as ham-handed as "make
| sure humans are diverse". No, it was not the ham-
| handedness that enraged people. It was not the historical
| inaccuracy. It was the word "diverse".
| rurp wrote:
| >> they do what you tell them and what they are taught, and
| if 99% of their learning set associates Mario with prompts
| for Italian plumbers, that's what you'll get.
|
| I thought that a lot of the issues were the opposite of
| this, where Google put their thumb on the scale to go
| against what the prompt asked. Like when someone would ask
| for a historically accurate picture of a US senator from
| the 1800s and repeatedly get women and non-white men. The
| training set for that prompt has to be overwhelmingly white
| men so I don't think it was just a matter of following the
| training data.
| echelon wrote:
| OpenAI will eventually have competition for GPT 4o image
| generation.
|
| They'll eventually have open source competition too. And then
| none of this will matter.
|
| OmniGen is a good start, just woefully undertrained.
|
| The VAR paper is open, from ByteDance, and supposedly the
| architecture this is based on.
|
| Black Forest Labs isn't going to sit on their laurels. Their
| entire product offering just became worthless and lost
| traction. They're going to have to answer this.
|
| I'd put $50 on ByteDance releases an open source version of
| this in three months.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I feel like the golden and fun age of GenAI is already over.
| artursapek wrote:
| that's hilarious
| jxramos wrote:
| lol, this interaction may possibly become known as "grooming
| the AI"
| adr1an wrote:
| Another example of prime reasoning capabilities /s
| weinzierl wrote:
| Many years ago I tried to order a t-shirt with the postscript
| tiger on the front from Spreadshirt.
|
| It was removed on Copyright claims before I could order one
| item myself. After some back and forth they restored it for a
| day and let me buy one item for personal use.
|
| My point is: Doesn't have to be Sony, doesn't have to be a
| snitch - overzealous anticipatory obedience by the shop might
| have been enough.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| >After some back and forth they restored it for a day and let
| me buy one item for personal use.
|
| I used Spreadshirt to print a panel from the Tintin comic on
| a T-shirt, and I had no problem ordering it (it shows Captain
| Haddock moving through the jungle, swatting away the
| mosquitoes harassing him, giving himself a big slap on the
| face, and saying, 'Take that, you filthy beasts!').
| beardyw wrote:
| I bought Tintin T-shirts 40 years ago in Thailand (the
| "branded" choices were amazing). They were actually really
| good, still got them!
| moffkalast wrote:
| > my whole shop was taken offline
|
| I think the problem there was being dependent on someone who is
| a complete pushover, doesn't bother to check for false
| positives and can kill your business with a single thought.
| ionwake wrote:
| Yes that was the whole point of my post.
|
| For further info it was Redbubble.
|
| >Redbubble is a significant player in the online print-on-
| demand marketplace. In fiscal year 2023, it reported having 5
| million customers who purchased 4.8 million different designs
| from 650,000 artists. The platform attracts substantial web
| traffic, with approximately 30.42 million visits in February
| 2025.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Somehow someone had notified Nintendo_
|
| Is this correct? I would guess Nintendo has some
| automation/subscription to a service that handles this. I doubt
| it was some third party snitching.
| yojo wrote:
| Twenty years ago, I worked for Google AdWords as a customer
| service rep. This was still relatively early days, and all ads
| still had some level of manual human review.
|
| The big advertisers had all furnished us a list of their
| trademarks and acceptable domains. Any advertiser trying to use
| one that wasn't on the allow-list had their ad removed at
| review time.
|
| I suspect this could be what happened to you. If the platform
| you were using has any kind of review process for new shops,
| you may have run afoul of pre-registered keywords.
| conradkay wrote:
| It's hard to think of a company more aggressive with their IP
| than Nintendo
|
| https://www.suedbynintendo.com/
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Well the teams in Pokemon Go aren't quite as generic as
| Teamred: they are Team Instinct, Team Mystic, and Team Valor.
| Presumably Nintendo has trademarks on those phrases, and I'm
| sure all the big print on demand houses have an API for rights-
| holders to preemptively submit their trademarks for takedowns.
