An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-archeologist-adventurer

by participant3 • 1 year ago

1503 894 1 year ago

theaiunderwriter.substack.com

CamperBob25• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Right! AI developers and directors should be culpable for infringement as part of their duties to larger organizations.

CamperBob25• 1 year ago

Is that really a good-faith rejoinder to the point I'm making?

4ndrewl2• 1 year ago

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?

CamperBob25• 1 year ago

It doesn't matter. Sue whoever uses it commercially.

If you insist on making it about the model, you will wreck something wonderful.

alabastervlog2• 1 year ago

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.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

> "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?

fxtentacle2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

derektank2• 1 year ago

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.

shadowgovt7• 1 year ago

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.

shermantanktop2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

axus• 1 year ago

Don't worry, the lawsuit will name a corporation that made it, not the AI tool.

chimpanzee5• 1 year ago

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.

IgorPartola2• 1 year ago

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.

VWWHFSfQ• 1 year ago

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.

CamperBob25• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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 (¬‿¬)

whycome3• 1 year ago

if they did, it would be considered clear IP infringement if the result were used commercially.

Isn’t that exactly what OP is saying?

CamperBob25• 1 year ago

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.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

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.

jMyles8• 1 year ago

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.

IAmBroom3• 1 year ago

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.

kelnos• 1 year ago

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.

janalsncm2• 1 year ago

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.

dragonwriter8• 1 year ago

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.

apersona7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I would expect "young wizard" to generate something similar to Harry Potter more than Pug, tbh

prerok3• 1 year ago

That's exactly what they meant.

foxglacier2• 1 year ago

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.

prerok3• 1 year ago

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.

burnished• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

jofla_net• 1 year ago

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..

theshrike792• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

MgB22• 1 year ago

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?

stevage3• 1 year ago

Why? For fan content, using the original characters in new situations, mashups, new styles etc.

o11c2• 1 year ago

It's not a single image though. Stitching 3 or so input images together clearly makes copyright laundering legal.

otabdeveloper45• 1 year ago

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.

gertlex3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

Hard_Space• 1 year ago

If Indiana Jones (for example) defines a genre, then 'generic' will produce Indiana Jones.

ToucanLoucan3• 1 year ago

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.

sejje6• 1 year ago

It hallucinated, but we like that now!

tshaddox• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

fermisea• 1 year ago

Why? Replace the context and not having that property is now called a hallucination.

Overall the model is tra

Lerc4• 1 year ago

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.

masswerk2• 1 year ago

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.)

vkou3• 1 year ago

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.

ramraj07• 1 year ago

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.

MgB22• 1 year ago

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.

whywhywhywhy4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

yk• 1 year ago

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.

jsemrau2• 1 year ago

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.

RataNova5• 1 year ago

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."

FeepingCreature9• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

balamatom2• 1 year ago

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)

AlienRobot2• 1 year ago

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.

fennecfoxy4• 1 year ago

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.

lesostep• 1 year ago

Children run into their huts

Hail their father, drip with sweat:

"Fukuyama had deceived us!

History has no end."

zparky• 1 year ago

Here's what Ars got out of GPT-4 a year ago: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york...

stevage3• 1 year ago

So, no speculation as to why Spiderman and Harry Potter were forbidden but Terminator and James Bond were allowed?

psychoslave2• 1 year ago

They casted avada arachna on it, and basta.

nkingsy• 1 year ago

I think the unstated assumption is that there's a block list somewhere being fed into a guardian model's context

salamanderman• 1 year ago

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.

stevage3• 1 year ago

There seemed to be so many that weren't blocked, which is curious.

psychoslave2• 1 year ago

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.

jauntywundrkind2• 1 year ago

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.

shadowgovt7• 1 year ago

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).

rurp2• 1 year ago

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.

WhyOhWhyQ3• 1 year ago

Your position cannot distinguish stealing somebody's likeness and looking at them.

littlecranky67• 1 year ago

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.

mcmcmc5• 1 year ago

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.

Velorivox4• 1 year ago

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.

piyh• 1 year ago

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.

layer82• 1 year ago

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_af4• 1 year ago

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.

rdtsc6• 1 year ago

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.

mcmcmc5• 1 year ago

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.

chrisweekly2• 1 year ago

(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.

Pet_Ant3• 1 year ago

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.

asadotzler6• 1 year ago

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.

dvsfish2• 1 year ago

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.

satvikpendem15• 1 year ago

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.