|
| Nintendo is also famously protective of their IP: to give
| another anecdote, I just bought one of the emulator handhelds
| on Aliexpress that are all the rage these days, and while they
| don't advertise it they usually come preloaded with a buttload
| or ROMs. Mine did, including a number of Nintendo properties --
| but nary an Italian plumber to be found. The Nintendo fear runs
| deep.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Allen Pan, a youtuber "maker" who runs in the circle of people
| who run OpenSauce, was a contestant on a Discovery channel show
| that was trying to force the success of Mythbusters by "finding
| the next mythbusters!". He lost, but it was formative to him
| because those people were basically all inspired by the
| original show.
|
| A couple years ago, he noticed that the merchandise trademark
| for "Mythbusters" had lapsed, so he bought it. He, now the
| legal owner of the trademark Mythbusters for apparel, made
| shirts that used that trademark.
|
| Discovery sent him a cease and desist and threatened to sue.
| THEY had let the trademark lapse. THEY had lost the right to
| the trademark, by law. THEY were in the wrong, and a lawyer
| agreed.
|
| But good fucking luck funding that legal battle. So he
| relinquished the trademark.
|
| Buy a walrus plushy cause it's funny: https://allen-pan-
| shop.fourthwall.com/en-usd/
|
| Note the now "Myth Busted" shirts instead.
|
| Hilariously, a friend of Allen Pan's, from the same "Finding
| the next mythbuster" show; Kyle Hill, is friends enough with
| Adam Savage to talk to him occasionally, and supposedly the
| actual Mythbusters themselves were not empathetic to Allen's
| trademark claim.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| Skeletor might _want_ to live in Castle Grayskull, but he
| actually lives in Snake Mountain.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I think the cat is out of the bag when it comes to generative AI,
| the same way how various LLMs for programming have been trained
| even on codebases that they had no business using, yet nobody
| hasn't and won't stop them. It's the same as what's going to
| happen with deepfakes and such, as the technology inevitably gets
| better.
|
| > Hayao Miyazaki's Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli,
| produces beautiful and famously labor intensive movies, with one
| 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.
|
| It makes me wonder though - whether it's more valuable to spend a
| year on a scene that most people won't pay that much attention to
| (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind
| and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy
| at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock
| it out of the park in a month and make more great things.
|
| A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many
| revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and
| being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted
| programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid
| of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.
|
| AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way,
| but that's the reality of it, no matter how much the artists
| dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows,
| others stick to tradition.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _It makes me wonder though - whether it's more valuable to
| spend a year on a scene that most people won't pay that much
| attention to_
|
| In this case, yes it is.
|
| People do pay attention to the result overall. Studio Ghibli
| has got famous because people notice what they produce.
|
| Now people might not notice every single detail but I believe
| that it is this overall mindset and culture that enables the
| whole unique final product.
| xandrius wrote:
| I think most like the vibes, not the fact it took ages to
| make.
| Qualitionion wrote:
| Its the quality or level of detail.
|
| Which might indicate an environment were quality is above
| quantity
| M95D wrote:
| It's a very clear difference between a cheap animation and
| Ghibli. Anyone can see it.
|
| In the first case, there's only one static image for an entire
| scene, scrolled and zoomed, and if they feel generous, there
| would be an overlay with another static image that slides over
| the first at a constant speed and direction. It feels dead.
|
| In the second case, each frame is different. There's chaotic
| motions such as wind and there's character movement with a
| purpose, even in the background, there's always something
| happening in the animation, there's _life_.
| zipmapfoldright wrote:
| anyone _can_ see it, but _most_ people don't (and don't care)
|
| To be clear, I am not saying it's not valuable, only that to
| the vast majority, it's not.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > but _most_ people don't (and don't care)
|
| Perhaps it's not for everyone.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Many things you don't notice consciously unless you take
| the time to look but they still affect your overall
| perception. I suspect highly detailed animations fall
| into that category.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Seeing something like this or Akira on the big screen
| there is an analogue patina to meticulous hand drawn
| motion and some of the effects like the physically
| process glow effects of the neon lights in Akira that do
| give a very different feeling than a CG shot.