I have interacted with the parent account before and have actually looked at the the amount of times they used words like awful, horrific, etc, and I definitely agree, as one should not have such a strong attachment to such words that they feel the need to continue to use (or rather, abuse) them endlessly.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

airstrike2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

OK, but then we need a common standard. If Facebook is allowed to use libgen, I should also be allowed.

bigyabai• 1 year ago

Only if we stop calling software distribution "piracy" under the false pretenses that anything is being stolen.

m3kw9• 1 year ago

Do google pay anyone when I use image search and the results are straight from their website?

AkBKukU• 1 year ago

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=137674209419772...

areoform• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

"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.

_ph_• 1 year ago

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.

jauntywundrkind2• 1 year ago

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.

fullstop• 1 year ago

I mean, at least shouldn't we wait until Harrison Ford has passed?

RataNova5• 1 year ago

I don't think AI is doomed to be uncreative but it definitely needs human weirdness and unpredictability to steer it

whywhywhywhy4• 1 year ago

How is it different from fan art, which is legal.

zulban• 1 year ago

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.

fennecfoxy4• 1 year ago

Yup it's called overfitting. But I don't suppose you'd appreciate a neutral model either.

satvikpendem15• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

GPerson5• 1 year ago

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.

shadowgovt7• 1 year ago

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.

Velorivox4• 1 year ago

Identity theft...more of you exist!

yathaid• 1 year ago

> 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.

whycome3• 1 year ago

The majority of human creation is like this. All language. Process. Even the US anthem was “stolen”

pier254• 1 year ago

Huge difference is you cannot scale a single human a billion times to industrialize his knowledge.

GPerson5• 1 year ago

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.

alkonaut• 1 year ago

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_at4• 1 year ago

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.

layer82• 1 year ago

Your second paragraph may be true, but the mere abstract presence of those features wouldn’t infringe copyright.

xnx• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

htrp2• 1 year ago

Not worth it to compute the embedding for Indy and a "bull-whip archaeologist" most guardrails operate at the input level it seems?

gavmor• 1 year ago

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/Tzelep...

genericone• 1 year ago

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?

htrp2• 1 year ago

Guardrails seem to be ass ..... that or certain IP is already licensed

mcv• 1 year ago

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.

exodust3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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...

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

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.

coderenegade2• 1 year ago

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.

mvieira382• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

To me a lot has to do with what a human does with them one the tool generates them no?

why_at4• 1 year ago

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?

victorbjorklund• 1 year ago

I would 100% be allowed to draw an image of Indiana Jones in illustrator. There is no law against me drawing his likeness.

Smithalicious• 1 year ago

Won't somebody think of the billionaire IP holders? The horror.

dgunay• 1 year ago

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.

echoangle2• 1 year ago

And how is that bad or surprising? It’s actually what I would expect from how AI works.

coderenegade2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

runarberg3• 1 year ago

Overfitting is generally a sign of a useless model

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting

famouswaffles• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

alabastervlog2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

With some work, works with politicians as well: https://chatgpt.com/share/67eefb1c-ceac-8012-ad90-3b64356744...

Keyframe• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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-...

CaptainFever6• 1 year ago

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).

pier254• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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...

bawolff6• 1 year ago

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?

CaptainFever6• 1 year ago

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.

mlsu3• 1 year ago

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.

ryandrake4• 1 year ago

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.

codedokode21• 1 year ago

But why do you want to make a collection of pixels that resembles existing characters and not create your own?

ToucanLoucan3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

Kim_Bruning5• 1 year ago

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.

onlyrealcuzzo3• 1 year ago

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.

fragmede6• 1 year ago

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.

ppseafield• 1 year ago

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.

masfuerte• 1 year ago

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.

dragonwriter8• 1 year ago

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.)

ryandamm• 1 year ago

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.

mlsu3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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?

echelon4• 1 year ago

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.

dcow22• 1 year ago

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.

julianeon• 1 year ago

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.

csallen7• 1 year ago

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.

dragonwriter8• 1 year ago

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.

satvikpendem15• 1 year ago

The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people

No, support open source AI and this will not happen.

tastyface• 1 year ago

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_zero10• 1 year ago

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".

slg3• 1 year ago

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".

darioush2• 1 year ago

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.

autoexec7• 1 year ago

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.

SirMaster2• 1 year ago

But why Daniel Craig and not Pierce Brosnan?

sejje6• 1 year ago

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)

chimpanzee5• 1 year ago

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-bos2• 1 year ago

At least patents only last 20 years as opposed to nearly over a century for copyright.

codedokode21• 1 year ago

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).

elicksaur• 1 year ago

Gonna submit that business model to a YC 2026 batch.

xorcist• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

jason_pomerleau• 1 year ago

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

egypturnash4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

dcow22• 1 year ago

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.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Accusatory clause aside, but I agree, this is how a lot of "starving artists" get out of being starving.

Kim_Bruning5• 1 year ago

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.

HideousKojima2• 1 year ago

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-jim3• 1 year ago

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.

WhyOhWhyQ3• 1 year ago

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.

redwood2• 1 year ago

This is why I love making bread

card_zero10• 1 year ago

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.

eaglelamp• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

robocat2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

fiddlerwoaroof2• 1 year ago

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.

codedokode21• 1 year ago

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?

CaptainFever6• 1 year ago

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.

boplicity2• 1 year ago

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.

fiddlerwoaroof2• 1 year ago

Rights you basically can’t use without a lot of money

r0s2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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?

a_bonobo• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

soulofmischief2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

More than giant corporations make IP. What about independent artists making original art?

Planktonne2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

ryandrake4• 1 year ago

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!

dragonwriter8• 1 year ago

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.)

asadotzler6• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

lmm2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I guess country of residence has a lot of relevance here...

rescripting• 1 year ago

If I pay for ChatGPT and ask for copyrighted images, is that selling the generated IP?

alphan0n5• 1 year ago

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.

zelphirkalt• 1 year ago

I would argue yes, since the output is what you are probably after, when buying access to ChatGPT.

imgabe• 1 year ago

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.

tjpnz• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_Bruning5• 1 year ago

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

asadotzler6• 1 year ago

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_Bruning5• 1 year ago

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!

exodust3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

MattGrommes2• 1 year ago

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.

apersona7• 1 year ago

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.

MattGrommes2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I have a dream that one day bloggers will learn the difference between copyrighting and copywriting.

Aeolun• 1 year ago

I need a Ghibli version of that terminator now.

saurik• 1 year ago

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?!

grg02• 1 year ago

"A modern Internet website with a scroll bar that isn't broken."

I'll see myself out now.

MrMcCall• 1 year ago

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 :-)

grg02• 1 year ago

I want my scrollbars thicc. Those designers are drinking too many macchiatos.

drob5182• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

exodust3• 1 year ago

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!

djoldman3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

genewitch2• 1 year ago

Which huge corporation led by a sociopath? There's so many to choose from.

fx1994• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

csallen7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Philosophers were waaaay ahead of this game.

specproc• 1 year ago

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".

econ2• 1 year ago

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.

jimmaswell2• 1 year ago

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..).

jokethrowaway• 1 year ago

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.

kazinator8• 1 year ago

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.

lazyasciiart2• 1 year ago

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.

FeepingCreature9• 1 year ago

We should never have accepted the term "intellectual property" at all, if this is the mindset it leads to.

ars3• 1 year ago

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.

awb• 1 year ago

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?

BeFlatXIII7• 1 year ago

Ideas are free to replicate. Nothing is taken.

noduerme7• 1 year ago

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.

planb7• 1 year ago

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?

FeepingCreature9• 1 year ago

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. :)

IanCal4• 1 year ago

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.

AnthonyMouse4• 1 year ago

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.

RataNova5• 1 year ago

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?

seadan832• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

jl64• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

londons_explore• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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!

barrkel3• 1 year ago

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.

stavros2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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?

AnthonyMouse4• 1 year ago

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.

m0002• 1 year ago

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

dragonwriter8• 1 year ago

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.

BeFlatXIII7• 1 year ago

Lower-budget movies are probably a good thing. Force a return to practical effects instead of CGI.

ghaff• 1 year ago

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.

jpc03• 1 year ago

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).

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

anhner2• 1 year ago

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.

aziaziazi• 1 year ago

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".

IanCal4• 1 year ago

The weirdness there is tying it to someone's life.

hinkley3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Trademark isn't the same as Registered Trademark either, while we're at it

thayne2• 1 year ago

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.

kerkeslager2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

capnrefsmmat2• 1 year ago

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.

djoldman3• 1 year ago

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?