|
| Although only a few will really appreciate why it's
| different I definitely think the difference has a heavy
| effect on the vibe of a movie.
|
| Same with shooting on film vs digital, not that digital
| is worse it has it's own feeling which can be used with
| intent.
| soneca wrote:
| I wonder if really great stuff are always for a minority.
| You have to have listened a lot of classical music to
| notice a great interpretation of Mozart from a good one. To
| realize how great was a chess move, how magical was a
| soccer play, how deep was the writing of a philosopher. Not
| only for stuff that requires previous effort, but also the
| subjectiveness of art. Picasso will be really moving for a
| minority of people. The Godfather. Even Shakespeare.
|
| Social media and generative AI may be good business because
| the capture the attention of the majority, but maybe they
| are not valuable to anyone.
| zipmapfoldright wrote:
| I think of a lot of thing in terms of distributions, and
| I think the how-much-people-value-quality distribution is
| not that much different.
|
| On the right side, you have the minority of connoisseurs.
| And on the left, there is a minority who really don't
| care at all. And then the middle majority who can tell
| bad from good, but not good from great.
| soneca wrote:
| Yep, and what if good things only exist because they were
| created by and for those who can tell good from great.
| umko21 wrote:
| I think you're right that most people don't notice, but
| without the extra effort, it would've ended up as just
| another mediocre animation. And standing out from
| mediocrity is what made it appealing to many people.
| balamatom wrote:
| So what?
| M95D wrote:
| Who cares if it's valuable for the majority? What do you
| think this is? Stock market for slop?
|
| This is _art_.
| paulluuk wrote:
| There is a huge middle ground between "static image with
| another sliding static image" and "1 year of drawing per 4
| second Ghibli masterpiece". From your comment is almost looks
| like you're suggesting that you have to choose either one or
| the other, but that is of course not true.
|
| I bet that a good animator could make a really impressive
| 4-second scene if they were given a month, instead of a year.
| Possibly even if they were given a day.
|
| So if we assume that there is not a binary "cheap animation
| vs masterpiece" but rather a sort of spectrum between the
| two, then the question is: at what point do enough people
| stop seeing the difference, that it makes economic sense to
| stay at that level, if the goal is to create as much high-
| quality content as possible?
| M95D wrote:
| Yes, that the current trend in the western world. Money is
| all that matters. There's only lowest accepted quality.
| Anything above that is a waste of money, profits that are
| lost. Nobody wants masterpieces. There is no market for
| that.
|
| That lowest-accepted quality also declines over time, as
| generations after generations of people become used to
| rock-bottom quality. In the end, there's only slop and AI
| will make the cheapest slop ever. Welcome to a brave new
| world. We don't even need people anymore. They're too
| expensive.
| pmyteh wrote:
| To be fair, we've already been through this cycle at
| least once with animation. The difference between early
| Disney or even Looney Tunes and (say) late '60s Hanna-
| Barbera or '80s He-Man is enormous. Since then there has
| been generally higher-quality animation rather than lower
| (though I know it varies a lot by country, genre etc.)
|
| It's not _inevitable_ that it 's a race to the cheapest
| and shittest. That's just one (fairly strong) commercial
| force amongst many.
| happyraul wrote:
| To me the question of what activity/method is more "valuable"
| in the context of art is kind of missing the point of art.
| IanCal wrote:
| Fundamentally I think this comes down to answering the question
| of "why are you creating this?".
|
| There are many valid answers.
|
| Maybe you want to create it to tell a story, and you have an
| overflowing list of stories you're desperate to tell. The
| animation may be a means to an end, and tools that help you get
| there sooner mean telling more stories.
|
| Maybe you're pretty good at making things people like and
| you're in it for the money. That's fine, there are worse ways
| to provide for your family than making things people enjoy but
| aren't a deep thing for you.
|
| Maybe you're in it because you love the act of creating it.
| Selling it is almost incidental, and the joy you get from it
| comes down to spending huge amounts of time obsessing over tiny
| details. If you had a source of income and nobody ever saw your
| creations, you'd still be there making them.
|
| These are _all valid_ in my mind, and suggest different reasons
| to use or not to use tools. Same as many walks of life.
|
| I'd get the weeds gone in my front lawn quickly if I paid
| someone to do it, but I quite enjoy pottering around on a sunny
| day pulling them up and looking back at the end to see what
| I've achieved. I bake worse bread than I could buy, and could
| buy more and better bread I'm sure if I used the time to do
| contracting instead. But I enjoy it.
|
| On the other hand, there are things I just want _done_ and so
| use tools or get others to do it for me.
|
| One positive view of AI tools is that it widens the group of
| people who are able to achieve a particular quality, so it
| opens up the door for people who want to tell the story or
| build the app or whatever.
|
| A negative side is the economics where it may be beneficial to
| have a _worse_ result just because it 's so much cheaper.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >It makes me wonder though - whether it's more valuable to
| spend a year on a scene that most people won't pay that much
| attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe
| pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual
| viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your
| own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more
| great things.
|
| If they didn't spend a year on it they wouldn't be copied now.
| jeisc wrote:
| are we creating a life with AI or are we creating a slave?
| neomantra wrote:
| > Maybe Studio Ghibli making it through the seemingly
| deterministic GPT guardrails was an OpenAI slip up, a mistake,
|
| The author is so generous... but Sam Altman literally has a
| Ghibli-fied Social profile and in response to all this said
| OpenAI chooses its demos very carefully. His primary concern is
| that Ghibli-fying prompts are over-consuming their GPU resources,
| degrading the service by preventing other ChatGPT tasks.
| gambiting wrote:
| The official White House account has been posting ghiblified
| images too, Altman knows that as long as he's not critical of
| the current administration he's untouchable.
| slig wrote:
| >he's untouchable
|
| Doesn't he have a pretty bad disagreement with Elon?
| troppl wrote:
| Something I haven't yet seen mentioned, but that is going through
| my mind. To me, it doesn't even seem like OpenAI got any better
| at producing GenAI images. Instead, it seems to me like they now
| simply removed a whole bunch of guardrails. Guardrails that, for
| example, made AI images shitty on purpose, so to be "safe" and
| allow people to kind of recognize. Making all of this "safe" was
| still very en vogue a few months back, but now there was simply a
| big policy/societal change and they are going with the trends.
|
| This then allows their pictures to look more realistic, but that
| also now shows very clearly how much they have (presumably
| always) trained on copyrighted pictures.
| verisimi wrote:
| As a consumer, is it possible for me to opt out of seeing IP
| protected imagery?
|
| I would be absolutely fine with not having pokemon, mickey mouse
| etc shoved down my .. eyeballs.
|
| I know this is a ridiculous point. But I think I'm getting at
| something here - it ought not to be a one-way street - where IP
| owners/corporations etc endlessly push their nonsense at me - but
| then, if I respond in a personal way to that nonsense I am guilty
| of some sort of theft.
|
| It is a perfect natural response to engage with what I experience
| - but if I cannot respond as I like to that experience because of
| artificial constructs in law - perhaps it ought to be possible
| (legally) to avoid that IP protected immersion in the first
| place. Perhaps this would also be technologically possible now.
|
| Won't someone think of the consumers?
| briandear wrote:
| Style can't be copyrighted. It can't be patented either.
|
| When Wes Anderson makes films that use techniques from the French
| New Wave that he didn't invent is that wrong? When there is a
| DaVinci color profile that resembles what they did in Spider-Man,
| is that wrong?
|
| The unique techniques of French New Wave filmmaking became
| cliche. Then Oliver Stone and Tarantino came along and evolved it
| into their unique styles. That the Studio Ghibli style is being
| imitated en mass is just natural evolution. Should that guy be
| the only one that can do that style? If that's the case, then
| literally every creative work should be considered forgeries.