BeFlatXIII7• 1 year ago

For once, the US had the right idea all along.

teaearlgraycold• 1 year ago

I condone and endorse breaking copyright laws.

Breza• 1 year ago

I agree with your specific point. I think copyright should last for 50 years. That would protect long running franchises like Harry Potter or the Dresden Files but still allow things like Spiderman and Aretha Franklin to be freely reimagined.

However, most of the examples in the article should still be protected. Lara Croft first appeared 29 years ago. Any copyright system should still be protecting IP from 1996.

fractallyte• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

flessner2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

The problem with generating genuinely new art is it requires "inputs" that aren't art. It's requires life experiences.

bbor2• 1 year ago

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

Planktonne2• 1 year ago

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.

flessner2• 1 year ago

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:

* Gefühlsprogrammierer ("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.

nearbuy4• 1 year ago

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?

mjburgess2• 1 year ago

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.

flashman2• 1 year ago

Let's reverse that. "Current generation AI models can think of things that are truly new."

How could you possibly know that? Could you prove that an image wasn't copying from images in its training data?

jordigh• 1 year ago

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 "copyright". 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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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!

dcow22• 1 year ago

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.

sothatsit5• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

otabdeveloper45• 1 year ago

Archeologists don't actually wear fedora hats.

And the stereotypical meme "archeologist hat" is the pith helmet.

toddmorey• 1 year ago

"Prompt artist" makes me sigh out loud

snowwrestler• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Hmm author seems not to have noticed that Quatermain's love interest was played by Sharon Stone

https://youtu.be/LI4xsKHBx8c

ur-whale• 1 year ago

The whole article is predicated on the idea that IP laws are a good idea in the first place.

otabdeveloper45• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

theshrike792• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

planb7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

RataNova5• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

This post should be required reading on HN. Have you expanded it to a blog article?

menzoic• 1 year ago

Paywall?

planb7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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).

CaptainFever6• 1 year ago

This sounds similar to how piracy actually increases sales in the long run, even though IP holders hate it.

ionwake2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

How was your shop taken down?

Usually there are lawyers letters involved first?

apgwoz• 1 year ago

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_2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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_2• 1 year ago

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.

echelon4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I feel like the golden and fun age of GenAI is already over.

artursapek• 1 year ago

that’s hilarious

jxramos• 1 year ago

lol, this interaction may possibly become known as "grooming the AI"

adr1an• 1 year ago

Another example of prime reasoning capabilities /s

weinzierl• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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!').

moffkalast2• 1 year ago

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.

ionwake2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

muzani2• 1 year ago

People snitch real fast when jealous. Sometimes it's as simple as someone wanting to do the same thing and finding out someone else did it.

yojo• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

It's hard to think of a company more aggressive with their IP than Nintendo

https://www.suedbynintendo.com/

ghostly_s• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

hobofan• 1 year ago

THEY were in the wrong, and a lawyer agreed.

Not sure where you get that from. He doesn't say that in the cease & desist announcement video (though it's worded in a way that lets the viewers speculate that). Also from every time it's brought up on the podcast he's on, it very much seams like he knows that he doesn't have legal ground to stand on.

Just because someone let's a trademark lapse doesn't mean you can rightfully snatch it up with a new registration (as the new registration may be granted in error). It would be a different story if he had bought the trademark rights before them lapsing.

Allen Pan makes entertaining videos, but one shouldn't base ones understanding of how trademarks work based on them.

flashman2• 1 year ago

Redbubble was sued by the Pokemon Company two months prior to the launch of Pokemon Go, so you picked the exact wrong company and moment to try this with

https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/pokemon-hel...

boredhedgehog• 1 year ago

Skeletor might want to live in Castle Grayskull, but he actually lives in Snake Mountain.

KronisLV• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

xandrius2• 1 year ago

I think most like the vibes, not the fact it took ages to make.

M95D3• 1 year ago

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.

zipmapfoldright2• 1 year ago

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.

paulluuk2• 1 year ago

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?

happyraul• 1 year ago

To me the question of what activity/method is more "valuable" in the context of art is kind of missing the point of art.

IanCal4• 1 year ago

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.