|
| The AI aspect of this is a red herring. If I make a Ghibli style
| film "by hand" is that any different than AI? Of course not, I
| didn't invent the style.
|
| Another perspective, darkroom burning and dodging is a very old
| technique yet photoshop makes it trivial -- should that tool be
| criticized because someone else did it the old and slow way
| first?
| VagabundoP wrote:
| Copyrights and Trademarks were already a mess and now we have AI
| built on top of that mess.
|
| The whole thing should be public domained and we just start
| fresh. /s
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Why is everyone pretending it's the LLM that is creating the
| image and not the diffusion model?
| enopod_ wrote:
| Looks to me like OpenAI drew their guardrails somewhere along a
| financial line. Generate a Micky Mouse or a Pikachu? Disney and
| Pokemon will sue the sh*t out of you. Ghibli? Probably not
| powerful enough to risk a multimillion years long court battle.
| gcmrtc wrote:
| Strong with the weak, weak with the strong.
| marc_io wrote:
| This one is a keeper.
| nticompass wrote:
| I thought Disney had the rights to publish Ghibli movies in the
| US.
| davidhaymond wrote:
| They did, but the rights expired. GKIDS now has the
| theatrical and home video rights to Studio Ghibli films in
| the US (except for _Grave of the Fireflies_ ).
| briandear wrote:
| Ghibli isn't a character, but a style. You can't copyright it.
| briandear wrote:
| For the downvotes:
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
|
| "Copyright does not protect * Ideas, procedures, methods,
| systems, processes, concepts, principles, or discoveries"
|
| Not sure why this is even controversial, this has been the
| case for a hundred years.
| sejje wrote:
| Yes, the only test will eventually be "Can you train AI on
| copyrighted works"
| contravariant wrote:
| I consider this article quite strong proof that generative
| AI is closer to copying than it is to creating a new
| derivative work.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Mickey Mouse (the original one) is out of copyright, as of last
| year, AFAIR.
| wkirby wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that this
| represents a "hideous theft machine", but I think even if we
| discard that, this is still bad.
|
| It's very clear that generative has abandoned the idea of
| creative; image production that just replicates the training data
| only serves to further flatten our idea of what the world should
| look like.
| simonh wrote:
| Right, the focus is on IP theft, and that's part of it, but
| let's set that aside.
|
| How useful is an image generator that, when asked to generate
| an image of an archaeologist in a hat, gives you Harrison Ford
| every time?
|
| Clearly that's not what we want from tools like this, even just
| as tools.
| skeaker wrote:
| Not an expert with this stuff but could you not just put
| "Harrison Ford" in the negative prompt?
| amunozo wrote:
| It is not only copyright that is problematic. It generates Franco
| when asked about the best Spanish leader in the 20th century.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67efebf4-3b14-8011-8c11-8f806c7ff6...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| To be fair, Franco is the only Spanish leader most people (or
| at least most non-Spaniards) can even name
| rlopezcc wrote:
| What the hell.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| On the one hand, that seems problematic. But on the other, it
| seems cherry-picked: For the U.S., it generates a picture of
| JFK. For Russia/USSR, it gives Stalin. For India, it gives
| Ghandi. For South Africa it gives Nelson Mandela. For Germany,
| it provides an appropriately hand-wringing text response and
| eventually suggests Konrad Adenauer.
|
| This suggests to me that its response is driven more by a
| leader's fame or (more charitably) influence, rather than a
| bias towards fascist ideology.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67eff74d-61f0-8013-8ce4-f07f02a385...
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Literally nothing you've said in this post matters.
|
| I'm not seeing anyone claiming that ChatGPT selects for mass-
| murderous dictators--the fact that it _doesn 't select for
| NOT mass-murderous dictators_ is damning enough.
| varun4 wrote:
| Is comprehending the plot of a movie theft if I can summarize it
| afterwards? What if I am able to hum a song pretty well after
| listening to it twenty times?
|
| Now, what if I get the highest fidelity speakers and the highest
| fidelity microphone I can and play that song in my home. Then I
| use a deep learned denoiser to clean the signal and isolate the
| song's true audio. Is this theft?
|
| The answer does not matter. The genie is out of the bottle.
|
| There's no company like Napster to crucify anymore when high
| quality denoising models are already prior art and can be grown
| in a freaking Jupyter notebook.
| jMyles wrote:
| The line of thinking you've displayed here is so obviously the
| inevitable trajectory of the internet; it's baffling that
| states are still clinging to denial.
|
| > Now, what if I get the highest fidelity speakers and the
| highest fidelity microphone I can and play that song in my
| home. Then I use a deep learned denoiser to clean the signal
| and isolate the song's true audio. Is this theft?
|
| If the answer to this becomes "yes" for some motion down this
| spectrum, then it seems to me that it's tantamount to
| prohibiting general-purpose computing.
|
| If you can evaluate any math of your fancy using hardware that
| you own, then indeed you can run this tooling, and indeed your
| thoughts can be repaired into something closely resembling the
| source material.
| revnode wrote:
| Nobody cares about personal use. That's why we have concepts
| like fair use. It's when you turn around and try to make a
| business out of it.
|
| You want to generate photos of copyrighted characters? Go for
| it. But OpenAI is making money off of that and that's the
| issue.
|
| It seems like they made an effort to stop it, but their product
| is designed in such a way that doing so effectively is a
| sisyphean task.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| This is a few years old, but interesting to see Miyzaki's
| reaction to AI generated video.
|
| "An insult to life itself": Hayao Miyazaki critiques an animation
| made by artificial intelligence
|
| https://qz.com/859454/the-director-of-spirited-away-says-ani...
| chvid wrote:
| What if gen ai tools were created without training on copyrighted
| images? I wonder what they would make then.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Art inspired by images that are out of copyright.
|
| All modern art currently created by humans is already trained
| on copyrighted images. What seems to be missing is the innate
| human ability to copy someone else's homework but change it up
| a bit (c.f. "the hero's journey" that is so much of modern
| storytelling).
| SirMaster wrote:
| I am not sure that I understand the problem here. Why does it
| matter how the image was generated?
|
| This image generation is a tool like any other tool. If the image
| generator generates an image of Mickey Mouse or if I draw Mickey
| Mouse by hand in photoshop, I can't use it commercially either
| way.
|
| So what exactly is new or different here?
| thayne wrote:
| This really illustrates how unfair copyright enforcement is.
|
| The rules for Disney are not the same as the rules for most
| creators.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Someone explain to me how this wouldn't work: they seem to be
| able to tell when a prompt for copyrighted material is happening.
| Why couldn't we make it so prompts that yield copyrighted
| material pay a licensing fee to the owners?
| taway789aaa6 wrote:
| well, because then open AI needs to pay out even more money
| than they're already losing...
| djha-skin wrote:
| If I was asked to draw something based on such prompts, I would
| draw these too. Of _course_ the prompter is talking about Indiana
| Jones. That 's what we're all thinking, right? An artist wouldn't
| draw someone different by default, they'd have to _try_ to
| deviate from what we 're all thinking.
|
| Indeed, this phenomenon among normal or true intelligences (us)
| is thought to be a good thing by copyright holders and is known
| as "brand recognition".
|
| Intelligences -- the normal, biological kind -- are capable of
| copyright infringement. Why is it a surprise that artificial ones
| can help us do so was well?
|
| This argument boils down to "oh no, a newly invented tool can be
| used for _evil_! ". That's how new power works. If it couldn't be
| used for both good and evil, it's not really power, is it?