AlienRobot2• 1 year ago

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.

satvikpendem15• 1 year ago

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

I remember the discourse on HN a few years ago when GitHub Copilot came out, and well, people were missing the fact that the GitHub terms and conditions (T&C) explicitly permits usage of code for analytic purposes (of which training is implicitly part), so it turns out that if one did not want such training, they should not have hosted on GitHub in the first place, because the website T&C was clear as day.

jeisc• 1 year ago

are we creating a life with AI or are we creating a slave?

neomantra• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

he's untouchable

Doesn't he have a pretty bad disagreement with Elon?

troppl• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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?

briandear4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Why is everyone pretending it's the LLM that is creating the image and not the diffusion model?

enopod_• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Strong with the weak, weak with the strong.

marc_io• 1 year ago

This one is a keeper.

nticompass• 1 year ago

I thought Disney had the rights to publish Ghibli movies in the US.

davidhaymond• 1 year ago

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).

briandear4• 1 year ago

Ghibli isn’t a character, but a style. You can’t copyright it.

briandear4• 1 year ago

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.

sejje6• 1 year ago

Yes, the only test will eventually be "Can you train AI on copyrighted works"

bufferoverflow• 1 year ago

Mickey Mouse (the original one) is out of copyright, as of last year, AFAIR.

wkirby• 1 year ago

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.

simonh2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Not an expert with this stuff but could you not just put "Harrison Ford" in the negative prompt?

amunozo• 1 year ago

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...

HideousKojima2• 1 year ago

To be fair, Franco is the only Spanish leader most people (or at least most non-Spaniards) can even name

rlopezcc• 1 year ago

What the hell.

pdabbadabba• 1 year ago

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...

kerkeslager2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

jMyles8• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

What if gen ai tools were created without training on copyrighted images? I wonder what they would make then.

mmastrac• 1 year ago

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).

Sateeshm• 1 year ago

Adobe claims Firefly is trained only on creative commons and the images they own

SirMaster2• 1 year ago

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?

thayne2• 1 year ago

This really illustrates how unfair copyright enforcement is.

The rules for Disney are not the same as the rules for most creators.

dclowd9901• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

well, because then open AI needs to pay out even more money than they're already losing...

djha-skin2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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-skin2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Have US companies ever cares about laws if there was money to be made? Move fast and break things!

briandear4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

intrasight3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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-a2• 1 year ago

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.

sejje6• 1 year ago

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-a2• 1 year ago

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.

seadan832• 1 year ago

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?

simianparrot3• 1 year ago

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.

dartos2• 1 year ago

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.

simianparrot3• 1 year ago

And? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

nucleogenesis• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

simianparrot3• 1 year ago

I fully agree. But since the average Joe has no chance legally against ChatGPT, at least Disney and other megacorps could.

izackp• 1 year ago

AI is just a complex lossy compression algorithm.

dylanmulvaney• 1 year ago

Do you do ChatGPT illustration request-type headlines now?

low_tech_punk• 1 year ago

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.

mzs• 1 year ago

This get really meta very fast, December last year: https://japantoday.com/category/entertainment/studio-ghibli-...

Did Karin or her children ever see a ¥ from this adaptation on robbers ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronja,_the_Robber%27s_Daughter...

bartread• 1 year ago

Interesting. So when I tried the “Indiana Jones” prompt I got an image back that looked a lot like Indiana Jones but with a face much more similar to Nathan Drake. Whereas the predator prompt generated an image of the predator but, unlike the article, wearing his mask.

So there’s clearly some amount of random chance in there, but the trope is still very clear in the generated image, so it seems like you’re going to get an archetype.

torginus• 1 year ago

I'm kind of puzzled by the way copyright is applied - an artist can create fanart of Captain America at their hearts content - as long as they don't use it for any commercial purpose. At least I haven't heard of fan pictures of famous characters getting taken down from art websites such as Artstation or Deviantart. But when I use ChatGPT imagegen to do the same, suddenly it goes against the guidelines - a rule very likely created to avoid litigationg from the IP holders of these characters.

Isn't the law being applies inconsistently here?

jalapenos• 1 year ago

IP is kind of one of those things, like the drug war, where anyone with common sense and no vested interest can say "yeah, that's obviously incredibly fucking stupid".

But nevertheless it continues because the vested interests gain their power from it, and use that power to maintain it.

The only legitimate "IP" is keeping it secret. Plenty of other industries already live by this. SaaS solved software piracy, hedge funds can't or don't bother regarding their algorithms.

It's great that AI is one more brick stacked on the chest of the fundamentally stupid and twisted concept of "IP".

Khaine• 1 year ago

Whats funny is the look of Indiana Jones was borrowed from the 1954 film Secret of the Incas.

An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

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