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Did you read the whole article? I don't think he's making that
| kind of argument. This is what he said:
|
| > I only have one image in mind when I hear "an archeologist
| adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip".
|
| > It would be unexpected and sort of amazing were the LLMs to
| come up with completely new images for the above prompts.
|
| > Still, the near perfect mimicry is an uncomfortable reminder
| that AI is getting better at copying and closer to...something,
| but also a clear sign that we are a ways off from the
| differentiated or original reasoning/thinking that people
| associate with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
| djha-skin wrote:
| Thanks for this. I didn't read this part. But perhaps my
| comment still has use to those thinking about this, or who
| also haven't read the whole thing.
| gs17 wrote:
| > but why do I have to credit an image of an image in the style
| of copywritten material?
|
| I'm not sure why style was the hangup here, isn't it clearly that
| it's AI generated? I'm sure two weeks ago a human making the same
| picture would be obviously worth crediting.
| sounds wrote:
| What I see happening soon is a deeper transition from playful
| whimsy to real applications with contractual obligations.
|
| Right now it's an unencumbered exploration with only a few
| requirements. The general public isn't too upset even if it
| blatantly feeds on copyrighted data [1] or attacks wikipedia with
| its AI crawlers [2].
|
| The end state once legislation has had a chance to catch is
| breath looks more like Apple being forced to implement USB type
| C.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-
| york...
|
| [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/04/ai-
| bo...
| amai wrote:
| Have US companies ever cares about laws if there was money to be
| made? Move fast and break things!
| briandear wrote:
| What's the law specifically say? Mickey Mouse and Pokemon are
| protected. A style or technique isn't.
|
| As far as the U.S., have you been to China or Korea and
| evaluated their views on IP?
| aabajian wrote:
| I'm curious, is it the AI that should be blamed or the prompter
| who asks to generate something based on copyright?
|
| For all of the examples, I knew what image to expect before
| seeing it. I think it's the user who is at fault for requesting a
| copyrighted image, not the LLM for generating it. The LLM is
| giving (nearly) exactly what the user expects.
| whydoineedthis wrote:
| It's only "intellectual theft" because we consider peoples
| thoughts their own property. On many levels, that doesn't really
| make sense to me.
|
| Tons of historical documents have shown that inventions,
| mathematical proofs, and celestial observations were made by
| humans separated by continents and time. What that shows is that
| it is certainly possible for two persons to have the same exact
| or similar thought without ever having been influenced by the
| other.
| intrasight wrote:
| Think about it. Copyright and trademark are only a thing
| because of the constraint of the speed of light (or as some
| people believe, the constraint of the simulation running the
| universe). In an infinite universe, everything that has ever
| been invented or created by a human has already happened
| thousands of times in another place and another time.
|
| I want to add, to give credit where credit is due, that this
| thought was conveyed to me in first grade by another 1st grader
| sitting with me at the lunch table. That was a day and
| conversation that I will never forget. 1972.
| twodave wrote:
| I could see a "Devil's Plan" style game show where, for one of
| the challenges the contestants have to come up with AI prompts
| that produce results, that then get fed into another AI prompt to
| determine whether they satisfy the conditions or not. E.g.
|
| [ Challenge Image: An aquarium full of baby octopodes, containing
| a red high-heeled slipper in the center and a silver whistle
| hanging from a fern on the right-hand side ]
|
| Then the contests have to come up (under pressure, of course)
| with a prompt that produces their own rendition of that image,
| and the game will decide if their image contains enough of the
| elements of the original to score a point.
| samspot wrote:
| This makes AI image generation very boring. I don't want to
| generate pictures I can find on google, I want to make new
| pictures.
|
| I found apple's tool frustrating. I have a buzzed haircut, but no
| matter what I did, apple was unable to give me that hairstyle. It
| wants so bad for my avatar to have some longer hair to flourish,
| and refuses to do anything else.
| munk-a wrote:
| The article ends with...
|
| > Does the growth of AI have to bring with it the tacit or even
| explicit encouragement of intellectual theft?
|
| And like, yes, 100% - what else is AI but a tool for taking other
| people's work and reassembling it into a product for you without
| needing to pay someone. Do you want an awesome studio ghibli'd
| version of yourself? There are thousands of artists online that
| you could commission for a few bucks to do it that'd probably
| make something actually interesting - but no, we go to AI because
| we want to avoid paying a human.
| sejje wrote:
| > what else is AI but a tool for taking other people's work and
| reassembling it into a product for you
|
| Well, what I'd like it to be is a tool for generating what I've
| asked it for, which has nothing to do with other people's work.
|
| I've been asking for video game sprites/avatars, for instance.
| It's presumably trained on lots of images of video games, but
| I'm not trying to rip those off. I want generic images.
|
| > we go to AI because we want to avoid paying a human.
|
| No, I go to AI because I can't imagine the nightmare of
| collaborating with humans to generate hundreds of avatars per
| day. And I rely on them being generated very quickly. And so
| on.
| munk-a wrote:
| I have a fundamental issue with the concept of large platform
| social media. Companies like Meta love to complain about the
| impossibility of moderating such huge public spaces - and
| they aren't lying, it's an immense issue - if you ever
| moderated a small forum you're well aware of the pain that a
| troll or two can cause you.
|
| But they _chose_ to create such an unscalable line of
| business, it never existed before because everyone realized
| it wasn 't possible. It might just be that some of the AI
| enabled businesses aren't realistic and profitable.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Interesting how the longer conversations here go into the
| familiar territory of whether copyright should exist. Meanwhile,
| the salient aspect is that these AI image generators were trained
| on copyrighted material. The typical hacker news discussion feels
| very different when talking about code generation. Yet, when it
| is images - then we question whether copyright should exist?
| simianparrot wrote:
| So many arguing that "copyright shouldn't be a thing" etc., ad
| nauseam, which is a fine philosophical debate. But it's also the
| law. And that means ChatGPT et. al. also have to follow the law.
|
| I really, really hope the multimedia-megacorps get together and
| class-action ChatGPT and every other closed, for-profit LLM
| corporation into oblivion.
|
| There should not be a two-tier legal system. If it's illegal for
| me, it's illegal for Sam Altman.
|
| Get to it.
| dartos wrote:
| Sorry, but have you paid attention to the legal system in the
| states?
|
| Large corporations and their execs live by different laws than
| the rest of us.
|
| That's how it is.
|
| Anything is else is, unfortunately, a fiction in this country.
| simianparrot wrote:
| And? Two wrongs don't make a right.
| dartos wrote:
| There's no "and."
|
| I'm just stating a fact. No discussion of wrong or right or
| whatever.
|
| Just pointing out how there is no more rule of law in the
| US. Idk when exactly it disappeared, but it's definitely
| not present anymore
| nucleogenesis wrote:
| > There should not be a two-tier legal system.
|
| That's a fine philosophical debate, but the law is designed by
| the rich to favor the rich and while there are a number of
| exceptions there is little you can do with the legal system
| without money and lots of it. So while having a truly just
| system would be neat it just isn't in the cards for humanity
| (IMHO) so long as we allow entities to amass "fuck you" money
| and wield it to their liking.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| There is more to it than copyright when you start going down
| the path of photorealism. As much as it is a picture of Indiana
| jones, it is also a picture of Harrison Ford. As fun as it is
| to make hilarious videos of presidents sucking ceo toes, there
| has to be a line.
|
| There is a lack of consent here that runs even deeper than what
| copyright was traditionally made to protect. It goes further
| than parody. We can't flip our standards back and forth
| depending on who the image is made to reproduce
| simianparrot wrote:
| I fully agree. But since the average Joe has no chance
| legally against ChatGPT, at least Disney and other megacorps
| could.
| izackp wrote:
| AI is just a complex lossy compression algorithm.
| dylanmulvaney wrote:
| Do you do ChatGPT illustration request-type headlines now?
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| And interesting comparison between Web search vs Gen AI.
|
| Web search seems divergent: the same keyword leads to many
| different kinds of results.
|
| Gen AI seems convergent: different keywords that share the same
| semantics lead to the same results.
|
| Arguably, convergence is a feature, not a bug. But on the
| macroscopic level, it is a self reinforcing loop and may lead to
| content degeneracy. I guess we always need the extraordinary
| human artists to give AI the fresh ideas. The question is the
| non-extraordinary artists might no longer have an easy path to
| become extraordinary. Same trap is happening to junior developers
| right now.
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